The Universal Studios in Florida carefully cultivates the teenage audience, trying to distinguish itself with the message that Disney is for little kids and that if you're cool you should come to Universal Studios. Meanwhile, USJ has train cars advertising their new Sesame Street 4D attraction.
When you first approach the park you walk through sort of a commercial / restaurant district, which I wouldn't have commented on except that Ana found this popcorn place. In looking at the original picture at full size, I'm pretty sure one of the 32 flavors is fried octopus ball. I felt we needed to put that out there.
When we arrived at the park proper, it turned out that we were visiting during their 10th anniversary festivities. That would probably mean the park should have been more full than usual, but the day was kind of gray and misty, and it was a Monday, so the crowds balanced out to merely significant rather than overwhelming.
All park employees had stickers or paint on their faces for the event - slightly creepy
I don't particularly want to go through all the different rides or shows and discuss them in depth - most readers have never and will never go there - but I'll toss out some tidbits and show some of our pictures. I mention the others briefly towards the end.
1) The ride that looks like a kiddie ride where a space princess is supposed to save an anthropomorphic sun is actually a high-impact roller coaster, in the dark, where the car itself can spin laterally on the track. Mom, you would definitely have puked. We however, were pleasantly surprised. It's kind of a Space Mountain clone, but then again, Space Mountain is fun...so that works.
2) The Waterworld show - yes, based on that Kevin Costner movie that bombed way back - rocked my mind in several ways not related to the show being awesome. First, there was a line to get in. Not a small line. Several hundred, maybe a thousand people, were waiting outside in the rain ahead of us for the doors to open to let them in. Arriving ten minutes early, when we did, we got put in the we're-not-sure-we'll-have-room-for-you overflow line. They pretty much filled the bleachers for this, though we got decent seats anyway - didn't want to be in the splash zone. The show itself was fairly amusing and I laughed through a lot of it - perhaps not at things that you're supposed to laugh at and I may have gotten some dirty looks from the Japanese around me who were all "this is serious business in here young man" - but laughing none the less. From time to time they had pretty big explosions / fires / something large coming through a wall of the arena when you didn't expect it and that kept my attention from wandering too far.
Typical example of transport after the polar caps melt and they put gills on Kevin Costner
The thing that really blew my mind though, was just the fact that the show existed at all. Tens of thousands of people must decide each year that they want to see this show. There are a couple dozen people who get up every day and what they do is act in or run the Waterworld show at Universal Studios Osaka. They have a guy whose job it is to impersonate Kevin Costner in one of his less-loved movies. That's what he does. Right now, someone might be impersonating Kevin Costner and riding around this arena on a jet ski while yelling in Japanese, in front of a full crowd. You have to admit - that's pretty trippy.
3) The special tenth anniversary show was simultaneously pretty decent, both visually and musically, and also reflected some of the most classic Japanese what-the-hell-is-going-on-here we've seen.
Note that Beetlejuice is in this picture, right next to characters from Sesame Street, Hello Kitty, and Peanuts. Beetlejuice, in fact, was the character chosen to emcee this event and was on stage singing and dancing pretty much the whole time. The theme of this whole gig was that the 10th birthday of some kid lined up with the 10th birthday of the park and for that reason the whole family got to dream about something they wanted, so they each met famous characters and so forth.
Doc Brown on the left of the stage - I believe there were Jurassic Park pterodactyls on the other half
At the end they all dream one dream together...which is that the patriarch of the family will actually take a goddamn day off from work and be with his family for his kid's birthday, which of course comes true. That theme plays well in many places, but it rings a bit too painfully true here I think, where so many people spend such tremendously long hours at work (I said "at work", and not "working" for a reason) six days a week just because the everybody else does.
4) The rollercoaster pictured below is pretty awesome, as it weaves through the park, but mostly for the extended zero-G sections more than for the view, which you don't have time to pay attention to. Your individual seat plays music during the ride, which can be selected by pressing a button on the console in front of you at the beginning of the ride. The first time we rode it, we both screwed it up and got special 10th anniversary J-Pop, which was bloodcurdling. The second time, later in the day, we paid closer attention to the instructions and selected Eminem, which was much more appropriate for rollercoaster-ing.
It also lit up at night.
The roller coaster was so intense (and so over-innocent-pedestrians) that they put rubber bands on shoes they thought might come off during the ride. Ana got some lovely purple rubber bands that matched her socks.
5) The gift shop and "candy store" were terrifying. Allow me to illustrate this point with pictures rather than words.
Would you like Spiderman to stare accusingly at you out of your overpriced cup noodle? Yikes.
How about some Elmo fries, kids? Anybody?
Jaws likes dried squid strips. Therefore, so should you. Get 'em here!
We couldn't figure out if these were animal, vegetable, or mineral. All I know is they make T-Rex angry and me very afraid. The writing suggests the contents are fried "Fear Dragon" which I assume means T-Rex, and if there is one thing I'm sure of it is that there is no actual T-Rex in that package.
Do you think that writing "Snoopy Flying Up" front and center on underpants is perhaps a little risque for a family audience?
Continuing the theme of horrifying themed edibles, Ana bought (and subsequently consumed the entirety of) a Dear Daniel (friend of Hello Kitty) Steamed Pizza Bun. Despite my concern, the lethal dose is apparently higher than a single helping, as she is still alive and only twitches oddly now and then.
There were a bunch of rides and shows not documented much so far - I'll mention most of them here. The Back to the Future and Spiderman rides used air currents and tricks of perception to create fairly convincing feelings of flying, swinging, and falling. The Terminator 2 show had some unbelievably cheesy footage done by the original actors but the 3D effect for the metal monster on the end was pretty convincing - it did seem to be in the theater. The Jurassic Park ride was completely lame except for the very tall, very steep drop into darkness at the end of it which certainly got my attention. The Jaws ride was really, really lame. They even had a show based on Backdraft (Seriously? Does Backdraft connect with anyone at this point?) which featured an interminable period of talking film clips (dubbed in Japanese of course) followed by several minutes of them blowing things up and setting things in front of the audience on fire, using real fire, that was reasonably exciting.
As we wrapped up our day at USJ we though about eating at some of the fairly upscale places right outside the part that target people leaving the park, but ultimately decided on something less expensive and more satisfying. We'd previously found a branch of Freshness Burger (ours in Kanazawa closed after getting us hooked) near the hotel, so he headed over there and bought several burgers each as take-out (they're small) and cleverly bought some wine from the convenience store as the liquor stores were closed. Part of it was that I was really hungry, but a couple of real cheeseburgers and some fruity easy-drinking red wine delivered satisfaction far in excess of the modest price, and a tasty end to the evening.
The following day we'd make a side trip to see a bridge on the way to Kyoto. Stay tuned for more.
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