Hooray for Hollywood!

Hollywood and Universal Studios

Probably the quickest checkout so far today - we were packed and ready to roll before the kids had much of a chance to wake up (the best way, as it turns out). We all piled into Igor The Boat and set Twiki to direct us to Universal Studios. By more coincidence than harmony between man and machine, we arrived at Universal Studios around midday without any incident, bar encountering a *very* helpful English woman who felt she needed to impart everything she knew about the States to us on a garage forecourt. That said though, she was very nice and had a very friendly German Shepherd.

Universal Studios was, it has to be said, pretty tacky at first impression - we parked in the ‘Frankenstein’ car park and ate at the ‘Flintstones’ BBQ grill, but once you got past the opportunistic stalls and branded souvenir outlets, the main features were pretty cool. We took the Universal Studios tour, saw Fear Factor Live, Shrek 4D, Waterworld and The Simpsons ride.

The tour was interesting and fun - a bit of history and trivia combined with some surprising set pieces (Jaws, Earthquake, Psycho, the Mummy, Fast and the Furious) set the scene (so to speak) very well. Jack wanted to go on it twice.

Fear Factor was a dumbed-down version of the US TV programme where contestants have to perform various endurance feats (hanging 25 feet up, giving themselves electric shocks) and gross-out tests (drinking fish guts), but still done in an entertaining way, and enough to keep the kid’s mouths dropped open.

Shrek 4D was a 3D presentation of a new Shrek film (complete with glasses), with environmental effects (water, moving chairs, pretend spiders) to make the experience more interactive. I (Mark) thought it was really good - Annabel spent quite a lot of the time with her feet on the chair once the spider effects had started!

Waterworld was a long stunt-action set piece within a futuristic pool arena - lots of explosions, falls, speedboats, jet-skis, shooting, more explosions and lots of water throwing over the audience. Quite impressive really - especially the seaplane dropping into the arena! A bit wet and smelling faintly of smoke we left the display satisfied.

Finally, the Simpsons ride - we weren’t quite sure what this was about and whether Jack in particular would enjoy it, but Ellie insisted so we braved the 45 minute queue. As it turns out, and whatever your views on the Simpsons may be, the ‘ride’ was really impressive. Each car was actually a self-contained ride simulator within its own wraparound cinema that took us through an absolutely manic adventure scenario set in Krusty’s Adventure Park, then Springfield, Space, Hell Maggie’s mouth and back. The scenes were amazing, and we all really enjoyed it - the best of its kind we’d ever been on.

After a bit of recovery time with Ben and Jerry we went back to Igor and Twiki guided us directly to the hotel - right next to Hollywood Bowl. Check in, minimal unpack and collapse into bed followed.

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