Universal Studios

My first in-depth installment on arriving at LA is two posts down because I started it earlier in the week, so please go there first to bring you up to speed on my arrival in LA.

On the Wednesday morning I went to the tours office next door to the hostel to wait for the shuttle to Universal Studios. Unlike the daytours of the star's homes and shopping, it is not a "tour". The shuttle service goes out and picks up at a predesignated time. The good news is that they give you your entry ticket with your shuttle pass so when you arrive at the theme park, you can go straight in and not wait.

There were 7 of us on the bus that day, Kate and Paul, young marrieds from Sydney who has previously lived and worked in Banff a few seasons ago. There were also four middle- aged Aussies from Perth, a married couple and long-time friends travelling together as a foursome on a big world tour. As I write they will be on their way to or in the West Indies for the World Cup Cricket.

Universal Studios is two things; a successful working studio and a successful theme park. It is built on a hill so there are some of the longest escalaters I have been on, cunningly called "star-ways". It was a bit disturbing. I just thought I was on a really long escalator. Imagine then, getting on it and being told by a Troy MacLuire- style voiceover that I was on the "Universal Studios Star-Way, at the place where the Movies HAPPEN !!!". I have never seen anyone glamourise an experience of travelling up an escalator, which as we know primarily involves avoiding; looking at, comparing yourself to, or catching a whiff of, the person's bottom in front of you.

There were also videos at the end of each section showing two "celebrity hosts" from a morning show program. They were entertainment folks I didn't know- call them LA Barbie and Ken, telling me that if I was lucky, I might just spot other celebrities just like them (which would be difficult because TV celebrity generally doesn't excite me). There were a large number of Asian tourists who were very excited all day at various points in the Park (theme park) taking a large number of photos of everything, including the cardboard cutouts of Tom Hanks and the Apollo 13 crew. Fantastic.

My day started by tagging on with the group of four from Perth and heading for the Universal Studios Studio Tour. On quite a few movies (I think a few of the Beverly Hills Cops and Naked Gun movies) they have shown scenes involving the hero hiding on one of the little white motorised trams used for the tour and then escaping into the soundstages proper to find something/ someone/ solve a mystery. Well, I was on one of those and security was tight. The trams are all connected and open- sided for photo taking. There was a combination of video presentation screened on each tram and the tour guide riding on the front tram but he was also live video-presented on all the other trams. It was really well put together. I recommend the tour. Even though half of it is simply showing the outsides of the big soundstage buildings, the video presentation did a bang-up job of putting together the history of the studios.

They had also put a lot of effort into making the outdoor stuff interesting- creating a flash flood down a nearby hill, showing a working "Bruce" shark from Jaws, an entire 747 busted in half and war zone from War of the Worlds and a working King Kong having a go at the tram during a recreation of a San Francisco subway station earthquake. Trivia- the name "Bruce" for the mechanical Jaws shark was the name of Spielberg's lawyer. I am sure the Bruce shark in Finding Nemo is a subtle nod to that and the Monty Python sketch. More recent additions include having the opportunity to drive down "Wisteria Lane" made famous by Desperate Housewives. Even though I only really watched the first season, that was very cool. For the record, I don't think the wisteria is real. I know, what a shock !

Back to the theme park and my determination to see most of the shows, so I said cheerio to the other Aussies and went my own way. Unfortunately, being a Wednesday and not a weekend, the live Blues Brothers show was not on. However, I did go to the Terminator 2- 3D show, which was excellent. The Terminator 2 film actors, including Arnie, had previously shot a sequence in 3D film of a battle scene and time travel, which was fused with live actors who looked scaringly similar, appearing as though they'd stepped out of the screen to do battle with Terminator machines on the stage in front of us, with pyrotechnics, smoke etc. To counterract the problem of no-one being able to sound like Arnie, all the live actors were very carefully lip- syching with the pre-recorded movie actors' voiceover. I am pretty cynical but it all impressed the socks off me.

I stuck my head briefly around the Flintstones Carnival Games section for confirmation that it was "Yabba Dabba Doo" for kids and went in search of something to eat.

I still have the park map and guide and it cracks me up every time I see the headline, "Healthy Choices available at all restaurants". Which basically means after you've eaten your dried out salt-encrusted deep fried chicken you may substitute a lettuce leaf for a basket of fries. That one's true. I tested it. Golden rule of theme parks- don't eat. Have a big breakfast, digest it before any rides and run on water and soft drink all day. The food and prices are rubbish and you're wasting time by sitting down when you could be looking at the I Love Lucy Exhibit and quite frankly, you should be too excited to eat.

Speaking of I Love Lucy, I was really touched to see the modest, but lovingly put-together exhibit on Lucille Ball. It had her collection of Emmy awards (four or five in total) under glass, which was exciting and the closest I will get to one of those, a lot of her most famous costumes (she was very petite in figure) and a large projector screen showing continuous episodes of the show. There was a real collection of old folk in wheelchairs watching the old shows when I went in. They were chuckling and throughly enjoying themselves, not hearing the distant screams from the Curse of the Mummy ride. One thing that is great about Hollywood, is that they do give credit to where they have come from, and the past talented people and performers, who can hold their own against most of our current stars with ease.

Whilst the lines were too long for me to wait around for the Curse of the Mummy ride and more unfortunately the Back to the Future ride, I did get on the Jurassic Park ride. It's a water-log ride and I was in the front row, being menaced by dinosaurs, including a 50ft T-rex, chased by raptors and my only escape, "a treacherous plunge straight down an 84- foot vertical drop waterfall !!!". Not too scary but fun while it lasted. Well, I survived and dried off in time for the Waterworld show at 1pm, which is more popular (and probably brings in more money) than the movie. It was a big outdoor stadium show with all actors performing high quality stunts, including flying on flying foxes, fistfights on bridges 5 storeys up, diving off the same heights or higher into water, beating each other with heavy implements, racing around on jetskis and jumping over people in the water and most importantly, large explosions.

Interestingly, there was a "technical problem" into the first five minutes of the show, after the heroine had made her big entrance by speedboat. The show had to be stopped and started again but without (rewinding) the big entrance. The actors improvised over it to make it still interesting which again, was cool. Most of the actors had appeared on various TV series, including Law and Order. I think they were just as good as professional stuntpeople, which answers the question of what the supporting characters from various shows do in the off- season or when their contracts are up.

The guy who played the Kevin Costner character was better-looking and a better all-round hero than Kevin Costner which combined with the Arnie lookalike in the Terminator show makes you wonder how many star lookalikes there are in Hollywood. Certainly at every show and tour I went on at Universal Studios all the staff were acting as though they were about to be "discovered" and I had a hidden camera in my purse... Smile, pose, smile again, crack a self-deprecating one-liner, talk about the "vista" of LA (fancy word for smoggy horizon) smile and wish me a nice day. I started looking suspiciously over my shoulder for the imaginary camera crew within the first few hours. Eventually I gave up and just went along with it.

Another excellent show was the Backdraft special effects fire show, which was a recreation of the last factory scene sequence, where everything was burning down or exploding. The heat from the explosions was so carefully calculated that we only felt it as a warm flash on our faces from our vantage point. An opportunity to see more fire effects, one of my favourite kinds of special effects because it is the most difficult to control.

I did dedicate some time to trekking about the shops to find souveniers of my day, including my nephew's birthday present and just checking out the Betty Boop and Marilyn Monroe collectables, which were half the price of similar stuff back home.

Other highlights included the Special Effects show, where the presenters got some audience participation to saw someone's hand off, re-record the sound of the final race of the movie Seabiscuit, the final scenes of King Kong and show some animatronics. At each show, the presenters would always say that they had "lots of people from other states and other countries" and invite people to shout out where they were from. At every single show I went to that day, the first and immediate response from the crowd would be "ARIZONA !!!" like they had just won the lotto. Apparently Arizona or at least two residents of that State were really, really excited to be in Hollywood. There was one exception to that. At the Special Effects show the question was thrown to the crowd and the immediate response was "Kakistan !!" The Presenter stopped dead and I saw clearly that she wanted to say "Are you kidding ??" because since Borat hit the screens I doubt any Kakistani would admit there were from there, particularly in Hollywood. She recovered well though, "O-kay ! Give it up for KAKISTAN !!!!" Big applause. Then "Anywhere else?"

Of course. "ARIZONA !!!!!"