Universal raises the bar once again with new zombie encounter
dares to challenge received amusement industry wisdom with an almost sacrilegious statement: Universal attractions like The
Wizarding World of Harry
Potter, The Simpsons Ride – and now The Walking Dead Attraction – are not only touching but surpassing Disney's own superlative presentations.
Having finally stop trembling with fear/excitement from experiencing the latter at Universal Studios
Hollywood, Gary tells us
why he believes Universal is making such great strides
Dead scary! A
In an exclusive article for Park World, Gary Kyriazi
lright, it's arguable, and yes, Disney introduced the world to and copyrighted the term Audio- Animatronics. But let's look at it from a social
standpoint, starting with Jurassic Park: The Ride, which opened at Universal's original Hollywood park in 1996. Early in the ride there's a good-natured jab at Disney when we see a pair of Mickey Mouse ears floating in the water next to a passenger boat like the one we're riding in, apparently destroyed by dinosaurs. Is nothing sacred? Universal didn't stop there. In 2008 it spoofed the entire amusement industry with The Simpsons Ride in both Hollywood and Orlando, wherein Universal Studios guests are invited to visit Krustyland. Again, no theme park is sacred, not even Universal itself. In the queue line we see a hilarious presentation wherein a mock “wait time” clock first tells us that the wait time is “300 minutes.” Then the wait time is adjusted to some type of mathematical equation, until finally Krusty the Clown glibly says “To tell you the truth, we don't know how long the wait time is!” As another friendly poke at Disney, a preview of one of Krustyland's attractions is the “Hall of the Secretaries Of The Interior,” with a wait time of zero minutes. This year, Universal Studios Hollywood made a leap from
self-parody to the post-apocalyptic planet Earth with its new Walking Dead Attraction. To understand its powerful impact, we have to go back to where the zombie fear/fascination began. In the 1940 picture The Ghost Breakers, someone
explains to Bob Hope that “a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” “You mean like Democrats?” Hope quips. That was comedy of course, but horror got ramped up in
1959, when Alfred Hitchcock's iconic Psycho was shot on the Universal lot. It stood movie audiences and the film industry on their heads with its unmitigated horror. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote that it was, “what a theatrical experience is about: sharing this terror, feeling the safety of others around you, being able to laugh and talk together about how frightened you were as you leave.” She may as well be describing a ride on a rollercoaster. Kael goes on to say the film “stayed with me to the degree that I remember it whenever I'm in a motel shower.” Indeed, we'd never be the same after Psycho, and when
we see the original Psycho house while taking the Universal Hollywood Studio Tour, we remember just when and where we were when we first saw Psycho, and how frightened we were.
Zombies attack Fast forward to 1968 with writer/director George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. If Psycho turned us upside-down, Night Of The Living Dead finished us off. Whereas Bob Hope's zombies blandly walked around like Democrats (or Republicans), George Romero's zombies attacked and ate the flesh of living humans. This horrifying expression of the end of the world spawned countless sequels and revisions, the most intelligent and searching being the current AMC television series The Walking Dead. Like the TV show, Universal Studios Hollywood's most recent addition, The Walking Dead Attraction, takes George Romero's original hellish vision and and runs with it. Universal had previously featured Walking Dead content in its Halloween Horror Nights in both Hollywood and Orlando, but this is the first time it has been integrated into a permanent walk-through attraction. I experienced The Walking Dead Attraction because I had to, and I haven't been so terrified as the only time I hopped
SEPTEMBER 2016
The Walking Dead Attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood
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