Sons of Loki

People call me a misanthropist pretty much all the time, but be honest: most people are feckless idiots who should never be allowed to do anything. I mean, hypothetically, just hypothetically for a second, imagine you’re queuing to buy a ticket for a busy theme park. There are hundreds of people queuing for a small number of ticket gates. Finally, the gate is in sight. You see the cashier. You see the price. What do you do now?

1. Get the exact cash out of your wallet in advance (or the closest, most convenient amount possible), step up to the counter, boldly ask for one ticket and hand the cash over; grab your ticket and change and proceed smartly into the park. [15 seconds]
2. Get to the counter, stare at the prices, remember you’re at a theme park and want to go in, fumble for your wallet or purse, get the money out, look up at the board again, ask the cashier if you can use these coupons – no, these coupons – forget where you are again, try to calculate the price for your six kids, go through your wallet or purse, get confused, ask if you can pay by card, ask if you can use the coupons with your card, finally pay by card, take the tickets and carefully distribute them to your kids at the ticket window, put everything back in your bag, forget where you are again, stand motionless for ten seconds, remember you’re at a theme park and proceed as slowly as possible to the park while a hundred people behind you wait patiently. [for-fucking-ever]

I mean, that’s what I assume was going on as we waited for the best part of an hour to enter Universal Studios Japan, in Osaka. I have no idea what anybody could be doing at the ticket counter to stay there for a full minute. (I know, I was bored enough to time it.) I thought, maybe there’s a lot of questions to answer, or perhaps you have to show ID, or the cashier’s really slow or the printer broke. But when I got there, it was as efficient as can be. Which leads me to blame people, mainly. I don’t claim to be some kind of superhuman ticket purchaser, blessed with ability to queue and buy tickets better than most, but … Anyway, no sense in bitching.

The park? Was cool. Stepping in, it’s an almost unbelievable simulacrum of Manhattan rolled into LA and continuing down the street to San Francisco; hyper-real, in a sense, far too clean and bright and accurate to be like the real thing. 1950s-style store fronts line big, empty boulevards, giant-old fashioned cinemas show posters for the latest Universal flicks, and there’s even a Japanese-style San Francisco-style Japanese-style restaurant – with long queues of Japanese visitors. In fact, I only saw a handful of gaijin in the entire park while we were there.

We made a beeline for the Back to the Future ride, which took two long hours to queue for and was – well, pretty cool, but not worth two hours. (You could watch the first film and make a start on the second in that time!) I almost feared a long, dull day of queuing, but the funny thing about theme parks is that your brain kind of forces you to ignore the queues in pursuit of a fun time. Next up was T2:3D, which I vaguely remembered reading as being very well received as a theme park ride. And it’s a real spectacle; after a not-too-long queue, we were ushed into an entrance hall where a suitably over-excited Cyberdyne representative excitedly asked everybody where they were from and squealed and engaged in a little banter with the audience and generally did a very amusing job of acting. Then it’s into the main auditorium – a huge, huge cinema – where we slip on our “safety visors” (3D glasses) and marvel at some cool Terminator animatronics before Arnold Schwarznegger! (or a slightly-too-short Japanese guy in sunglasses) appears, bursting through the screen as John Connor rappels down from the ceiling and together, on a motorbike, they ride into the screen and straight into a well-made ten-minute action sequence (directed by Jim Cameron himself, I hear) with Arnie and the kid (whatever happened to him?) fighting off Skynet in the future in 3D. I mean, after the spectacle of Avatar anything else in 3D seems a little flat, but there’s a very impressive boss fight in the end where the live actors come back on stage in a huge chamber that makes good use of the 3D effect.

After pizza, Backdraft – which I didn’t even realise was a film, but which is apparently a little-remembered early 90s film with Kurt Russell and Robert de Niro as firefighters, or arsonists, or something. The queue wasn’t too long, so we went for it. After watching Ron Howard speak fluent Japanese about his job as director, and then Scott Glenn talking about fire or something, you get to see the main spectacle – a big-ass pyrotechnic display in a warehouse mock-up, with explosions and fire and barrels crashing off gantries and all in all, quite an impressive scene.

It was getting quite late – and cold – by the time we got to Jurassic Park, which is a log flume/animatronics spectacle through the titular park (wait, wasn’t Jurassic Park the place where those dinosaurs escaped and ate everybody a few years back? And come to think of it, wasn’t there some bizarre thing in the 80s where a Cyberdyne robot came back in time and killed a bunch of people? I swear I saw a documentary about that. I think Universal Studios need some better ride sponsors.) It was a good lark, with a genuinely scary final T. rex and huuuuge drop.

Then the final ride, USJ’s big coaster, Hollywood Dream (presumably themed as a metaphor for the ups and downs of life in LA). Nothing too special – a couple of good drops, a upwards helix, no inversions sadly – but for the (unique?) feature of letting you pick your own music with a keypad in front of every seat. There was Bon Jovi, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”, The Beatles’ “Get Back”, and two j-pop songs I’d never heard of. I went with old Shady, and I don’t know if it’s deliberately synced up but the chorus seemed to be timed with the drops, so it’d be all “but the beat goes on” at the crest and then “you better LOSE YOURSELF!” just as you hit terminal velocity. A nice addition. As we rolled into the station at the end, the staff stand around the train, applauding as you dismount and grab your possessions.

Afterwards, there was a parade of light with Snoopy and shiny things, which was pretty and visually impressive. Then we ate some shrimp at Bubba Gump’s Shrimp.

So that was Universal.