On Saturday morning, we got up, had our complimentary cinnamon roll and cereal breakfast at the hotel and headed over to Universal Studios Hollywood. I had prepaid for discount tickets through Wild at Work, a corporate program my employer is a part of. We got three days for a discounted price around 12% off of the regular one day pass cost. We got inside the park after redeeming our passes at the annual pass center and immediately headed to The Simpsons Ride. We had to wait ten minutes, even though we were first in line. There are parts of the ride that are built in to the queue experience. In the end, the ride wasn't worth the five years built up hype. It was okay, but I certainly wouldn't wait 30 minutes to an hour to ride it on a busy day.
We did The Transformers 3D ride next. It was a bit better than The Simpsons Ride and while it was shorter, the queue went even faster and our rescue of the Allspark riding along with Evac went pretty smoothly. I liked the experience on The Transformers ride a lot, even though I can't see 3D.
After The Transformers ride, we walked through the small NBC Universal Experience exhibit. It was mostly a bunch of props from recent films, with a highlight exhibit about Paranorman, complete with the stop motion character models that were used in the film. There were also reproduced fan letters from the early days of television, complaining about the late start time for Leave it to Beaver and asking for 100 autographed photos from Alfred Hitchcock for a "fan club", among other things. The exhibit was short and sweet and we figure it would be a good place to hide out if the lines got congested at the bigger rides in the lower lot. There was no congestion while we were there. It was only forty degrees and not many were braving the cold to go to the amusement park.
Because of the cold, we decided not to ride the Jurassic Park log ride. We instead walked into the Dino Play area for kids and were asked to leave because we had no kids with us. I captured some Ingress portals including a prop raptor in front of the ride and the escalators between the upper and lower lots and we headed back to the upper lot to do the studio tour. The only other lower lot ride, Revenge of the Mummy, was temporarily closed.
We got our photo with Shrek and Princess Fiona, another with SpongeBob SquarePants and saw Curious George, Beetlejuice, the mummy and Frankenstein's monster roaming the park. Earlier in the day, we saw Donkey from Shrek "selling waffles" and making fun of a guy that wore a tee shirt and shorts to the park "on the coldest day of the year."
Our tram tour was full of me capturing Ingress portals, on the Amity Island set, the Bates Motel, the Psycho House, the War of the Worlds set and the Grinch set. I would have also captured the new King Kong entrance but the 3D King Kong portion of the tram tour broke down. They gave us laughable priority passes for "any ride in the park except The Simpsons Ride or Transformers". That's pretty much just the Studio Tour or The Mummy which were both broken. I didn't mind, it meant we could leave 15 minutes early and we have two other trips any time this year we can take to do the rest of the studio tour.
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