Thursday, 21st March 7.30am GMT
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Thursday, 21st March - Universal Studios, 11am
Walking past the "Celebrity Etiquette training" ("If a celebrity has their child with them, don't push them aside to ask for an autograph") given with the aid of Cher and Jack Nicholson look-a-likes, one comes to the main entrance to Universal Studios where all-day tickets cost $59. Not a cheap day out, but if you want to do the day properly you should ignore this and purchase a VIP ticket for $99 (on offer, where usually it is $125). This ticket gets you a personal guide for 12 people and a whole bunch of extra's that the normal day ticket doesn't. The tour of the backlot includes visiting staqe sets and production and prop departments which the other tickets available don't give you. Perhaps more importantly, it enables you to queue jump all the rides (which often have queues for up to an hour!) - your guide takes you through a separate entrance right to the start of the ride. It also gets you the best seats pre-reserved for all the shows. Our guide, Mike, did an excellent job, escorting us around for 7 hours solid and ensuring we got to see all the big rides and shows, as well as the backlot facilities.
The tour of the backlot included a quick peek inside Sound Stage 22, where sets for the forthcoming Ang Lee "Hulk" film are being made. Unfortunately no photo's were allowed during this part of the tour, but the sets were very impressive. We also got to see the set of an American TV Show "Providence" - these were amazingly detailed and helped to give real insight into the work that goes into a modern television production
There was a lot of activity going on in one of the audio dubbing studios. It turned out to be in use for ADR (additional dialog recording) on "The Scorpion King". When you consider that there are posters everywhere, advertising the film's release date of April 19th, you realise just how last-minute a lot of the work on blockbusters can be! As we toured the backlot we were also shown various building facades as used in movies like "The Sting" and "Back to the Future". Most of these sets are continually re-used: apparently "The X-Files" had only recently finished filming on one of these sets - the buildings are generally made to look " generic" to facilitate this process. We also got to see miniatures up close before being shown how they'd appeared on film in a video monitor in our VIP bus.
Perhaps most impressive though were the action simulations of movie scenes. We saw a re-enactment of Jaws where our bus got stuck on a collapsing bridge with a nearby petrok tanker exploding, a very impressive "Die Hard" showpiece where we drove though an Underground tunnel only to have an exploding truck and cars smash through the ceiling close by, and a Flash Flood simulation where a small street suddenly attracted thunder, lightening and electrical explosions before a torrent of water appeared.
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