I have been a Harry Potter fan for a long time.
I grew up reading the books and went to the midnight releases for most of them. I didn't do as much reading as I should have when I was younger, but I used to get in trouble for staying up too late on school nights reading Harry Potter. Dressing up as characters has never really been something that I am interested in doing, but I was extremely excited when they started making movies out of the books and went to many of the midnight showings for those. I own all of the movies on Bluray and I can't even tell you how many times I have watched them. My girlfriend's fandom is on about the same level, so the idea of attending the Celebration of Harry Potter at Universal Studios this year was an extremely attractive idea to us both. We actually went to Universal last May in hopes that the new Diagon Alley section of the Universal park would be opened by then. Unfortunately it was not, but we were still able to see Hogsmeade in Islands of Adventure, as well as enjoy everything that both of those parks had to offer without much of a line. Ever since I got up the courage to ride my first roller coaster I have been hooked - they transformed from foreboding and scary into magical and exhilarating - so believe me when I tell you that Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is more than your average roller coaster.
Potential Spoilers Ahead! The first thing that you notice when you get near the boarding platform is that the carts are moving along the wall, not touching the ground and never coming to a complete stop. The floor is also moving, meaning that they need to keep the flow of riders boarding constant, which really helps the line move quickly. Once the ride begins your cart takes you and three other riders through a mix of immersive screens and actual, physical sets. The blending is almost flawless, making for an excellent experience overall. The second time through, I started looking around. Instead of looking at the screen, I was looking around the edge of my cart to see what the cart was attached to and how it was moving. It turns out that the ride cart is attached to a vertical arm that runs down to a four-legged contraption that has four wheels on a roller-coaster-esque track. The cart can pivot on the arm which allows quite a range of motion. That coupled with the fact that the screens cover your entire field of vision makes for a very convincing experience of flying through the air. They even get a little "4D" on you, having spiders spitting water and a dragon breathing hot smoke. I really don't think that I could have been more impressed with this ride and that excitement does not diminish much over subsequent rides. You do definitely come off of it feeling a bit disoriented and while I believe that is half the point, it can make your stomach turn.
Based on the experience with Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, I had exceedingly high hopes for the Escape from Gringots ride that was being built in Diagon Alley at Universal. I imagined a roller coaster experience culminating with the cart bursting out of the roof of Gringots with a dragon hot on our trail. Our first day in the park for The Celebration of Harry Potter weekend we headed straight for Diagon Alley to ride this new ride.
More Potential Spoilers! It could have been partially my own fault for building it up so much in my head, but I really think they could have done much better. The ride started off exceedingly promisingly: running into Bellatrix and having the ride move unexpectedly - no one expects a roller coaster on tracks to suddenly rotate from being flat to being at a 45 degree downward slant. The ride also featured a pair of 3D glasses for each rider which was used mostly to allow wand effects to appear to come towards you and that was a nice touch. Unfortunately that's where the impressiveness ended. The individual roller coaster cars had a neat mechanic where they could rotate on the track, but this had been done before (and better) on the Revenge of the Mummy ride (one of my favorite in Universal, by the way). The whole experience seemed a bit contrived. They had some of the film talent acting on screens to make it another story-driven experience like Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, but it seemed like they were trying to cram too much story and too many characters into too little time. Unfortunately, due to the length of the lines and the fact that there were other events going on during the weekend we only ended up riding The Escape from Gringots once, which means I didn't really have a chance to try to look around during the ride and inspect the tech. I think my favorite part was actually the fake elevator ride down to the boarding platform. They had the floor rigged to move and the ceiling was screens, so it really made it feel like you were descending to a great depth.
I can't say that I was particularly looking forward to the Hogwarts Express "ride", but I do think that it's a fantastic way to connect the Diagon Alley section of Universal to the Hogsmeade section of Islands of Adventure. When we decided to take the ride it ended up impressing me.
Even More Potential Spoilers! Before I get into the interior of the ride, let me just say that the exterior looks like the real deal. The train has steam coming out of it's stack, it's pulling a coal car and the cars themselves look like real train cars with automatic sliding doors. Very cool. Going into the ride I really thought that they would have some backdrops and scenes along the tracks to sort of simulate going across the countryside to get to Hogsmeade and vice versa. At the very most I figured they would put a screen on the window and do something animated, but since it's just a short train ride I wasn't expecting that much. Inside of the cars they sit you 8 to a compartment. The window is a screen (as expected) and starts out just showing a video of the wall that was actually on the other side of the train with some steam rising from below. Once the ride is about to start moving, the door to the compartment slides shut; All of the "windows" on the interior of the compartment are opaque and seem to be meant to keep your focus inside and on the window. Part the way through the ride that preconception is shattered as voices, along with silhouettes of Harry, Ron and Hermione move across the interior windows, creating a whole extra aspect to the show. That plus the moving countryside containing characters and locations from the movies moving past the window makes the trip an enjoyable experience. And you get a completely different show when you ride it the other direction! It obviously wasn't the most exciting ride in the park, but they took a train ride and made it fun.
All in all, the designers at Universal and Islands of Adventure did a fantastic job bringing the magic of Harry Potter into ride form. I had a blast on all of the rides and the magic didn't stop there. Check out Part 2: Diagon Alley and London!
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