If you’ve seen my other posts in this travel series, you would see that during this trip we went to a couple of theme parks. But I would be lying if I said I did not look forward to this particular theme park the most. I think I’m secretly a sucker for theme parks with character mascots. When I was a kid I went to the Warner Bros theme park in Australia and I love love loved it! I saw Batman, Flash, Tweetie and Silverster, Bugs Bunny… It was so much fun! I was looking to replicate that so I was majorly excited to visit Singapore’s Universal Studios!
So many things to see when we started walking and looking around the Hollywood area! Theme parks are awesome.
At the entrance to Far Far Away Land, we see Shrek’s home.
Though not a fan of Shrek, I loved the details and the props they added to this part of the theme park. We watched the Shrek 4D Adventure within the castle.
At Lost World we rode a couple of rides to jumpstart the day. I have never seen Jurassic Park movies because I don’t really like dinosaurs, but across the theme parks I’ve been to that draw inspiration from the Jurassic Park movie franchise, there is always a water ride (Rapids Adventure here). I also liked riding the Canopy Flyer, which I can only describe as very short, but sweet.
My Dad wanted to watch the Waterworld show and I was expecting it to be different from the one I’ve seen in the States, but it’s the same one, just with different actors. The stunts were still pretty entertaining though!
We crossed over to Ancient Egypt, which has the best detail and decoration and feel overall. This is the place that draws inspiration from The Mummy series.
You get to take photos with the Army of Anubis. These guys never ever break out of character.
They even had a dude dressed up as Rick O’Connell, the character Brenden Fraser played in The Mummy movie franchise. Do they look alike? Maybe the hair? Haha!
We went to ride The Revenge of The Mummy which is the highlight roller coaster in Ancient Egypt. I was a bit disappointed because it was not as scary as I was expecting, and I do love my roller coasters when they make me scream. I think I imagined a mummy would be popping up over my head or something, and I ended up over-preparing for this ride.
The area after this is New York. Characters from Sesame Street were hanging out and having photo ops here. I think they also perform at the City Hall.
Oscar The Grouch was super cute with his antics as people came up for photos!
Kids were running up and down the street trying to catch the falling soapy snow that would be blown down every hour or so. I watched them from inside a souvenir shop and had to laugh because I can’t remember the last time I did such a thing.
If you stay around this area, there is a scheduled street dancing show by The Rockafellas right outside the Palace, corner of 5th and Broadway.
These guys are a lot of fun to watch. They dance to recent hits, which at the time we came here was Gangnam Style. They are REALLY good at pumping the audience up, and soon enough everyone was bouncing around to the beat, clapping their hands along with the music.
They even invited a bunch of audience members to dance along, and it ended up being all sorts of hilarious!
After the street show, we passed by the Lights! Camera! Action! attraction. It gives people an idea on how the special effects and apocalyptic destruction scenes are done for movies. As usual, Steven Spielberg does the introductions in the first room, talking about how the magic in movies are created.
I remember going to a similar attraction in the States before, but that one had King Kong while this one was significantly shorter. It featured a hurricane scene, a boat, and a wall being torn by the angry winds– essentially a scene where New York was about to get hit by a hurricane. I thought it was cool when the walls got torn off to reveal another layer of the set. I’ve always been interested in the behind-the-scenes aspect of movies so this was a great watch for me.
After the show we bounded off to Sci Fi City, which to me is the coolest part of the theme park. My cousins and I had been talking about riding the meanest and biggest roller coaster here since we got a glimpse of it from the sky towers. This ride is the Battlestar Galactica ride Humans VS Cylon, where two tracks criss-cross against each other. The red track for ‘Humans’ is lower and less scary since you are actually bolted to the seats. My cousins, a few years younger than I, were a little scared of the blue track, so we went for the red track first.
It was pretty awesome, but I didn’t come all the way here only to miss out on the most epic roller coaster in this theme park! My cousins somehow managed to persuade themselves to fall in line with me and soon enough we were on the ‘Cylon’ side of things. While it was not the wildest I’ve been on (that is reserved for the coaster I rode in Australia when I was maybe 8 and I had my eyes closed the whole time!), it was still EPIC! I totally loved it!
I remember it began drizzling while we were riding, and the fun factor definitely went up. The seats are small and your legs hang in the air. The seats even swing as you spin on the tracks! So much fun! I scream-laughed for most of the ride. The best was the last part, when the roller coaster basically dived really fast from a height and just when you think your face is about to hit cement in the next 10 seconds, the roller coaster whooshes into a small room.
As we came out of the roller coaster, my Dad began calling us over toward the Transformers ride. He had just finished it and he said it was absolutely amazing.
We were supposed to go there but I was pretty horrified with the insane line I saw from the outside! After some urging on my Dad’s part, we braved the line for about an hour. Crazy crazy line, that one.
The ride took all but 15 minutes but my Dad was right: This was probably the best ride in the theme park. It’s not a roller coaster with the dips and highs, but it was a multi-sensory 3D ride that was so well-done, it was a thrilling adventure. You literally feel like you are part of the battle that is going on among the Transformers on earth! Totally worth falling in line for!
And with that, our first Singapore visit in so many years comes to a close. And what a fitting end too!
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Other posts in this series:
