Universal Studios' new Revenge of the Mummy blends moviemaking techniques with an indoor roller coaster. It's goal: lift attendance at the Orlando theme park out of the doldrums.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published April 19, 2004
[Universal Orlando]
The Revenge of the Mummy ride features high-tech robotics, fire and computer-generated images to add frights to the indoor roller coaster.
ORLANDO - Scott Trowbridge lost track of how many hundred times he has ridden Revenge of the Mummy.
The creative director of the next big attraction at Universal Studios Florida recalls locking arms with five fellow ride designers in a field four years ago and running as fast as they could up a hill toward a mockup of the ride's menacing evil spirit. Last week, Trowbridge climbed off one more "technical rehearsal" spin on the ride that grew out of that early visualization exercise.
Launched on a roller coaster car at the g-forces of a plane taking off from an aircraft carrier, Trowbridge concluded that the growling ghoul at the top of the hill needed a fix.
"The smoke obscures Imhotep's mouth," he said. "We'll adjust the fog machine a few sub-seconds tonight so its easier to follow the story line."
Trowbridge's fine-tuning has taken on a new urgency. Universal's thrill ride creators and the engineers who build the industrial-strength machinery that turn their dreams into reality are tweaking a ride that park officials hope will lift attendance this summer after three years in the doldrums. A huge teaser ad campaign launches next week. The grand opening is May 20.
Sometimes, Trowbridge, vice president of creative studios for Universal Parks and Resorts, said, he just watches the faces of riders.
"I'm looking for what makes people scream, then maximizing the effect by adjusting any of dozens of stimuli at our command," he said. That's what inspired him to stop a horde of animated scarab beetles from swarming riders as their train reversed directions, backed onto a turntable that spun them around 180 degrees, then shot them uphill to a speed of 45 miles an hour in 2.5 seconds.
"We made the beetles scene go to black at the moment the train starts to back up," said Trowbridge, who shifted to the theme park ride business from filmmaking. "People needed just a moment to think: "Oh, no! What's next?' "
Universal's merchants have done their bit, too. They loaded the gift shop with Mummy themed T-shirts, $24.96 black and gold Pharaoh hats and $12.95 action figures. Multimillion-dollar Coca-Cola and Burger King advertising tie-in promotions are set to begin after the grand opening.
"We see this ride as an incredible opportunity to drive more guests here and amaze people," said Kurt Kostur, a Universal marketing vice president. "It really positions us as the park that offers edge, a hipness and more intense experiences than Disney."
After six months of construction inside the Kongfrontation attraction building that had been gutted down to a dirt floor, Universal quietly gave patrons and reporters test runs on Revenge of the Mummy during the past few weeks.
The gruesome-looking 6-foot-10 robot that is the ride's soul-snatching bad guy, Imhotep, still was being wired at a nearby warehouse. A gauze-wrapped mummy wearing a red ball cap served as stand-in while a ball of fire erupted at the spot where Imhotep is supposed to make his first flashy appearance.
The ride's big ending was conspicuously missing, that part of the script remained shrouded in secrecy. Marketers insisted on withholding a few surprises to hype how this ride plays on people's fears of the unexpected.
Recent riders didn't mind. Other surprises kept them guessing. There was no escape. Even the queue has fun-house-style air blasts in the floor to startle the unwary.
"This ride is awesome," said Karen Speilzik, who runs a Brantford, Ontario, home building company.
"I don't like roller coasters, but this was interesting," said Josh Rota, a Roslyn, N.Y., high school senior. "It was sensory overload and really fast. I never knew what was coming next."
So far half of all riders got back in line to try it again.
Universal aims to use the ride to extend the life of its re-awakened Mummy movie franchise. Since 1999, Universal's $140-million film production investment in three Mummy releases generated almost $1-billion in revenues.
However, Mummy the Ride stretches the thrill ride horizon in some new directions, too. This is no simulator ride like Spider-Man. The ride mixes projections of computer-generated images with water spritzes, fog machines, dramatic lighting and bellowing audio for many of its effects. Riders' heads are subjected to 107-degree heat as they roll under a ceiling that has burst into rolling, blue "brainfire" flames first developed as a special effect for the movie Backdraft.
The Mummy ride is part of another new theme park trend. Because the cost of building one-of-a-kind rides has soared, the theme park giants - Universal, Walt Disney Co. and Anheuser Busch Cos. - all now buy multiple copies at the same time to save money. Universal poured $80-million into developing the Mummy ride for its Orlando park and a version that opens in June at Universal Studios Hollywood.
The Mummy is the first of what promises to be the next generation of theme park dark rides. Named after the "Laff in the Dark" rides, those are traditional amusement park attractions that carry seated riders in the dark past a series of special effects and tell a story. Mummy adds an indoor roller coaster, an idea pioneered in the 1970s by Space Mountain at Walt Disney World Co. and later the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, only with a big twist.
Revenge of the Mummy's trains are propelled the length of the four-minute ride by linear induction motors, a series of high-power magnets in the track and under the train. The motors have no moving parts, don't touch the track and use polarity to pull the coasters through their paces at high speeds. The motors are virtually silent. Universal even filled the tracks with sand to further deaden the sound.
Theme parks have used linear induction motors for decades. They have propelled such things as monorails and more recently sky-shot rides that subject riders to high-speed lifts and drops.
The Mummy becomes the first hybrid coaster/dark ride that runs both on gravity and linear induction from start to finish. There is no lift hill. Engineers can control the speed and direction of the train at any moment and stop it on a dime. But it's such an energy hog that Universal installed a device to avoid neighborhood brownouts. The ride sucks up enough juice (5 megawatts in spikes that occur every 24 seconds) to light a subdivision of 1,000 homes.
A major challenge was timing the hundreds of effects to the passing coaster cars. Coasters typically use sensors as triggers. The Mummy's effects are timed to the split-second through a controller that makes adjustments to each trip based on the weight of each coaster as it leaves the station.
Developing the "brainfire" effect was a straight-forward project for Universal engineers and their vendors. Several other Universal rides such as Jaws use walls of flame. They also had created a burst of brainfire half as big years ago for their Backdraft attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Heating a flaming ceiling the size of a living room to 3,200 degrees in a matter of seconds, however, was new territory. Universal chose natural gas because it is lighter than air, then sized the pipes to dump enough raw gas onto a series of perforated pans hung over riders heads to pull it off.
Fire safety code limits exposure to flame stunts at head level to 111 degrees.
"We rented a crane, an infrared gun and got all the gas pipes and accumulator tanks hooked up. Then we turned it on," said Mike Hightower, vice president of project management for Universal Creative. "We stood under it, took temperatures at head level and lowered the flame until it got to 107 degrees just to be extra safe. Then we took our measurements."
Universal claims Imhotep is the most sophisticated animatronic robot ever developed for a theme park. Capable of lifting 2,500 pounds, his arms are hollowed-out stainless steel that can be programmed to perform motions four times faster than other theme park robots.
But following an old rule of theme park trickery, Universal carefully engineered the robot not to look too natural.
"If he looked like a real guy in a Imhotep suit," Trowbridge said, "nobody would be amazed."
