\n<\/p>\n
On a recent<\/span> Friday morning, I found myself in a sea of bodies waiting to be admitted to Universal\u2019s new $7 billion Orlando theme park, Epic Universe. Speakers hidden in the foliage blared a soaring melody suggestive of a heroic quest involving swords. The adults in the crowd, most of whom were unaccompanied by minors, wore performance athletic-gear. We filed through a metal detector and presented our tickets. Then all around me, people began to run.<\/p>\n In recent years, Americans have drifted away from many of their once-beloved sources of pleasure: drinking, throwing parties, having sex, making friends. Yet they keep coming back to theme parks. In 2023, according to a report from the Themed Entertainment Association, 17.7 million people\u2014more than the entire population of Sweden\u2014visited the Magic Kingdom, one of the six parks that make up Walt Disney World, in Florida. And this is despite years of price hikes: At $199 on the busiest days, one ticket to the Magic Kingdom can cost more than a week\u2019s worth of groceries. Disney\u2019s \u201cExperiences\u201d division is more profitable than its TV and movie business, bringing in billions of dollars annually.<\/p>\n Even so, park operators have had to work hard to engineer fun at a time when people have become more fickle about what qualifies. \u201cWhen Disneyland opened, it was the most exciting technological thing you could see,\u201d Phil Hettema, who spent more than a decade working on Universal\u2019s parks, told me. \u201cNow there\u2019s nothing I can see anywhere in the world that I can\u2019t see on my iPhone.\u201d<\/p>\n To meet this challenge, rides are bumping against the limits of physics and the human body to deliver experiences that are more death-defying than ever before. There are hyper-coasters (more than 200 feet tall), giga-coasters (more than 300 feet tall), and strata-coasters (even taller) capable of hurtling people at 120 miles an hour. A 640-foot-tall \u201cexa-coaster\u201d more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty will open soon in Saudi Arabia, and will reach speeds of 155 miles an hour.<\/p>\n The goal is not just to delight but to overwhelm. In May, Epic Universe became the first major Florida theme park to open in more than 25 years. A complex of five themed \u201cworlds,\u201d it includes interactive robot dragons, a flame-throwing windmill, and a Harry Potter<\/em>\u2013inspired re-creation of 1920s Paris complete with true-to-scale Haussmann buildings overlooking imitation-cobblestone streets. I\u2019d heard of visitors stepping inside and bursting into tears.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n A crowd enters Universal Epic Universe\u2019s Super Nintendo World, one of five themed \u201cworlds\u201d at the complex.<\/p>\n Walt Disney pioneered<\/span> the art of micromanaging visitors\u2019 experiences when, 70 years ago, he opened his first park, Disneyland, in California. To prevent life\u2019s unpleasantness from impinging on his utopia, he did not allow the sale of newspapers and borrowed filmmaking techniques to place attractions within meticulously composed landscapes\u2014a lush jungle, the Old West. In so doing, he helped invent what would come to be known as the theme park. \u201cA theme park without rides is still a theme park,\u201d wrote the researchers Margaret King and J. G. O\u2019Boyle in an essay on the history of theme parks. \u201cAn amusement park without rides is a parking lot with popcorn.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Magic Kingdom\u2014the successor to Disneyland that opened in 1971\u2014the themes of various parts of the park are lax by current standards: You can, for example, find Aladdin\u2019s carpets and a tiki room side by side under the broad heading of \u201cAdventureland.\u201d The latest thinking among park operators is that impressing visitors requires re-creating, to an unprecedented scale, complete worlds they know from movies and video games. Epic Universe is home to a wood-hewn, Viking-style land based on the How to Train Your Dragon <\/em>franchise; a Super Nintendo World with perfectly spinning gold coins; and a horror-themed village inhabited by Dracula, Wolf Man, and other monsters from classic films, where the mist floating over gravestones feels eerie even under the Florida sun. The landscape at Epic Universe is so detailed that some visitors hire tour guides\u2014which begin at $460 per person\u2014to highlight minutiae they might miss and to share the history, both real and fictional, of their surroundings.<\/p>\n As I speed-walked to the Harry Potter<\/em> world (which is based on a prequel to the main Harry Potter<\/em> series that is set in Paris in 1927), I passed green benches manufactured by the same company that made the originals in Paris in the 1920s and, with my back to an imitation Sacr\u00e9-Coeur, watched a stick bug\u2013like animatronic creature futzing with a lock in the window of an artfully aged yellow storefront.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n A rainstorm at Disney\u2019s Magic Kingdom. Disney parks are designed to produce a sense of \u201cheightened reality.\u201d<\/p>\n I lined up for the Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry ride accompanied by Kevin Blakeney, a landscape architect who had worked on the park and who told me that the waiting area was designed to hold eight hours\u2019 worth of people (hence the running: When the park opens, people race to get in line for the most popular rides). Blakeney, who left Universal last spring, specializes in equipping theme parks with all of the unsexy infrastructure required to function\u2014toilets, cellphone towers\u2014as well as ensuring that none of it impinges on the illusion. According to King and O\u2019Boyle, visitors average eight hours in a theme park but only 10 to 15 minutes on rides.<\/p>\n As we stood inside a white-tiled tunnel made to look like the Paris M\u00e9tro, Blakeney directed my attention to the bathroom in the line, which parks have had to install to address the growing issue of visitors relieving themselves in interminable queues. In 2019, the Orlando Sentinel<\/em> reported on a 22-year-old woman who, while waiting to board an Avatar<\/em>-themed ride at Disney World, \u201cfelt something wet on the back of her leg\u201d and discovered that the man next to her was peeing. Rather than sacrifice her own place in line, she waited another 20 minutes, then alerted an employee.<\/p>\n To manage the thousands of people who descend daily, operators have studied visitors\u2019 behavior and engineered their parks to move people around without anyone realizing they\u2019re being nudged. One of Disney\u2019s early innovations was to lure visitors through its parks with enormous structures, such as castles, that Walt Disney referred to as \u201cwienies,\u201d supposedly because of the gravitational pull he observed hot dogs having on his toy poodle. These days, Disney and Universal have teams of employees who sit in front of computers and security-camera feeds in offices inside the parks, keeping an eye on wait times and gridlock. If one part of a park is too empty, employees could send out a parade to draw people from a more crowded spot. If a queue is backing up, they could deploy a character to buoy spirits or, for something like a carousel, shorten the ride from five minutes to four. Background music might have a faster, more driving rhythm in areas where operators want to keep visitors moving, and elsewhere, have an end credits\u2013type tempo to signal that it\u2019s time to clear out. In a sense, you are on a ride from the moment you step foot in the park.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n A replica of Hogwarts Castle at Universal Islands of Adventure park<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n The waiting area for Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry at Epic Universe is designed to hold eight hours\u2019 worth of people.<\/p>\n I\u2019d watched videos of the Harry Potter<\/em> ride online, and I was looking forward to flying through the air alongside dueling witches and wizards who, while firing colorful clouds of spells at one another, trash the Ministry of Magic\u2019s wood-paneled offices with help from stampeding beasts, then destroy a time-travel chamber, only to get sucked into the swirling black void of space. The difficulty of pulling off this illusion is hard to overstate. New rides like this one can cost $100 million, if not more, to create; incorporate LiDAR laser systems of the kind used on self-driving cars; and rely on robotic figures with thousands of moving parts. Designers do test runs, making minute adjustments to bring the elaborate machinery\u2014lights, video projections, animatronics\u2014into perfect sync. If any part of the ride becomes even a centimeter out of whack, it shuts down.<\/p>\n But even as rides have become more complex, the storylines behind them have gotten quicker and simpler to accommodate shrinking attention spans. \u201cYou have to create these moments where they are impactful, but they\u2019re not long enough to bore you. It\u2019s like, \u2018Wow, this is great.\u2019 BOOM<\/em>\u2014and then you\u2019re just jumping on to the next one,\u201d Thierry Coup, a former Universal executive who oversaw the creative development of Epic Universe, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s more like the TikTok philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n Lines have not gotten any shorter, though. Disney and Universal offer the option to pay extra to cut certain queues; the day I visited Epic Universe, these passes cost $300 a person, on top of the $190 entry ticket\u2014and they were sold out. Since Disney first started experimenting with a tiered entry system in 1999, theme parks have discovered that they need to build physical barriers separating the regular and express lines. \u201cThat\u2019s a real point of frustration: to see the express moving so quickly when the standby is not,\u201d Blakeney said. \u201cThat\u2019s when fights break out among guests.\u201d<\/p>\n Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry sounded amazing, but I was anxious to see the rest of the park, and after eyeing the seemingly endless queue ahead of me and discovering that the ride was an hour from even opening, I wimped out of the line. I consoled myself with the thought that, according to some riders, I\u2019d already experienced the best part: a cavernous, green-tiled room of airplane-hangar proportions that housed towering Ministry of Magic offices. I\u2019d seen scattered grumbling online about the ride\u2019s overreliance on screens, and The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 verdict was that \u201cthe queue is better than the ride.\u201d I learned later that, on a day when the Battle at the Ministry ride went down because of technical issues, visitors had still ventured into the line just to see the waiting area.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Stardust Racers at Universal Epic Universe<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n The Jurassic Park River Adventure ride at Universal Islands of Adventure<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n People on Stardust Racers experience more than 4 g\u2019s of force, a level at which the human heart struggles to pump blood.<\/p>\n Walking around Epic Universe<\/span>, I found myself hunting for spots where reality had intruded on the fantasy. But where? In the planters lining the outdoor caf\u00e9s in Harry Potter<\/em>\u2019s Paris, every flower was perfectly in bloom. The only scuffing\u2014on shop doors, on the walls of the M\u00e9tro\u2014had been artfully painted on to make the scenery look appropriately aged. Every night, Blakeney told me, an army of employees filed into Epic Universe to power wash sidewalks, deadhead the plants, repaint dirty walls, and replace lightbulbs. They\u2019d work until dawn creating the illusion of effortless beauty.<\/p>\n The unnatural perfection struck me as slightly off-putting, but some people find that it can be hard to give up once they get used to it. Not long before my trip, Jill and Kevin Levett, a married couple in their 60s who live north of London, had flown to Orlando for the grand opening of Epic Universe. They were preparing to return a week later.<\/p>\n The Levetts, semi-retired bus drivers, first visited Orlando\u2019s theme parks together in 2012. Since then, they\u2019ve basically quit vacationing anywhere except Universal\u2019s four Florida parks. They travel to Orlando four or five times a year, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, and will go to the parks in costume. Kevin often dresses as a Hogwarts Express conductor from the Harry Potter<\/em> series (red vest, customized pocket watch, suit dyed the perfect shade of brown); Jill frequently goes as the imperious witch Dolores Umbridge, shouting commands in a wig, a custom-made dress, and pale-pink ballet flats. \u201cI stay in character all day,\u201d Jill told me. \u201cI\u2019ve scared a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n While they\u2019re in the parks, the Levetts post updates and photos to a 184,000-person Facebook group of Universal devotees, run by a company that helps plan vacations to Orlando theme parks. Through it, the Levetts have become so recognizable that fellow Universal fans will stop them in the parks to ask for selfies. Between flights, hotels, and their annual park passes, the couple estimates they spend $20,000 a year on their Orlando trips, though this seemed conservative given that they were preparing to pay $2,600 for a private VIP tour of Epic Universe with friends from their Facebook group.<\/p>\n Last summer, after years of hip problems and some difficult surgeries to address them, Jill had an operation that went poorly. \u201cWhen we came out of hospital, Jill was so down, so depressed, I turned around to her and said, \u2018We\u2019re going to Universal,\u2019\u201d Kevin recalled. A few weeks later, they were on a plane to Orlando. \u201cYou can\u2019t forget everything that\u2019s going on; you can\u2019t forget the pain and things that you\u2019re going through. But it helps you escape from some of that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a place we knew that we could go\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we would be safe there,\u201d Jill finished.<\/p>\n At Universal\u2019s parks, Kevin explained, \u201ceverything is as it should be in a perfect world.\u201d Harry Potter<\/em>\u2019s Paris at Epic Universe, for example, has magical creatures and no cigarette butts. \u201cObviously, if you go to Paris, you\u2019re going to see Paris as it really is,\u201d he said. His frown made clear that \u201cParis as it really is\u201d was indisputably a bad thing.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Disney\u2019s parks division is more profitable than its TV and movie business.<\/p>\n For all the warm<\/span> and fuzzy feelings they engender, theme parks spend an astronomical amount of effort and money to simulate the feeling that they are trying to kill us. Stardust Racers, the sinewy roller coaster that towers over Epic Universe, shoots bodies through the sky at more than 60 miles an hour and plunges them toward the surface of the Earth from the height of a 10-story building. On a roller coaster, the theme park commands your full and undivided attention.<\/p>\n Roller-coaster aficionados have their own extensive vocabulary to catalog all of the techniques that rides use to give you the impression you\u2019re going to die. Stardust Racers, which a roller-coaster critic called \u201cone of the greatest on the planet,\u201d has \u201ctop hats\u201d (abrupt rises and falls mimicking the shape of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s stovepipe hat); \u201cairtime hills\u201d (which make you feel like you\u2019re floating); \u201cejector airtime\u201d (which tosses your body into the ride\u2019s restraints); a \u201czero-g roll\u201d (a 360-degree twist that spins you upside down and makes you feel weightless); \u201ccrossovers\u201d (where the track loops back on itself); and several \u201chead-choppers\u201d (moments where the coaster seems like it\u2019ll rip your skull off).<\/p>\n One of the challenges of building coasters is that each one is, essentially, a prototype\u2014Stardust Racers is the only ride in the world that weaves two groups of people around each other and upside down, mid-air\u2014and these prototypes must work safely and reliably from opening day, 14 hours a day, hundreds of days a year, for 30 years (the estimated lifespan of a coaster).<\/p>\n A roller coaster\u2019s first riders are usually about 170 pounds with a head, torso, legs, and no arms. These dummies\u2014human-shaped plastic bags filled with water to mimic the weight of real riders\u2014can be outfitted with sensors, then loaded on a coaster to test whether speeds and g-forces conform to the computer\u2019s predictions. Tweaks are rare, but sometimes necessary: a section of track might require reconstruction or brakes might need to be introduced to slow an unexpectedly speedy stretch. Disconcertingly, one can find videos online of dummies flying off rides during testing, though a 2005 survey of a decades\u2019 worth of fatalities in the U.S. found that an average of four people die annually from coasters, fewer than the number killed by kitchen appliances.<\/p>\n Roller coasters were once limited by technology, but now it\u2019s our bodies that are holding them back. Coasters can subject riders to g-forces more powerful than those typically experienced by astronauts\u2014people on Stardust Racers will experience more than 4 g\u2019s of force, compared with the 3 g\u2019s typical during a space-shuttle launch\u2014though industry guidelines limit how long riders should be made to endure such strong accelerations. At upwards of 4 g\u2019s, the human heart struggles to pump blood; you should experience this for no more than two seconds, per the standards for rides in the U.S. \u201cThe time is very important here because you don\u2019t want people graying out or maybe even blacking out,\u201d Daniel Schoppen, a roller-coaster designer with the firm Intamin, which has built attractions for Universal\u2019s parks, told me. \u201cThis is not enjoyment. This is not fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Once a coaster has been deemed safe, its designers ride it over and over to further finesse the experience. To Schoppen, the best coaster is like a piece of music: \u201cEvery part has its own motif, has its own feeling,\u201d he told me. Theme parks are trying to bring back visitors by building rides that change a little each time; on Stardust Racers, which has two trains of cars racing each other on separate tracks, if one train car falls behind, it gets an extra oomph of acceleration near the middle of the ride\u2014an additional thrill that one critic called \u201cboost mode.\u201d<\/p>\n The riders who stagger off of Stardust Racers have wide, shaky smiles. Braving a ride offers \u201ca sense of assurance that you will survive no matter what is going on, what trials and tribulations you may be undergoing,\u201d the Disney historian and former \u201cImagineer\u201d Tom Morris told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a way of proving that you can get through it.\u201d When the world scares us, people turn to the controlled terror of theme parks.<\/p>\n Sinna Nasseri for The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n The Celestial Park water fountains at Epic Universe<\/p>\n After the sun set<\/span>, Epic Universe began to glow. I stood on the top floor of the Helios Grand Hotel, a $490-minimum-a-night Universal property where a concierge told me some guests had checked in just to stay in their room and gaze at the park all day, and watched the fountains below shoot flumes of water as the nightly light show began.<\/p>\n From this angle, Super Nintendo World\u2019s polka-dotted Piranha Plants bounced within view of an eight-lane highway, a reminder of how finite the fantasy really was. Theme parks are celebrated for providing an escape, but part of their appeal is that they are real brick-and-mortar spaces, painstakingly engineered for visitors\u2019 pleasure. And for all their manicured artificiality, theme parks do not necessarily spoil us on reality. The playfulness they permit can follow us out.<\/p>\n I was walking through the parking lot when, in between slow-moving wisps of clouds, I caught sight of a sliver of moon so horizontal, it made the night sky look crooked. How did they do that? <\/em>I wondered, then immediately corrected myself: This is real<\/em>.<\/p>\n Later, I caught myself rewatching videos of Harry Potter and Battle at the Ministry, an endless stream of which is available online, captured by people holding up phones on the ride. I kept trying to re-create the experience I\u2019d missed, and watched them until I\u2019d mastered each beat: The animatronic Death Eater crouching on a bookshelf casts a spell, then Dolores Umbridge appears on a screen, then a rhinoceros-like Erumpent tries to gore the riders with its horn. I got to know the ride clinically, but I kept wondering about the physical thrill. It was both frustrating and satisfying to know people were still dreaming up experiences that demanded to be felt in person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a recent Friday morning, I found myself in a sea of bodies waiting to be admitted to Universal\u2019s new $7 billion Orlando theme park, Epic Universe. Speakers hidden in the foliage blared a soaring melody suggestive of a heroic quest involving swords. The adults in the crowd, most of whom were unaccompanied by minors,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[587,3600,2777],"class_list":{"0":"post-21280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-extreme","9":"tag-parks","10":"tag-theme"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}