Off-Brand: Universal Studios Hollywood and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter

*carefully peeks inside the blog*

Wow, that dust built up faster than I thought it would. What has it been, six weeks? I'm going to need to get a crew in here. Or just rebrand it as a urban exploration/haunted house blog. But for now, this:

Geographically speaking, I should be a Universal gal. The house I grew up in is about a 25-minute drive from Universal Studios Hollywood, and nowadays I live even closer—if I could get up to the roof of my apartment building, I could probably see the park. But the pattern was established in my childhood and I am pretty ride-or-die for Disneyland.* I think I've been to You Ess Aitch about...ten times. In my life. Until very recently, all my trips preceded my theme park blogging life, which is why I have mentioned Universal only in passing.

Until now.

This past Memorial Day weekend, I finally went back in order to finally see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. We probably could not have timed it better—we were anticipating insane crowds due to a) the holiday, and b) the fact that everyone was saving their Disneyland trips for the next weekend—but attendance was actually pretty light. Maybe the weather kept people away (it was the chilliest, dampest Memorial Sunday I can personally remember. I wore layers), or maybe the Universal fans were holding off until the Jurassic ride opens back up. We got to do everything we wanted to do, some of it more than once.

I shrieked at the top of my lungs in full view of an auditorium crowd. I had my reasons.

What really struck me on this, the first Universal trip since I started blogging, and really drilling down through all my strata of feelings and observations about theme parks, was how stark the place is, compared to Disneyland. I often complain about Disney's growing tendency to just slap attractions down wherever in defiance of area theming, but at least Disney has some lingering commitment to area theming. Universal doesn't lack it completely, but it's low on the priority list. The most you can expect most of the time is what I like to call “cluster theming,” where individual attractions are backed up by matching shops and eateries nearby, but across the way things might be entirely different.

So the theming at Universal is focused on single attractions rather than broad area concepts. It's hard to blame them, since they're so constrained in where they can build and expand due to the park's hillside location. One consequence of this is that...it can be kind of hard to find what you're looking for. Basically you have to either already know where it is, or be willing to wander around until you stumble across it. The map can help, but your navigation skills are further handicapped by USH's wonky, meandering split-level layout.

Another consequence—or perhaps a motivating cause—is that Universal seems very little invested in the longevity of its attractions. It might be helpful if I explain this by way of contrast. If something at Disneyland needs to be replaced, the replacement has to fit—at least tangentially—with the area theme. The pool of possible replacements for any given attraction is therefore smaller, which incentivizes the park to install attractions that can stand the test of time. It doesn't always work out that way, obviously, but at least they try.** Without themed lands, Universal can literally throw anything anywhere, content to know that if it doesn't work out, they can just rip it out and install the next most popular option from their giant portfolio of anythings.

All of the above is the rule. The exception is Wizarding World.

That seems to be the generic name for “Harry Potter Land” in whichever Universal park you find yourself in, though the specific locale recreated varies. Orlando got Diagon Alley, Hogwarts and the associated village of Hogsmeade, and a slammin' Hogwarts Express train ride to get from one part to the other. We got just Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. Obviously, I can only comment on the latter...but...damn. Universal went hard on setting here, and every nook and cranny of the place is utterly committed to the concept, from the film-accurate exterior of Hogwarts Castle to the voice of Moaning Myrtle in the restrooms.

Honestly? It's better than a lot of what Disney's been doing lately. I was particularly impressed by the interiors of the shops and eateries, which are themed with just as much dedication and attention to detail as the exteriors. To say nothing of the merchandise, which reinforces the escapism with very few exceptions. The big draw of Harry Potter for most people is not the characters and plot so much as the fantasy of being a wizard in this secret parallel society, and Universal happily indulges this fantasy by selling all manner of items which wizards are actually seen to buy in the series—robes and wands and outlandish quill pens and Chocolate Frogs and butterbeer and...

What about that staple of the theme park scene: collectible pins? Well, yes, there are pins, but...here, let me digress for a bit to explain how Disney tends to fall short in this area. Disneyland will probably always be my greatest theme park love, but—I know I have complained about this before—it puts way too much emphasis on character branding, to the detriment of its own environmental illusions. Disney shops and restaurants almost never feel like in-universe shops and restaurants; you're constantly reminded that you're in a theme park, shopping for theme park souvenirs. Here's Exhibit A:

You can get this Monsters University cap anywhere in the resort that Pixar merch is sold. It looks innocuous enough, but what's that threadbare spot on the bill? Not the result of time, misfortune, or vandalism—these hats are manufactured that way. Why? Because they are not meant to be generic MU caps, such as monster students might wear while attending Monsters University in the monster world. These are specifically replicas of Mike Wazowski's cap:

This is what I mean by the focus on character branding damaging the illusion. I can't suspend my disbelief that there is a monster world where monsters go to college and wear caps with their school logo when all such caps in my world bear identical damage in order to remind me of one individual monster.***

The Harry Potter series also, rather famously, features a school. And Universal sells the trappings of that school to guests much the same way businesses within the fiction would sell them to students. You can buy a replica of a specific character's wand, but you're not obligated to in order to have a wand at all. Your Slytherin robe is yours, not Draco Malfoy's with rips in the sleeves from the hippogriff attack in Prisoner of Azkaban.

And you can get pins, but they are not pictures of the characters the way nearly all Disney pins are. Instead they are House crests and Prefect badges and Quidditch team pins. You know, like wizards would wear.

The contrast between this, and what I am used to from Disney, is not only striking, but a real lightbulb moment. “Ooohhhhhhhhh,” my brain is going. “That's why Disney panicked and built Pandora and Batuu.”

And now Galaxy's Edge is open at Disneyland, and reviews have been trickling in over the past month. The consensus seems to be that it's pretty dang good—immersive and detailed and all that—and also that it leans pretty hard into the roleplaying aspect. Obviously I'll have to wait until I am able to see it for myself before I can make any judgments, but there is a glaringly obvious difference between Star Wars and Harry Potter that I think makes the two concepts less in competition with each other than I think Disney is banking on.

And no, it's not that one has spaceships and the other has wizards. Star Wars also has wizards. The Jedi are wizards. Let's not kid ourselves.

It's that in Star Wars, only a few people are wizards, while in Harry Potter, everyone is a wizard.

That's not all of it, but it sort of points to the whole, which is more that the Harry Potter setting is easier to play casually in. You can still be a wizard even if you're not a direct participant in the big Good vs. Evil clash. In Star Wars, by contrast, every character of consequence is someone who has gone all-in on the conflict, pitching in on one side or the other or in a few cases aggressively playing the middle. Nothing happens in Star Wars except for the plot, while the Harry Potter universe still has Quidditch matches and Transfiguration exams and vacations to Egypt. Star Wars just inherently takes itself way more seriously than Potter does, and I think that has a major effect on the mindset you must adopt in order to immerse yourself in their respective theme park spinoffs.

To put it another way, while Disney is undoubtedly getting a major attendance boost from the addition of Star Wars LARP-Land, it may not be wooing away Universal's Potter crowd so much as tapping a previously underserved market segment. Which...great! Different make-believe strokes for different escapism-craving folks.

Only...Disney's unsettling trend toward snobbishness and courting the upper class is rearing its ugly head again. One of the recurring complaints I'm seeing about Galaxy's Edge is that the full show isn't available to everyone. I haven't investigated in detail, but apparently there's some kind of lightsaber presentation ceremony that you only get to see if you or someone else in your party plunks down about 200 beans for a custom-constructed lightsaber souvenir. Nope, it's no good asking to sit in on a stranger's ceremony; it's a private event. (There's also a build-a-droid shop, with comparable prices, but no ceremony, I think? Again, I haven't looked at it very hard.)

200 is a lot of beans. By contrast, the Harry Potter wands—the closest narrative equivalent to a lightsaber—run in the neighborhood of forty or fifty legume seeds. You can kit out your whole family with wizard gling-gling sticks for the price of just one Jedi vwoom-vwoom baton. So you can see the issue. The park has always offered premium souvenirs for high prices, and charging for VIP access to certain bits of show is nothing new at this point, but this...this is locking people out of part of the show altogether if they don't buy the premium souvenir, and that's a new degree of bad form.

So honestly? I think that to the extent that I have a theme park fantasy roleplay setting of choice, Wizarding World is still going to be it. Even though I'm not a Universal gal.

It's a funny old world, isn't it?

* Get it? Ride-or-die? Because of the...never mind.

** In Disneyland/the Kingdom parks, that is. The others seem more vulnerable to out-of-theme tinkering—“Paradise Pier” or “Echo Lake” just don't have the same cultural cachet as “Fantasyland.”

*** If Mike were a celebrity in his universe, it might be more believable. But he's not.