Los Angeles - Day 3 👻

This blog is brought to you by Barry.

Yesterday featured early morning mountain climbs, heat, jet lag and challenging drives around twisty-turny streets in LA traffic. With all that taken into account, I’m sure it was little comfort to Ellie’s legs to know that when planning this trip, even I looked at our schedule for today and thought ‘this could be a bit ambitious’.

Nevertheless, we were taking advantage of the fact that the massive shift in time zones had temporarily turned us into early birds and were able to enjoy a relaxed start to the day as we had breakfast and readied ourselves for the day’s adventures. Once set and prepared we (slowly) hit the road into morning rush hour, making our way through West Hollywood and onto the 101 Freeway, which would take us around the range of hills we had ascended yesterday to Burbank, home of the majority of LA’s film and television studios. Universal, Warner Brothers and Disney are all practically adjacent, and this morning we had 9:30am reservations for the WB Studio Tour.

After passing through the security checkpoint to pay the first of many, many car parking charges of the holiday (and for Ellie to receive the first of many, many compliments from strangers on the strawberry dress she was wearing today) we were soon milling around in the waiting area surrounded by various film artefacts. Judging by the size of the costume, Pennywise the Clown is in fact a bit of a shortarse and we decided we’d feel much more confident taking him out, should the situation arise.

We were corralled along with the rest of our tour group to watch the obligatory intro film, in case all of us had recently recovered from brain surgery and didn’t realise that we were visiting a film studio today. If for some reason I ever end up running a tourist attraction that has an opening ‘hype’ film then that’s the first thing on the chopping block. Once the newly lobotomised guests in the room had been caught up, we were then allowed to board our tour vehicles (which were essentially giant golf carts) to begin our journey around the studio.

With this being a genuine working backlot, you have no real ability to predict what you’re going to see, or not see, as it largely depends on which of their outdoor sets are being used at the time. As such, we were warned by our guide that a lot of areas were going to be off limits - particularly those that had featured in the filming of Gilmore Girls. As I was travelling with the world’s biggest Gilmore Girls fan, this was a trifle disappointing, but the guides are very good at working around such issues and instead of confining us to a vehicle we were allowed off to wander around the streets that were at least open.

The sets are designed to resemble generic US streets that can be ‘dressed’ to match whichever location is required by the production. This means that quite often you’ll see the same location in multiple different situations without necessarily realising - for example, the upside-down kiss in 2002’s Spider-Man, the album cover for Prince’s Purple Rain and the Hard-Knock Life dance number from Annie all take place in the same small fake ‘alley’. Ellie was intrigued by the guide relaying all the different locations that had been used in Friends episodes, whereas I was more excited by seeing the shop where Gizmo was purchased in Gremlins, and of course getting a photo of the famous Water Tower where if 90s kids TV hasn’t lied to me, the Animaniacs definitely live.

The various stages where indoor locations and TV shows are filmed are all in gigantic but nondescript beige buildings, although this area of the tour was given a surreal air by a hospital drama being filmed on site that day, which caused a lot of the area to be filled with extras milling about in medical garb. Once the guided part of the tour was over, we were left inside another building featuring various original sets, including the original coffee shop from Friends, costumes from WB films and TV (mainly superheroes, so completely lost on me) and Harry Potter exhibits. Ellie visited the Friends-themed cafe, but just for a pastry snack rather than the Moist Maker Sandwich or Joey Special (two pizzas) on offer. We shared a small portion of apple fritter and saved the rest for tomorrow’s breakfast.

I was off in search of something more substantial post-tour so we headed the short distance away to iconic diner, Bob’s Big Boy. The Burbank location has been a staple for industry types since the 50s, the kind of place where the photos of celebrity visitors on the wall are genuine rather than wishful thinking. The ‘Big Boy’ himself was looking resplendent in the California sunshine and posed nicely for some photos. Film fans might remember him for his role as Dr Evil’s escape ship in Austin Powers.

Despite the car park being busy we were quickly seated at a booth, although not the one commemorating the visit of the Beatles back in 1965. Menus perused, along with a round of Cherry Cokes for the two of us, I went for the California Melt Sandwich whereas Ellie chose the Fried Chicken & Waffles with Syrup - that’s all on the same plate. America really must be stopped when it comes to putting sweet stuff on things where it simply doesn’t belong.

Midway through our meals - I received a sudden nudge from Ellie and a whispered instruction: ‘Look up! Cute dog being carried by famous man!’ (which when you think about it is a lot better than her telling me ‘famous dog being carried by cute man’). Sure enough, wandering through the restaurant in our general direction was a very sweet puppy being carried by 2022 Oscar Winner for Best Actor, Brendan Fraser. AKA Rick from the Mummy. AKA George of the Jungle! In classic Hollywood fashion no-one else seemed the least bit perturbed by the presence of a famous actor in their midst, in a movie town they see them all the time, so while Ellie and I’s jaws remained somewhere near the floor we decided to play it cool and not bother Brendan as he made his way towards the exit.

After a day of movie studios and movie stars it was time for…another movie studio. Well, this one was slightly different as we were making the short journey to the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park. We had tickets for entry anytime after 2pm, which would also grant us access to the after hours Halloween Horror Nights event. After milling around the CityWalk shopping area while we waited for our entry time, we headed in to Ellie’s first chosen attraction - the Studio Tour. Deja vu central, right? Unlike Warner Brothers, this is more of a quick zip around the film production areas of the Universal property combined with a variety of staged set pieces (there’s a flash flood! there’s an earthquake! Jaws the shark is jumping out of the water!). Call me a cynic but I think the main attraction for Ellie was this experience involving a 60 minute sit down while the tram drove us around.

We had time for a few other rides before things got spooky. Sadly those pesky dinosaurs got loose on the Jurassic World boat ride again and ruined what had promised to be a highly educational experience. We also shamelessly name dropped on the Mummy rollercoaster that we had been in the presence of its star mere hours earlier, and got to experience the brand new Mario Kart ride, where it would only be fair to point out that I trounced the competition. Take that, Bowser.

With the cheers of Mario and the gang ringing in my ears, the time had passed 5:30pm and so it was time move on from cute cartoons to gruesome ghouls, as we could now access the Horror Nights ‘houses’ before the guests who were arriving just for the evening could enter the park. We quickly made our way to the Poltergeist maze - I’d encouraged Ellie to watch this film with me last night as it was the one house I was really keen to do. It was a faithful and lengthy recreation of the main scenes from the film, with the added bonus/drawback of live actors leaping out at you in character at unexpected moments. Great fun in my opinion, although less so for poor Carole-Ann.

With this complete we quickly prioritised any of the other houses that we could visit with short wait times. Some of which were themed after other film/TV franchises whereas others had storylines of Universal’s own creation (the ‘Ghosts of Latin America’ house was insane and contained some images that will probably pop up in some of our nightmares to come). Ellie was very brave and only occasionally would need to grab onto my t-shirt or hand as we were making our way through, whereas I got quite accustomed to predicting where the scare actors would appear from and would wait until one was ready to pop out so I could receive maximum impact.

For a change of pace we stopped for dinner in the Harry Potter-themed area of the park. This section was both free of things that go bump in the night and also contained the Three Broomsticks, in our opinion one of the best theme park restaurants anywhere, mainly because its meals actually feature vegetables as supposed to the standard burger & fries you get in 99% of parks. After a quick spin of the nearby Hippogriff coaster, a cult favourite in the Clare/Hubbard household (only because I’d spent ages building it up as a headliner attraction when it is in fact a brief child-friendly rollercoaster, Ellie’s ‘is that it???!?’ after months of hype proving that playing the long game is definitely worth it) we agreed that although the park was due to stay open until the early hours, it was time to head home after a long but successful day.