Japan Trip 2018 - Day 5 - Universal Studios
3A lovely sunny day in Osaka as Day 5 of our trip rolled around. Our third theme park in 4 days, we headed to Universal Studios.
We headed to Universal Wonderland first, a child oriented section recommended to families with kids. The Flying Snoopy ride is like a merry-go-round where you sit inside Snoopy as he flies around clouds and the Peanuts characters in the middle.
I witnessed Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy dancing around and entertaining the crowd so I decided to do a bit of filming. They released some confetti canons at the end to the delight of the crowd too.
As a Terminator fan I went for a quick walk to check out the Terminator 2: 3D attraction at the Cyberdyne Systems building which we would come back to later on in the day.
Back in Wonderland, Elmo and Cookie Monster were out and about greeting people. We also had a quick look around Elmo's Imagination Playland which is perfect for the little ones.
After that we tried Elmo's Little Drive where the smaller children can drive a cute car around a circuit similar to a go-kart. Hello Kitty was also out taking photos with the crowd.
A major drawcard to the Universal Studios theme park was The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - a huge section containing Hogsmeade Village which contained rides, stages, shops and Hogwarts Castle. We headed on the Castle walk after realising that the wait for the main attraction the Hidden Journey was over 3 hours! After leaving the castle we caught the tail end of the TriWizard Spirit Rally.
It was getting later in the afternoon and Jurassic Park was next on the list but again the ride wait times were ridiculous so we decided to keep walking straight though to check out what I'm pretty sure would be one of the oldest attractions at the theme park - Backdraft which is a demonstration of fire and special effects.
Thankfully we decided to try heading back to the Terminator 2: 3D theatre show where we discovered the time was a reasonable 50 mintues! A short wait in comparison to some of the other attractions at that point during the day. I was having a great time in anticipation of seeing what was in store.
A lady addressed the crowd in a quite eccentric manner and after that we all shuffled into a large theatre but I didn't bother filming this as we all had 3D glasses on by that point and I thought that it would be pointless to try and capture it. All in all, a really good exhibit which I'm sure has been around for almost 20 years but really clean and still very thrilling for the crowds I'm sure.
I managed to do a bit of quick filming in the gift shop after we exited which was home to a large T-800 Terminator statue. Unfortunately I wasn't aware that I wasn't allowed to film and I was informed by one of the staff to stop before I spotted the statue.
After that we decided to walk around a little bit longer and the get some dinner. By that time the sun had gone down and we decided to refuel with some tasty ramen noodles.
I spotted a Japanese pop culture anime and manga shop called Jump Shop which seemed quite interesting. We decided to call it a night.