By Ken Pozek
Earlier this week on a rainy summer afternoon, we had the opportunity to be hosted by Universal Orlando for their media preview of their latest Summer release, The Mega Movie Parade. What Michael Aiello, Senior Director of Entertainment and Creative at UO, called the “front door" into what guests can experience during the day at Universal Studios Orlando. CineSational: A Symphonic Spectacular being the “back door” I’d guess, as the night time show caps off your day.
Before the parade we had the chance to hear from Aiello and Michelle Alagna. They had some cool insights into how the show was created. We’ve all seen parades before, but how often to you stop to think about how many people and decisions it took to create the show?
There's an emotional human element that goes into making sure everyone watching (young and old) will enjoy the parade. This was carefully considered as evidence from Universal using older and newer IP, the musical choices they made, and the choice of tech they decided to introduce (I’ll get to that in a minute).
There’s nearly 100 performers and hundreds of design choices to consider as well. Like how tall should Stay Puft Marshmallow Man be (he’s 16-feet), or how loud the roars of the T-Rex is too loud (it should be louder in my opinion)?
You’ll notice on the Back to the Future float that all three movies are represented in the details. From the Twin Pines Mall marquee on the side from the first movie, the 2nd movie version of the DeLorean (you know it’s the 2nd because of the Mr. Fusion on top), and the Clock Tower Clock with details from the third movie on the front of the float. Blink and you might miss them, but each float had the same attention to detail!
Last thing we did before heading out to the 20-minute long parade was to hear from the merchandise team. They had some new tech to discuss, and it wasn’t what I expected!
Sequence of Floats in the Parade:
Universal Mega Movie Parade Opening Float
Back to the Future
Illuminations (Sing and Despicable Me)
Dreamworks (Kung Foo Panda and Trolls)
Ghostbusters
ET
Jaws
Jurassic Park
That makes 10 floats, or 11 if you count the gyroscope float being chased by the T-Rex float.
The original media release mentioned 13 floats. Which has me wondering if there’s others that’ll be added (being that they’re still in technical rehearsal), or if some got cut due to length. We’ll update if we hear more!
The parade will run on select nights now through November 14th. Make sure to check the Universal app if you want to catch the parade on any given night. We’ll be interested to see how it interacts with HHN which opens on August 30th (just 51 days people!)
Looking to move close to the theme parks? We just dropped a video about the best place to live near the theme parks - watch it below!
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