 Recently, my family and myself took a lengthy trip to Universal Studios and to Walt Disney World. We went to a total of five theme parks, two on the Universal side with Universal Studios and Island of Adventures, and three on the Disney with Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and Epcot. We passed on Hollywood Studios this time because a couple of years ago we went and we're not very impressed, but I'm gonna break down what I thought of these parks all around since I'm a movie fan, it will be from the perspective of a fan of films and we'll see if you agree. So please join me for the next several minutes as I rant about the good, the bad, and the goofy. Full disclosure, prior to going this time around with my wife and two children, I had previously been to the Disney side of the theme parks three times. So this would have been my fourth time going over there. The previous entries were to all four of the theme parks every time, twice growing up with my family, which they were both wonderful experiences, then once as an adult with kids and a wife. Also a really good experience. It's been a few years, we decided to go back. On the universal end, I'd never been. I missed out on the Back to the Future ride. I missed out on whatever else was there prior to the restructuring and recreation. Back to the future was really the one that I was bombed out. Oh, Jaws as well. I always wanted to do that Jaws ride, but too little, too late. Because of a big deal that was going on at Universal, two of our days were free, so we were there for a total of four, two days at each park. Although we hopped around pretty easily thanks to the Hogwarts Express, or just walking from one theme park to the other, which isn't that far, they're right next to each other. On the Disney side, we had one day at Magic Kingdom, one day at Animal and one day at Epcot. Epcot, to get the pros out of the way first, is still fantastic. I'm a huge fan of Epcot. It is much better as an adult. Yes, there's a lot more walking involved. It's mainly for eating, checking out the culture in the different countries, and more eating. The rides for the most part are pretty much terrible, but they are kind of across the Disney playbook now, because they're all like a thousand years old and Disney barely updates or adds anything. Our last day was at Epcot, and I honestly wish we had more time, because we were there at Park Open, but we had to leave to hit the road to drive back home at about five in the afternoon. So as a little bummed out, we didn't get to stay for the fireworks or anything. Food at the festivities was great. The rides were embarrassingly bad. To put it nicely, even the frozen ride, which is one of the newer ones from a few years back, is pretty pathetic. I remember going on it a couple years back with my kids when they were like the perfect age, like eight years old, five years old, and we had a great time. They really liked the ride. And I remember even as an adult thinking, oh, this is cool, this is fun. Now though, it's just lame as shit. It's so bad compared to everything at Universal. Universal's definitely geared for an older audience. Now, if I take myself out of it though, and I'm talking to parents who are thinking about bringing their kids, Disney's magic is completely gone for this family. I'll say that. And I can't imagine many families going for the first time even, outside of seeing the castle and outside seeing some of the characters, which we didn't really see many walking around at all anymore, probably because post COVID, that's just how it is. There's just not a lot there. You're mainly sitting in huge crowded areas, waiting in long ass lines. And that's because the new system they have, the genie pass, is garbage. It is absolute horse crap. I think it used to be called the Lightning Lane or the Lightning Express Pass or I don't, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. That was, that's history now. How it used to work though is you could select a few different rides at different times to get on and you lock them in. You got like three, I believe, from the park and they were any rides you wanted. You just had to make sure that you had that hour window to get there. Now though, you can only do one ride at a time. The app is super wonky and it's hard to even back out. Like I found myself having to basically leave the app every time, shut it all down and say like, I'm starting my day over because what it's supposed to be doing is curating this magical experience for you. Oh, you're going to Magic Kingdom? You're going to start your day at nine o'clock or 10 o'clock going on Peter Pan, a ride that came out 45, 50 years ago. It's ironic that Disney's celebrating their 50 year anniversary right now of the theme park because all their shit is still from the 50s. It's now taken them seven or eight years since announcing to start rebuilding Splash Mountain. And they're not even like building this from scratch, they're re-skinning it. It's a new theme for Princess and the Frog. This is embarrassing when you look at what Universal's done, but we'll get there. We'll get there, I gotta stay focused on this magic genie crap pass thing, whatever it is. They curate this experience. The experience is like go on two rides that are lame as hell and then go eat somewhere that's overpriced, although to be fair, the pricing at both Universal and Disney wasn't like that bad compared to what pricing is everywhere since inflation, everything's gone up, food costs more. I was expecting things to be horrible, but it was like, oh, this is like equally as bad as what I pay at the grocery store now. Obviously it was more expensive, but not what I was expecting in the slightest. So that part wasn't the biggest like, ah, it was more just, okay, we're here because we are basically like handcuffed to be here at Disney for the day when I could have been back at Universal having a good time. Anyway, this genie pass system doesn't ever lock you into the good stuff. And if you wanna get on something good, you better be patient because you're going to be locking something in for like five o'clock in the afternoon. In the meantime, you have nothing else you can do with this thing. And sure, you can roll the dice and get rid of that ride, pull it and say, oh, I don't wanna go on Space Mountain at five o'clock. I'd like to go on it earlier. Maybe there's some times available. So you back off of it. And then you look if there's something earlier in the day, but there's not, okay, well, I better get back on that five. It's gone. The five o'clock time's gone. You lost Space Mountain, but don't worry, you can go on. It's a small world after all because that crappy ride's still there. It's still there. Nothing's changed. Disney, who owns Fox? Disney, who has Pixar? Disney, who has hundreds of properties under their belt, can't be bothered to build anything new. Where's Wreck-It Ralph? Where's Big Hero 6? Where's Luca? Where's Inside Out? Where's the Good Dinosaur? I mean, I don't care about the Good Dinosaur, but where is it? Where's Wally? Where's Up? Outside of like some merch? There's no representation at all. What about all your terrible live-action movies you've been making, Disney? I know your solace is crap and you're just rehashing all the classics and making them live-action, but why aren't you updating your theme park with that stuff? Is it because you know it sucks? Probably, probably. I digress. When the only ride for Aladdin is some genie carpet thing that goes, I can show you the world. Shining shivering sucks. This ride is terrible. Pirates of the Caribbean is 1,000 years old. They tried to update it a few years back by adding Johnny Depp, Jack Sparrow in there once in a while. They'll like pop out of a drum, like mm, mm. And then all the animatronics are like, where is Captain Jack Sparrow? I think that Jack Sparrow's gonna be a lot of trouble when we find him. Squawk, Jack Sparrow. It's just embarrassing. Clearly it wasn't set up for this and they just shoehorned it all in. And if you're gonna shoehorn Jack Sparrow in, why not all the other characters or at least some of them? I don't think there's anyone else from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies in the ride. It's just Johnny Depp. It's like sprinkled throughout. The best rides Banshee Kingdom has to offer are Splash Mountain and Space Mountain. Well, Splash Mountain's now closed. Space Mountain, wow, that's not near as good as I remember it to be. And now when I went on Space Mountain, I was legitimately scared I was going to die. And not because it was a fun, exciting, fast paced roller coaster, but because it felt so poorly constructed over the years. I'm a big dude and I'm sitting in this thing and it's like. I'm like, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. What the fuck? Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. It's pitch black. So you can't see if things are breaking, which they probably are. It's like pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. A bolt goes by. It's like slamming off of things. Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. That doesn't seem normal. Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. Ah! Oh. God. Never again. By the time two o'clock rolled around, it was game over for Magic Kingdom. The line for Jungle Cruise was an hour and a half. Line for Peter Pan over an hour. I don't think any children or even people under the age of 20 know who Peter Pan is at this point. Why are you even standing in the line for that ride? Spoiler, it sucks. I wouldn't do it. My family wouldn't do it. We're not gonna stand and wait in line for more than a half hour to go on a lame ass ride. Disney has to do better. They know they don't need to though. Their parks get massive attention, very popular, make billions of dollars. Why would they upgrade anything? Why would they build a new theme park? That costs way too much time and money and manpower and, you know, why bother? When you can just paint over some of the rides, have a little event from time to time and call it a day. Meanwhile, Universal Studios has built two theme parks in the time it's taken them to re-skin one ride. Next on the shit list is Animal Kingdom. I will say, Animal Kingdom, also not great. It's also not great. That dinosaur ride is way better than it needs to be. I'll say that much. Dinosaur ride was solid. We started the day there. We wanted to go to the Avatar stuff. I honestly have no idea what's going on with that Navi River Raft ride thing. Why did they make this? Why does it exist? You sit in a boat and you just do the like frozen thing where you just go in along this journey and there's like CG, Navi screens in the background with some of the characters. And some animatronic ones. And it's just supposed to make you feel like you're in the world of Pandora. Well, I just felt like I wanted to get off the ride because it's so boring. It's like, oh cool. Wowee. I'm sure glad I waited an hour and 25 minutes for this. Which we didn't. Which we didn't. We had the genie pass for that. I'm really glad we locked in the genie pass for this ride. The only thing genie pass got us into that day. We also went on a train at one point that takes you from Animal Kingdom to this little area off on its own. And there's really nothing there. Outside of a building you can go in that shows you some of the animation stuff. Very light though. Very limited to what you can even do. We did do an experience there though where a guy gets up and draws and he shows you how to make a character and you draw along with him. That was all right. That was fine as someone that's very good at freehand. I was like, let me show this guy how it's done. There you go. Naked Minnie Mouse. You're welcome. Subscribe. The train ride to get over there was filled with crying babies, spoiled little brats, my kids of course, and then other terrible children running around being obnoxious. The train ride itself to contrast it with Hogwarts, no magic at all. This thing's just like pulls up to the stop. And what you are greeted to, what your eyes get to feast on on your way on this two, three mile trek over is the lots, the parking area, the background feed troughs of some of the animals, the workers hustling and bustling to and fro. This is not fun. This isn't exciting to see. It's like, oh, chain link fences. Oh look, there's a sick rhino. Why is he even here? There were some pros to Animal Kingdom. Pandora still looks pretty badass outside of that weird raft ride. The other ride, still one of the greatest things ever. The Navi Flight escape thing, whatever it's called, which also has stuff from Avatar 2 in it before Avatar 2 came out. Cause James Cameron's been working on that movie for like 13 years. So he had already put in a lot of the water stuff into the game, which is pretty cool going on it again. It's like, oh, okay, hey, I remember that. I remember seeing that in the movie. Here's the deal though. When we go out and do this stuff, we're very positive, optimistic people. So even if we're having a miserable time internally, externally, we're celebrating. We're laughing, we're having fun, we're eating, we're spending a bunch of stupid money because we are on vacation. We're trying to have a good time, damn it. But these are the criticisms I bring back with me. These are the observations I throw your way. The parks are overpopulated. There's not enough workers. The bathrooms are always full. There's people everywhere smelling and being annoying. Children at every turn making your day miserable because they're miserable. You shouldn't bring a two-year-old to Disney World. I understand that the age group that it's going after is like toddler to 10. That's like their sweet spot, but these parks aren't built for toddler to 10. You have to walk so far to get to anything. It's down in the hot heat. It's noisy. It's overstimulating for babies. You have to bring these giant double-decker strollers and there's not enough room to maneuver. So you're smashing into people. Hey, I'm walking here. It's just not set up for this. It's not a daycare. Also, if you stay at a Disney resort, one of the perks is that you get early access to the park. Well, yeah, sure, okay. You get early access to the park, but not the rides. You can go into the shops early and buy stuff early, but most of the sections are roped off. Really, you only have access to Central Plaza, which is mainly shopping stores. So enjoy getting in your one-on-one with the merchants. You earned it. I started out praising Epcot, I stand by that. They do have some of the art stuff there, some of the animation studio things. Some of the rides though, were just kind of like, what are you doing? For instance, we went to the Pixar Theater, where you got to watch three animated shorts. You would think that these would maybe be exclusive for the park. No, no, no, no, no. These are things you can watch on Disney Plus. Yes, they're in 3D, which is awesome. It brings you into it more. But again, I've seen Piper like five times. I've seen the Cell Shaded Dog video like five times. I've seen the animated black and white Mickey to color 3D thing like 20 times. I've seen all this stuff. It's just bewildering that this is what you have a giant theater 3D experience for. Three shorts that are on Disney Plus right now. The worst ride I've ever been on in my entire life, though, full stop or experience, whatever you want to call it, was over in France. And that was The Beauty and the Beast retelling or something. Sing along. The Beauty and the Beast, sing along. You go into this theater, and it's like this twist on the classic movie. Keep in mind, Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite animated movies of all time. You sit down in this theater, and they say, this is a twist on the classic tale that you know and love. This story is taken from the perspective of LeFou and how he's really the hero of the film. And then we're greeted to several horribly animated scenes of LeFou with stock backgrounds that look really bland and lifeless, where they clearly had like the fourth string animator rush to make something and then animate it with Adobe Flash, which Flash isn't around anymore, but this thing was like 40 years old. So it makes sense. Whenever Beauty and the Beast came out, this came out. So not 40 years, but you know, 90s. This has been here since the 90s, and it looks worse quality than the movie Beauty and the Beast, which looks beautiful. This hasn't been remastered. This hasn't been touched since launch, okay? So you're watching a low-res shitty version sing along. We get treated to LeFou going to some of the different locations, like Be Our Guest, the different songs come up. They do like habsy versions of the songs, and then you're supposed to sing along with it. No, I'm not singing shit. I'm not singing anything. And this theater was not very full. So you would have heard me. Be Our Guest, Be Our Guest, put our serves to the test, tie a napkin round. So again, easily the worst ride. There was a brand new one there. Besides Guardians of the Galaxy, there was Ratatouille. Didn't go on that one either. Heard it wasn't very good, but it was an hour wait. I don't know, I'll just watch Remy in the movies. Thank you very much. We did eat lunch in France in Epcot at an amazing restaurant. That was easily the highlight of the entire Disney experience. I forgot the name, but whatever restaurant is in France, that's the one to go to. You can take that to the bank. Speaking of banks, let's head on over to Gringots, which is in Universal Studios. See that transition, see that segue? Yeah, so Disney, by the way, magic's gone. They need to update everything. They need to make it more adult. And I don't mean strippers and people doing cocaine in the back alleys with fucking Cogsworth. I mean, 18-year-old kids could enjoy, a grown man could enjoy, a grown woman, for that matter. Because right now this park is geared to six-year-olds. That's the sweet spot. And people that just can't let go of their childhood, I guess, which is kind of me. I mean, I'm wearing a freaking pizza planet shirt. I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a big fan of Harry Potter. Kind of a fan of Harry Potter. I like Lego too, so it just made sense for me to get most of the Harry Potter Lego collection. I've been wanting to go to the wizarding world of Harry Potter for a very long time now. I finally got that opportunity with the family. I was not disappointed. It was awesome. I'm sure if you've gotten several times, the, you know, it's not quite as exciting going to Honeydukes or getting a butter beer or frozen butter beer or going on the escape from Gringotts ride or, to me, it was amazing. I went on most the rides like five times each. The one that goes through the castle I thought was amazing. I really did. I thought all of them were good except for the stupid buck beak thing. I did not get to go on the greatest ride I'm told in the world, which is the Hagrid motorcycle escape or whatever it's called. The lines were just, they were like three hours long. The shortest that line ever got was an hour and a half. And I can only play Pokemon Go so long in a day. That's the bottom line. I'm an adult. Also, Universal just in general was kick ass. Even before going into Universal Studios there is stuff built up everywhere around there. Huge destination spots for people, for tourists, for all walks of life to go in and out of. You have a huge theater complex. You have beautiful vistas to look at, a nice canal with a riverboat that's taking people from hotels, lots of restaurants, lots of good clothing places to shop at. I mean, you can spend days just going there for free because it's outside of the park and just having a day, having a ball, having a ball of it. But going into Universal, man, this thing is so cool and they're not paying me. I wish they were. I wish they paid me to go to the theme park as well because I got a good bill from both Disney and Universal. We can just get those subscriber numbers up maybe someday. That's the dream. That's the dream is to sell out, right? Universal for the most part, great experience. Definitely, we went at the best time, they say, which is in January. Everybody's poor from Christmas. It's colder in Florida. People aren't heading there. They're not quite depressed from the weather in the Northern states. Still pretty busy, but nothing like that was crippling depression at all. We were able to get on all the rides. They don't have a genie system in Universal. They have your standard FastPass. This thing costs a lot. We, I don't know if I wanna say foolishly, but we did drop a dumb amount of money on it day one, even though we had four days between these two parks. You know, in hindsight, probably didn't need to do it. We could have gone on all the rides. I think it total out to almost $600 for four of us for one day of FastPasses. Granted, you have pretty much carte blanche to get on everything within 15 minutes. I think I waited no longer than 10 minutes with the FastPass and the average time was like six. So we went on in one day 21 rides with the FastPass. Definitely got our money's worth from it. Could have gone on more even, but we were all kinda like walked out. A lot of walking we're putting in 20,000 steps a day over seven days. That's a good amount of calories burnt. A big negative I noticed about Universal is their rides broke down a lot. Over the time we were there, the King Kong ride broke down like four times. Ride's not even that great. I find it funny that it's the Peter Jackson film, themed ride, I like that movie a lot, but the outside very much makes it seem like it's Kong Skull Island. I think it's even called Kong Skull Island. So new people are gonna be like, oh cool, it's from the movies that came out in the last 10 years. Not the Peter Jackson film. Some really clever branding there. Some misdirection for sure. Ride is cool, but nothing amazing. I mean, especially when we have all the Harry Potter stuff, the Velocicoster, which is freaking awesome. The Hulk ride, freaking awesome. No, it's not MCU themed. That's owned by Disney, but Universal owns a lot of the superhero stuff when it comes to the merch and the theme parks. So you do have like a whole comic book section full of X-Men, full of Spider-Man. You have the Spider-Man themed ride. The Dr. Doom tower drop is probably the lamest thing ever, but tower drops again. Outside of the Twilight Zone one, that's at Hollywood Studios. I just haven't found a tower drop that I'm like, yeah, I gotta get on that. Two side step for a second. I brought up Hollywood Studios and how we didn't go there because a couple years ago we did. That theme park is so small and so overcrowded, legitimately was miserable. We left that thing pretty early in the day because you just couldn't do anything. You were like sardines being moved around. And yes, they have Star Wars stuff there. That's a mistake. You have too many big properties there. You have the Star Wars, you have Toy Story. It's too small of an area to introduce such big things. Star Wars should have its own damn theme park for Christ's sakes. MCU should have its own theme park. Disney won't do this stuff, but whatever. Back on Universal, they're doing it right at least. You have a whole drastic park area which admittedly does need more rides. There's legitimately just the Raptor ride and that's it. And some stupid go meet the dinosaur thing, which we didn't do. I imagine it's like some people dressed up as dinosaurs walking. I don't even know what it is. Maybe it's animatronic dinosaurs. Wouldn't wait for it. And there was like a 10 minute wait. Just couldn't do it. I think it's the only thing we didn't do. We even went on the stupid Dr. Seuss ride, which talk about dated. I'm a fan of Dr. Seuss for sure. But yeah, I don't need to have like a whole theme park revolved around him. And there is a big chunk of Universal that's Dr. Seuss theme stuff. Left foot, right foot, the Lorax, things of that nature. And there's a roller coaster that goes really slow around at all. I just, that felt really out of place at Universal Studios. Universal just had way more going on from the little shows that would be put on on the street sides to all the movie stuff that I loved. You could see Adrian's Pet Shop from Rocky. You could look over and see a giant Transformers building with Optimus Prime up top. That ride is freaking awesome. Most of their rides are just so far above in advance than Disney is going. A lot of them are in 3D or have, you know, TV screens everywhere that really immerse you into it. There's mist and water and like, you know, people come out like Vin Diesel punches you in the face at one point. It just feels really, really intense. You have a Simpson section. You've got a Men in Black area, Men in Black's lane, but it's cool that there's a Men in Black area. The freaking E.T. rides still there. That poor little bugger that little shit heads put in the corner where you can barely see him. The ride is so charming. Again, I've never been on it before. I thought it was freaking great. Like super old school. You're on these bikes going across over the cityscape. You have E.T. there, Elliot, phone home, all animatronically done. We went on that thing like three times. There was really no line ever. And again, it's like tucked away in the corner. Simpsons were a big fan of Simpsons. So seeing that whole world was really cool. The ride was nice. It was very funny. So many characters jammed in there. And no, unlike Disney, we didn't just watch an episode of The Simpsons. It was a tailor made experience for the park. Same with all the stuff going in, which is the bigger pro I will give it. With Disney, you might, if you're lucky, get a long line where there's some rocks to look at and some trees and some fun things that they painted on the walls. But with Universal, every single line has a huge amount of stuff to look at. Moving paintings if you're in a Hogwarts. Giant monitors showcasing the different types of hulks that are coming out of this laboratory. Or if you're at Fast and the Furious, you have cast members acting out scenes for the ride itself. Now, again, that ride was terrible and embarrassingly bad, but it was really cool that they had all the actors jumping in here and there, saying different lines of dialogue. And that's across all the rides. You go on The Mummy, you see Brendan Fraser. You go on the Jimmy Fallon ride. Jimmy Fallon's taking you through the entire set out into space for some reason. I don't know why that ride was so good. It was way better than it had any right to be as well. And I kept saying that. I kept getting surprised and impressed by all the stuff that was there. The food, there was some great restaurants. We ate at like an Olympus themed one and that was an amazing experience. Loved the meal, loved it all. This is already a long ass rant in video. I could probably pump the brakes now. I talked a lot. I gave you some information, I think. If you've been to these places, I would love to know your thoughts. Where are you at with Disney? You still find it magical. Do you have like a pass where you go all the time and collect the bottle caps or whatever they have that you can get? That's kind of fun. That's kind of cool. I'm into that. I go to theme parks to escape the humdrum life, to get lost in these worlds, to appreciate cinema being represented in the physical in front of me. Things that I can interact with. I thought Universal was massively better than Disney and I would highly recommend going to Universal if you haven't been or if you're on the fence of which one to decide on going to. I mean, any kid over the age of like eight is gonna have a much better time, I think, at Universal Studios just because of all the movie properties presented and the fact that these rides are so much better, so much more up to date. Honestly, I can't even think of a single thing that Disney did better at this point, which is sad as a big fan who's always defended Disney World in the past, who likes going, I have no interest in going back. Outside of Epcot, I have no interest. Disney needs to get off their ass and build some new stuff. New theme parks, redo the rides, not just one or two every couple of years, get on it and do them all over. It's way too much time and fix your genie system. That thing is embarrassing. It's atrociously bad to work with and it made the whole experience sour. Universal's got a new theme park already being developed and planned on releasing in, I think, 2025, I read. It's gonna have the Nintendo Land stuff that you've seen in Japan. It's gonna have a how to train your dragon section. It's gonna have a monster-versed section that's gonna have like the mummy and Dracula and Frankenstein. These are all kind of just hearsay internet things going on. I looked into it because I was curious. Like, what are they doing next? Epic Universe is what it's gonna be called. And I have to say, oh, and there's gonna be a new Harry Potter section. They're gonna have the Ministry of Magic. The only bummer with this one is the other two parks are right by each other. So you get that experience going on Hogwarts and the fact that you can just kind of like park jump easily. This one I read is like 15 minutes down the road. So you don't have the three park experience right away. Still though, I mean, I'm freaking excited for that. I already said to the family, 2025, we're back three days at Universal, one day at Epcot. That's a good trip. That's a realistic trip for us. All right, that was a long video. Hope you enjoyed it. Let me know your thoughts on Universal and Disney. Have you been there? Do you like Hogwarts as much as I do? Are you as disappointed with Disney as I have been? Let me know. Like the video if you had some fun. Subscribe to the channel as I post tons of movie-related content each and every week. Love to hear from you. Take care.