 I just got back from Universal Studios' 2024 edition with my family, two kids and a wife. I've got zero sleep under my belt. The experience was less than magical but certainly above tragic. I'm gonna talk about it in what I assume will be a very lengthy V-Log-ish style rant. Please join me if you want and strap in because it's going to be a wonderful Rocky bumpy ride. Let's begin. Let me get my fictitious colors and brush out and paint you a picture. It's a picture of a happy family in 2022, in January, going to Universal Studios. On a magical adventure, the likes they would never forget. They're big Harry Potter fans. They're also huge movie fans. Oh, there's a Hulk ride, cool beans, they said because they speak like they're in the 90s still. Oh, there's a mummy attraction. That sounds fantastic and it was. The punchline here is that was my family. We went to Universal in 2022. It was absolutely a time to remember. Do we drop a lot of money? Of course. Do I regret it? Not at all because the memories were so magical, so monumentally special to me and them that there's just no price tag you can put on that. As big Harry Potter fans going to Hogwarts for the first time, having that first butterbeer, going to the three broomsticks, it's a treasure. It's a treasure I put in my keepsake and I bust it out from time to time as a memory that I can say, yep, that happened. That actually happened. My daughter went to all Lavander. She got a wand. She got the light cast on her. The wind blows and she got to keep that wand. From all Lavander, she got to keep that wand. A nice specialized case. While the other four shitty kids looked on and jealousy and I sat there like, yep, my daughter was picked. My son wasn't but that's okay. One of them was. The special one was the gifted one. Now jokes aside, we had a great time at Universal and so we thought, let's do it again. Let's do it again in 2024 and so we did. You know what? I said 2022. I misspoke. It was 2023 because it was, you know, it's on the, it's on the beginning of 2023. It's the cusp and so I misspoke and I apologize. So 2024, January we go, try to relive this experience. It's impossible folks. It's just never going to be the same the second time and so with that in mind, let me talk about the pros and cons of this experience. Four day park event because this was a deal where Universal, they keep this deal, I think, going all year round. You buy two days at the parks. You get Universal Studios and you get Adventure Island or Islands of Adventure. Who gives a shit? The Island of Dr. Monroe and you get four days there and you can hop between parks. Jumping back and forth if you want. You can take the Hogwarts Express back and forth. You can just walk your ass over there. It's great. And the parks are right next to each other so it works out. I went through a travel agent like we usually do and this time she decided, let's put these schmucks up in the Cabana Bay Resort. Big mistake. The Cabana Bay Resort on face value looks pretty solid. Looks like a nice little trip down memory lane. Got a cool vintage vibe to it. Black and white film in the cafeteria, bunch of food offerings. Got pizza, baking cheeseburgers. It's the whole, it's the whole kitten caboodle, the whole nine yards. Plus you got buses that go to and fro every 15 minutes to the parks. And it's only a hop, skipping a jump away. It's a couple miles. It's a cup of coffee, really. The rooms upon inspection seem decent enough. You got a divider, you got two beds, you got a bathroom, shower, a nice little kitchen area. I just, it seemed on face to be a decent place. If I could throw a rhyme out there. It was not. After spending the night, it became very, very real that these beds were made out of metal. There was no cushion for the cushion. They were hard as rocks. I don't think I slept consistently more than an hour at a time before waking up to someone rustling sheets or a groan or a full-on fever dream because these were so miserable. Adding to that, we noticed on the third night there of four nights that there was a massive hole under the door where there's that little rubber flap. Half of it was gone and there was a, you could fit a hand under that thing, let alone a giant cockroach or rats. Thankfully we didn't see any of them, but they were probably there. They were probably on looking from some crevice hole in the wall or a corner of the room. I didn't bother looking. I was already checked out at that point with no sleep and a little to my account, little to my wallet. The rooms were dirty too. They just were not well-capped. The beds weren't tightly made like you expect. It wasn't a crisp crispness to anything. They just had a gross dusty feel. Didn't smell great either. And let's talk about the people staying at this. The inhabitants were even worse. A lot of people with missing teeth. A lot of smokers on campus because apparently you can smoke right outside the room, which is pretty disgusting. Kind of takes away from some of the wonder, some of the hospitality when you have to walk by a bunch of smokers. I went out, we went to bed pretty early most nights because when you have the, when you're in the resort and you can do the park hopping experience, you also get early access, which gives you an hour before gates open to the public on the islands of adventure side. So you go to the gate, you stand there with the herd of sheep and doors open, I think at eight, which means you have to get up pretty early because you got to get your coffee, you got to get dressed, maybe take a shower, get on the bus, get over there. And it takes a good 15 minutes to get from the bus up the stairs through security, pass the pavilion across the way of all these shops to universal island of adventure. It's not, it's not an easy task. It's a lot of walking. It's a lot of footwork. If you have little ones, it's going to be a project, which is a whole other rant altogether that I'll probably do in a different video. In fact, I'm going to make a note right now. Why do people bring little babies to the parks? It's asinine and it ruins everyone else's experience. So if you want to hear me bitch for about 10 minutes about that, subscribe to Adam does movies because it's coming. Oh boy, is it coming? Let's continue. Cabana Bay trash. The food was terrible. You're spending easily $19 a person, 20 bucks, we'll round up to 20 bucks a person. It's a, it's a $60 meal. If it's you and two kids, if you got a wife in the mix, you're spending 80 bucks, you can easily hit $100. You know, you multiply that by a couple meals a day. Next thing you know, oh $300 in one day, three, six, nine, 12,000, over $1,000 in four days. And that's only if you're talking about the meals at the resort, which you're not. Of course, you want to eat at Hogwarts. You want to eat at the three broomsticks. You want to eat at maybe that awesome Olympic place that I forgot the name of, that I probably should have looked up because it's one of the greatest places ever to eat. I love that place. I have film there. As I'm talking, I have a lot of video. There's going to be, you know, I should point out that I kind of vlog this whole experience. So on occasion, I might intercut with me talking from the park or from the hotel, really leading you on a journey of whimsy and wonder. Currently waiting for my food at my favorite restaurant at the park, Mount Olympus. Good fish, good burgers, just a good variety of flavors. My daughter's favorite is the tomato soup. She's excited for tomato soup. It's embarrassing. It's depressing, really. How excited are you for the tomato soup? I'm so excited. I've been waiting my whole life for this. It's so sad. This is exactly what I thought of, the first thing I thought of when my parents said that we were wrong universal. Somewhere I screwed up with her. I'm just not sure where. Best meal ever. It was called the pork, room and knife grilled cheese and tomato soup. Lift up to the height. I ate it in two minutes. No cab. Making cheeseburger good? Yep. This is called fries. It's called fries. There's no such thing as a bacon cheeseburger. Went down in Christmas. Islands of Adventure is small, but it packs a lot in. The best rides are on that side, for the most part. You have the Hogwarts journey through the school. I don't remember the names of any of these, I apologize, but basically you go through the castle. You're strapped in, your feet are dangling, you got 3D glasses on, Harry's flying around the broom, you're on the quidditch pitch, you go through the whomping willow. It's a combination of practical effects and 3D effects virtually that are astounding. Little dated, sure, but I get to see the actors slash characters from those films and that alone is worth the price of admission. Short for admission, of course. I think that rides fantastic. Buck Beaks, Roller Coaster, Frenzy, Shenanigans, that whole thing can be tore out, burned to the ground. What a waste of a useless roller coaster. It's a baby roller coaster. It's a starter pack roller coaster that has no reason to exist. It's lame, especially when it's right next to Hagrid's motorcycle thingy-ma-bobber. I love Hagrid's motorcycle thingy-ma-bobber, which is of course the technical name for it. I don't love the fact that there can be a two to three hour wait. Now, I will say this January, the parks were a little bit calmer, at least everywhere but Hagrid's world. Like Universal and Islands of Adventure, for the most part, were pretty easily navigatable in January. There wasn't a ton of people until the early afternoon and beyond, but we had a good four hours where most of the rides could be accessed within a 30 minute window outside of Hagrid. But even a Hagrid was down to 45 minutes, and at 45 minutes I do think the ride is worth the wait. Anything over an hour though, I just, I have a hard time waiting in lines for anything that long, and I've done it. I've sat two hours for that stupid-ass slinky dog ride at Hollywood Studios at Disney. I waited almost two hours for that Guardians of the Galaxy ride at Epcot this year. Do I think it was worth that? No! The ride was solid, it was smooth, it was fun, but it's not two hours fun. It's not two hours fun, but let's back up. Let's, let's beep, beep, beep, let's bring the truck back to Hogwarts. I would say on average, 30% increase in population in Hogwarts areas of the parks. Parks are decently accessible until you get down Diagon Alley, until you take a step past that brick wall, then bam, that percentage increases significantly. Bodies are everywhere, these are narrow streets, the shops are even smaller. So navigating around this is, is chaos. It's bedlam, and I hated it. Last year was not like this at the same exact time. It also was warmer last year, which helped. This year we had rain. This year we had a lot of cloudy days. It was colder, we had jeans on at points, we had jackets on. I'm fine with that. I grew up in Minnesota. All right, it's 30 degrees out, I'm in a t-shirt, I'm in a tank top. It's 40 degrees, I'm popping the tea I got shorts on. It's, it's, it's a no-brainer for me, but it didn't really deter people. People stayed, they stuck around through this because they paid a lot of freaking money. They flew from all over the world to go here, and I felt bad for them. I already had the perfect experience last year, which is pretty uncommon, I think, in, in now, in today's day and age, to go to one of these theme parks and have a great special experience, because there's so much working against it. Rides break down constantly. Last year didn't happen, it didn't happen like that Kong did, because Kong's the stupidest ride ever outside of the Fast and the Furious. Just such a stupid movie, such a stupid ride and movie franchise, so it works out well. Day three at Universal. It's cold as crap in Florida today. Yeah. Good contribution, Connor. We're having a good time still. Spirits are high. We did pretty much everything yesterday we wanted to do, so now it's just kind of all a cart, you know, whatever. Right, Connor? Yeah, we're going to the Fast and Furious ride. Yeah, we are so desperate to get warm. We're going to go to the crappiest ride in Universal, hands down, which is Fast and the Furious Supercharged. We're super excited about it. Can't wait. We're in Fast and the Furious. How excited, Connor, are you for this event? 10 out of 10. A lot of family in this ride. A lot of family. Yeah. Wow. Wife and daughter are waiting in line for 35 minutes for Transformers. We're doing 10 minutes for Fast and the Furious. It's always 10 minutes for this thing, because nobody wants to be here. Just leaving Fast and the Furious Supercharged. It's as exactly as terrible as I thought it was. I got wet. That's not euphemism. By the way, I am going to have a top five worst rides at Universal Studios and Island of Adventure, so please stick around for that as well. I'll have the best rides as well. There's going to be a lot of stuff on the parks this year. I shouldn't say this year. This month, January, such a shit dumping ground for bad movies that it was kind of the perfect time for me to go, because I have a lot of material to talk about when it comes to Universal Studios. I did go to Epcot for a day, and I did go to Magic Kingdom for half a day. It was the last leg of our trip, so we went just for a half day. I actually have better things to say about that. Last year we went. I fucking hated Disney. My family was over it all, except for Epcot. Epcot rules. It's a great park, even though some of the rides are really, really stupid and pointless. I still really like it. Magic Kingdom's a shit show, but it does have pros, and we found them out when we went this time. I will have a different video on that as well. Let's focus back on Universal. The things that really worked for me were the rides when they worked. The Hulk ride we went on like three or four times, because the lines just were not there. We went on the Velosa coaster, which was the Jurassic Park ride a bunch of times. That ride's awesome. I even went on the dumb Doctor Doom tower drop, which is basically a trip and a fall down a flight of stairs. It's not high up at all. It's a lame ass tower drop. The mummy ride is amazing. Last year, I don't... It's funny how you forget things so quickly. I didn't remember the mummy ride being that good, but we went on it like three times in a row, back to back to back. Let's do it again. There's hardly a line. It was a really cool experience. You go backwards on it. You're going through pitch black with just some torches lighting the way. It's fast moving. It's got Brendan Fraser cameoing, giving a little comedy. It's got it all. There's a new ride. The Minions... I don't know what it's called. It's a shooting thing. It's so fucking bad. It's an embarrassment. I can't believe they wasted so much space on this thing. Basically, you're on a conveyor belt. You have a toy gun and it's a point and shoot adventure thing where you're just... It's a video game. You're just shooting stuff on the screen. I was aiming to the left and my cursor was to the right. It took me two full minutes to figure out where my cursor even was. There's barely any feedback to the gun. It just doesn't work. It's trash. I couldn't understand even who was winning at the end. The numbers didn't... It's somehow worse than the Men in Black ride, which I also think is a complete dumpster fire. And I love the Men in Black movies, but that ride is bad. There's no feedback at all on it. None. That said, the rides as a whole were fantastic when they worked. But this year, so many rides were down. There was a full day where the rocket and rip it or grip it and listen to it. The rock and roller coaster type ride didn't work. And there was four songs to choose from. This is a ride that exists, priding itself on the fact that when you get in, you have speakers blasting through your ears and you can pick from a selection of cool songs. There were four fucking songs. Four. One of them was an Abba track. One was Black Parade. By the time Black Parade even kicks in, the rides over. What's the point? Some deep cut Kendrick Lamar song? Humble or something? I just, last time we went, there was a huge selection and they were great. So, even though I really love that ride, the soundtrack was terrible and it definitely did take away. What's the best ride at the park? Hagrid's motorcycle ride. Okay. Connor, best ride at the park? Which one? The same could be said for the Hulk. What makes the Hulk so fun is you have speakers in the ears and they're playing this epic song. While you're shooting up, it's just so cool. It's so engrossing. I'd say 75% of the time the music didn't play. The first time we went on it, thankfully it did. So, I got that awesome first experience but after that, it almost never worked. It's just, you want to be ensconced in it. You want to lose yourself, Eminem style in the experience, in the ride. But when they're constantly breaking down, sometimes with you on them, which happened to me twice and my wife an additional time on one of the Hogwarts rides, the Escape from Gringots, she got stuck on it for a few minutes. When we went on Escape from Gringots, the ride was stalled twice before we even got on it. We waited for several minutes before we could even board. It got insanely stupid. Our third and fourth day at the park, there was a point where none of the roller coasters were working. Velociraptor was down, that rip it, rocket thing was down, Hulk was up and down all day. It was terrible. And so again, thankfully we had four days at the park, which is far too many but also kind of necessary because you just don't know what crap's gonna go on. But imagine the people that spent thousands of dollars to fly in to go to a park for just a day or two and the rain don or the rides aren't working. What a disaster. That Kong ride never fucking worked. We were there four days. It was never running. The few times it was, the line was 40 minutes and then you try to get over there and boom, it's down again. It's just embarrassing. And I understand the population's the problem. So many people are going on these rides now and there's so many issues that can happen. A person doesn't get on the ride on time because the conveyor belt's moving too quick or they're not buckled in well but the ride was already started so they have to reset the whole thing and that can take 30 minutes because it has to go through all the safety protocols over and over again. It's a disaster but when the rides worked they worked and the lines thankfully were not bad. By the fourth day I was just chilling because I had all the stuff off my bucket list. I went on every single ride mostly multiple times and so I thought all right well now you know I've been with my family. We've had a lot of fun. Now I'm just gonna film stuff. I'm gonna get a whole bunch of footage for the channel so when I talk about the roller coasters or when I talk about the restaurants I have video footage to back it up. And so it's not just you looking at me for you know 20 minutes at a time. Restaurant-wise the food was uh it ranged from decent to pretty damn good. Red velvet, shire cupcake. What did you give? No brown, rocky road. The pricing was absurd of course but last year I did not feel it like I felt it this year. Last year they seemed more reasonable. Going this time it seemed like everything jumped 20% or more. I was dropping $200 on some meals. I was dropping $300 on some meals depending on the experience. Freaking ridiculous. And at that point I just I didn't even care anymore. I'm like well you know I'm gonna be biting that I'm gonna be taking this in the ass later so we'll just go for broke. It's all about the experience at this point. Nothing else matters. That's the responsible adult way to look at life. We'll get it in post. We'll fix it in post. The staff was great. The parks were clean for the most part. The bathrooms they know they tried their best to keep up with the sheer amount of foot traffic going through. The people were nice and friendly. I will say from a again back to the stupid hotel which maybe I'll make a different video on because we were just so disappointed with it. The staff was nice. They were all doing their best but a big thing Disney does better which is weird to say because last year I had nothing nice to say about Disney. The big thing Disney does better and they do a great job is catering to your specific needs or ailments. For instance my wife can't have dairy. I have celiacs disease in my family. I'm undiagnosed. I'm unofficially diagnosed. I've diagnosed myself with celiacs because I notice when I cut gluten my life got a whole lot better. My stomach isn't constantly in pain anymore. It's actually very manageable so I just avoid gluten. Anywhere in Disney you go it's fantastic. They ask you up front and then they're like okay the chef can do this, the chef can do that, they'll prepare it this way and yeah you're paying an arm and a leg but at least you're getting the food that you know is going to be to your standards or to your liking or to your health programming. Universal almost seems annoyed at least at the Cabana Bay where we went when we had the chef come out he was like oh what's the problem like oh I gotta do this now like sorry to put you out but we are paying a premium price for very mediocre service and that's a problem that needs to be addressed. So overall I paid a lot of money. My family for the most part had a good time um regardless of the rain, regardless of the shenanigans with rides not working and regardless of the price hikes which were very noticeable on the food and just the overall a butter beer in 2024 is nine dollars. Nine fucking dollars for one drink. You add two more kids to that. That's 27 dollars for three butter beers and change so basically 30 bucks. I had like four butter beers in one day. I'm dropping almost 40 bucks just on myself. You compound that over four days. I dropped 200 dollars on some drinks. I don't drink alcohol so maybe that's nothing for those that go to the bar on a Friday night they're like oh 200 bucks in four days that's actually pretty good. I dropped that in a couple hours but for me that was a lot and uh I could have avoided it of course but I wanted I wanted butter beer damn it. I'm on vacation. I want to live a little bit. Entertainment was kind of sparse. There's just not a lot there as far as shows going on. You have the stomp thing with the construction workers. Nothing's changed in the last year that I was there. The same kind of song and dance literally. Beetlejuice made an appearance. You had the reg tag mystery van crew. The mystery crew. Yeah it just there was nothing new shiny or exciting really. I did do one thing this year with the family that we missed last year and it was actually just avoided because I thought it would be lame and that was the born identity little show they put on inside the building. There's this born identity thing which is a weird property I guess to go for considering there has been a new movie in a while and I wouldn't say it's top tier action. I would think Mission Impossible might be a better fit but regardless we went to the Jason Bourne show and that was awesome. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend when you go to Universal to check out that Jason Bourne thing. Very well done. Universal in general does such a great job getting you through the lines and making it entertaining while you wait. They usually have actors or characters from the movies when it's despicable me or the Simpsons ride. You have clips from the shows or the films and they just look great. I think they do so much better of a job than Disney does at tying in the video property. You go over to Disney and see the fucking Aladdin ride and it's a magic carpet spinning. That's magic that's Aladdin. That's the ride you give it. This should be a freaking immersive experience where you're on a roller coaster going through the Cave of Wonders. It should be a combination of physical things and animation flying by. I want to see Genie. I want to see Robin Williams flying by me saying a couple catchphrases. You got the voice. You could do something with it but regardless there's just a lot more passion it seems and a lot more thought put into these Universal rides. Granted Disney hasn't really updated a lot of their stuff in a long time which is a big problem and another video I'm going to do and I have seen I have been on some of the newer stuff and they are getting closer to that Universal level but even on Guardians of the Galaxy you're sitting through some very boring rooms and some very long queues before you do even get to those characters. That's in the way that's the last leg of this race. Ratatouille kind of the same thing but Ratatouille I thought was fantastic. I thought they did a really wonderful job with that one. Okay rambling aside the overall Universal experience was probably about 50% less satisfying. Even going on the Hogwarts train we were with other people. It felt smellier. It was more claustrophobic. The guy I was next to was huge and he sat on his phone the entire time while the screen is showing you know the Weasley brothers flying by and it's supposed to be the special thing but no I'm listening I'm looking at this asshole's bright-ass phone who he's for some reason got angled at my face and he's just going through TikTok looking at possibly under age women dancing around. It's a really really special time to be alive here in 2024. I don't know. I think we're done with Universal for a few years now and Disney. We're done with both. We'll probably go on a cruise or do something else in 2025. We'll see. Definitely not going back though. I know Epic Universe is on its way scheduled to come out in 2025 but it's going to be an insane asylum. So many people are going to go so we'll probably give it two or three more years. We'll probably go back in 28. We'll go back when everything's died down a little bit if it ever does or when these parks raise their prices to such a degree where people are finally like yeah this is maybe a bit too expensive. I don't know if there really is a ceiling though because they keep raising the prices and stupid schmucks like me are like yeah we're going. We're going to have a special time damn it no matter what the cost. Okay those are my thoughts on Universal not terrible not amazing. It's just kind of there now for me. I do think that it is going to be harder for people in 2024 to go to Universal and have that special experience I had a year or so with my family. At least in January which is supposed to be the time when things are lower because some of the rides aren't even working the water park's not going and then people are back at school and whatnot it's just the time to go they say but it was busy as shit now. I think the the secret's out. People are going all year round no matter what it costs no matter what it takes they're getting to these parks and it's not necessarily the park's fault that people are just loving it and going but it's a problem. It's causing rides to break more. It's causing lines to get longer. It's causing Hogwarts to lose its charm and yeah I just think it's going to be harder for people to really appreciate all the work and the exciting things that were put into this years and years ago. Okay let me know your thoughts please comment do you agree do you think Universal's starting to kind of show its age because so many people are going and it's just not able to keep up with the demand or did I just have a maybe a bad experience or maybe I'm just a angry bitter dude that doesn't like things anymore. I had a good time I just didn't have a great time and that's the difference from before. I didn't have any like wow emotional moments. Let me know though like the video please share it around please comment do whatever you need to do if you're listening to the audio version I don't know maybe you can like it there or subscribe to the podcast thank you very much for watching and hopefully I'll see you next time take care no