Universal ‘Fan Fest Nights’ Is A Good First Draft For A Game-Changing Event (The NoPro Review)

This weekend marks the final days of Universal Studios Hollywood’s Fan Fest Nights, a new event that plays out like a mix of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights and Disney’s Star Wars Night, complete with pop-up attractions and lots of fans turning up in cosplay.

The net result is an amusing evening out that doesn’t quite hit the highs of its influences, but takes some really big swings that are enjoyable in and of themselves.

I was lucky enough to get a few hours last Friday at Fan Fest, which keeps the park open after the usual Spring hours when Universal closes at 7PM most nights, thanks to a friend with a spare ticket. I never have as much time out these days as I’d like, but I was still able to work in three of the Fan Fest exclusive attractions, taking in two turns of the Back to the Future experience along with Star Trek: Red Alert and Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep. We’ll save that one for last.

Star Trek: Red Alert

The last thing I ran through before leaving the park was this Star Trek experience, framed as a visit to the Star Fleet Museum — canonical to the recent *Picard* television series — that, naturally, goes wrong.

Classic theme park shenanigans.

The experience consists of walking around some mock ups of places you’d find on the USS enterprise NCC–1701– D, the legendary version of the ship from Star Trek: The Next Generation. They also broke out the screen used bridge of the rebuild Enterprise D from the *Picard* series, so once you’re finally standing on the bridge it’s the real deal. As someone who grew up watching TNG, it’s definitely a kick to walk down the hallways and find yourself on the bridge of Picard’s Enterprise.

Of course, there’s the whole tour gone wrong business, which starts in the shuttle bay where a video screen shows us that some kind of large alien entity has manifested outside of the museum and is now going to try to take over the ship.

It’s clear some expense was spared in terms of picking out the digital screen which served as the shuttle bay’s opening into space. Not that we can really fault Universal for not going all out on top of the line screens for what is essentially a pop-up. Still, it’s set the bar low early, and said bar pretty much stayed where it it was left.

Star Trek Red Alert had big “what if we made a haunted maze, but didn’t make it haunted” energy. This was enhanced by the two teenagers in elf — definitely elf and not Vulcan — ears who giggled at just about everything the actors in each room said as they dutifully gave us exposition dumps. Which is all the actors, who brought a lot of energy to our run, were tasked with doing.

There wasn’t really anything for us to do, except not look up to notice that we were on a set with no ceiling or not walk through the turbo lift door that opened early and gave away the next gag before it was time.

Over all Red Alert was fine: it’s nice to see the sets, but they could have ditched the story and it would have been just as enjoyable. Possibly more enjoyable is the actual bridge of the Enterprise D wasn’t so tiny. I always imagined it to be bigger. Who knew?

Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets of Waterdeep

Much tighter, but still with some room to grow was the D&D pop up. This also moved a big group of us — I’d guess 40–50 at a time for this one — through five encounters on a sound stage set up with some classic D&D elements.

Three actors kept the action going, although at some point a decision had been made to forego body mics (which probably weren’t doing great as the performers moved room to room) with microphones that were hidden in various spots: broomsticks, plants, candles.

Honestly: it was hilarious. I both felt for the designers and admired that they went for the most ridiculous solve. I have now lived to see an actor animatedly giving exposition into a candlestick with a straight face. That alone was worth my time.

The big payoff for all of it is the encounter with the giant crime boss Xanathar the Beholder — one of D&D’s poster boy monsters who is realized as a great big beautiful animatronic. (Update day of publication: He’s actually a puppet! With a live puppetter! Even better.) He’s beyond fantastic, although he’s also hidden in a really obvious way when you walk into his room. That said: Xanathar the Beholder is what I imagine the designers at Knott’s are dreaming of when they make their big end-of-haunt maze creatures. I hope he is preserved with care and gets featured again.

I’m not even saying this as a D&D guy, as I’ve never been a regular player of that role-playing game. He’s just a really cool audio animatronic. (Update: puppet!)

Interaction here is fairly limited, given the nature of the brand, but what little was afforded was embraced heartily by the crowd we were with, with lots of people ducking to avoid Xanathar the Beholder’s magic spell beams. Folks were definitely eager to play, and if they were given more to do I suspect they would have leapt at the chance.

As I have no frame of reference for One Piece or Jujutsu Kaisen, both of which seemed to have some moderately healthy lines as I was making my way into the park, didn’t need a picture with Yoshi in Super Nintendo World and zero tolerance left for the Harry Potter franchise thanks to its author, that left only option left, which just so happened to be my first and most anticipated stop:

Back To The Future

For this the classic Universal Studios Tour Trams were repurposed to take guests down onto the backlot where the actual clocktower from Back to the Future still stands. Our first taste of what was to come was the actor playing the “Save The Clocktower” lady, who had a petition and photocopies of a newspaper article about how the town’s clocktower was at risk. Of course, I signed the petition.

The town square around it has been gussied up with classic cars, a certain DeLorean, a bandstand, carnival, and most important of all: live actors.

With the show on a loop multiple casts have been set up to run through a 40 min collection of scenes and random encounters with guests as a kind of speed through version of the story of the original Back To The Future, right up through the Enchantment Under The Sea high school dance plays out in the town square. George McFly, Lorraine Baines, and Biff Tannen kick things off, having little run-ins with guests and each other, sometimes playing out a scene from the film.

Things kick up a notch after a performance by the singing car hops at the corner gas station when a very out-of-time Marty McFly wanders into town looking oh so very lost.

Two turns of the show weren’t enough to pick up on all the scenes that are played out amongst the four leads, Doc Brown, Principal Strickland, and a few other supporting characters. Nor was it always easy to hear the actors as the choice was made not to give them any mic support save for on stage at the dance, which made for a more natural experience.

In any case, this was a blast right through the dance sequence, with both casts that I saw very game. The gal who was playing Lorraine (that’s Marty’s mom, if you can’t remember the movie) was exceptionally sweet with a little girl who was enamored of her, and played the crowd well between the set piece moments like George standing up to Biff.

Look: this wasn’t high art, but it was a lot of fun, and sometimes that’s all you want out of a big giant make-believe session.

The audience was really into this one, with a whole lot of people in orange vests and some in full screen accurate Marty McFly kit. One group even had Marty in all three of his hero costumes from each of the movies. For a hot second, I confused the one as 1985 Marty, until I noticed he was walking around with a full-on VHS camcorder.

There were only two real lowlights.

First: the climax of the whole piece involved projecting the climactic lightning storm onto the clock tower and timing some IRL effects with the lightening strike in the movie. After running around the square with the characters it wasn’t the best dismount, but you couldn’t actually drive a DeLorean 88 miles per hour through a gaggle of theme park guests. Not a design challenge I envy.

The other bummer was how long the line was to take a photo with Einstein the dog and the DeLorean. Easily the biggest line I saw that night other than the one for Mario Kart. (Which was too long, so I still haven’t ridden it!) Like the actors there is more than one pup playing the role, and the one who was sitting in the front seat was a truly majestic fella.

I’m pretty sure that when Universal Studios Hollywood execs do their after action analysis they’re going to come to the conclusion that the secret to successful after hours events are dog photo ops.

The Verdict

Tap into the talk of the town and the reaction to Fan Fest has been mixed, with Horror Nights fans being underwhelmed and those who are tired of Disney’s “a night of photo ops” formula finding the more ambitious pop-ups of Fan Fest a breath of fresh air.

From an immersive perspective Back to the Future stands out as a solid triple, if not quite a home run, although not for the lack of effort from the charming actors. Indeed one has to hope that if Fan Fest is deemed to be a success that park execs will realize its thanks in large part to the efforts of the performers down on the backlot who managed to create a real sense of place and time and fulfill the park’s promise of bringing the magic of the movies to life.

Here’s hoping the numbers pencil out and that they do it all again.

Universal Fan Fest Nights runs through May 18th, tickets start at $79.

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