"Brian Kendig" <brian-lugnet@enchanter.net> Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 02:46:58 GMT To: lugnet.reviews
After having put this on rec.toys.lego, I'm posting this here at Larry's suggestion. :)
At long last -- here's my LEGOLAND® California trip report! :)
The park is tailored strongly towards kids and enthusiasts. Since I'm more the latter than the former, this trip report is focused more on enthusiasts than on kids. (That is, I didn't go on many rides, so I won't say much about them.)
Refer to "http://www.legolandca.com/general.idc" for a general map of the park. It's generally laid out as a circle around the lake; from the park entrance, you can go to either Village Green or Imagination Zone and therefore go around the lake in either direction.
My group (four people) arrived at the park at 8:30am on the morning of Saturday, March 20 -- just in time for a brief opening ceremony, and then they let us in right afterwards! The park was nearly deserted until the official opening at 10am. My group got to Fun Town before 10, and we were the only people there. :)
But you're more interested in a play-by-play of what's at the park, so here goes. :)
Immediately next to the park entrance is The Big Shop. One large room that's roughly the same size as the LEGO® Imagination Center in Florida, it appears to carry most of what's in the current Shop-at-Home catalog; noticeably missing were service packs (and I don't remember seeing much Technic™ there but I was preoccupied), but they also have lots of LEGOLAND® CA tee shirts, pins, pencils, and other souvenir items (including a new version of the LEGOLAND® Ambassador Key chain! "http://www.ee.nmt.edu/~jmathis/legolandminifig.html"). If you want them to, they'll hold your purchases for you until you're ready to leave the park -- this was very handy, since the first thing I did upon entering the park was to buy two complete collections of Star Wars™. :) I also ran into Tom Stangl here, but wasn't too surprised. ;)
Oh, before I forget -- park employee badges are a red 4x8 plate with three yellow 2x2 flats on them, on which is a clear sticker with the employee's name printed on it. No name badges are sold for park guests (such as Disney's red "Guest of Honor" badges), but unlike Disney, you can make a badge for yourself if you're so inclined. :) Also worth noting here is that there are a few souvenir penny-pressing machines around the park. Each one offers four designs, and I found five of these machines around the park. Each penny you want to press costs two quarters (plus the penny). If you want souvenir pressed pennies, make sure you carry enough change, because the machines aren't necessarily near any shops or stands that can make change for you.
Back to the park attractions. Outside The Big Shop was a "model citizen" -- a "life-size" walk around minifig (blue overalls, blue pants, blue cap, standard smiley face). He looked a bit stiff, but the children seemed to like him. He was the only walk around we saw all day.
We went clockwise around the lake from there. Next stop was the Village Green, in which is a safari ride (the vehicles are one- or two-person gas-powered cars, I think). We skipped the ride, but it's surrounded by life-size LEGO® zebras and monkeys and elephants and other animals. A path behind one hedge reveals a LEGO® lioness with her cubs. Very cute!
We did go on the Fairy Tale Brook later that day. It's a gentle boat ride (each boat is a 'leaf' with two seats, each seating about two people) through some LEGO® fairy tale sculptures: the Three Little Pigs getting their house blown down by the Big Bad Wolf, Sleeping Beauty being kissed by a prince, Hansel and Gretel looking clueless, et cetera. At the end of the ride all the characters are dancing around together. The weirdest thing about this ride was that hidden speakers through the queue area were playing the sound of someone drowning (probably a troll you see at one point in the ride) -- "Glub! Gallub! Gloob!" Over and over and over again. Very weird.
The Water Works was cute; there's a row of giant LEGO® musical instruments which you can make play music and squirt water by standing on a dot in front of them. Another area lets you aim jets of water at alligators (complete with dangling tonsils!) and frogs. It's cute, the kids loved it, there was ample opportunity to get wet, but I saw something that looked like a giant hot-air hand dryer outside there so presumably kids can use it to dry off. A DUPLO™ village was nearby, with lots of little houses and slides for kids.
There was another shop here, a sports-oriented one, but I don't recall finding anything interesting in it. FYI, only a few shops beyond The Big Shop sold any LEGO® sets, and even then they were only small ones. The shops focused on souvenirs and candy. (Like Disneyland, no chewing gum is sold inside LEGOLAND®.)
Since it was beginning to get cold and drizzly, we sat for a bit to listen to a ventriloquist and his two puppets: a showoff vulture and an insecure parrot. His show could use a little more polish (which it'll undoubtedly get with time), but it was really funny and well worth the stop!
Next stop: The Ridge. We skipped the Sky Cycle and the Kid Power Tower, but the Amazing Maze was good fun. (All four of us were surprised to find it not as easy as we expected!) In the middle of the maze is a great vantage point from which you can see the whole rest of the park. Oh, let me mention something important here: IF YOU GO TO LEGOLAND®, BRING BINOCULARS. If you don't, you'll wish you had. There are a few telescopes around (bolted to railings) for kids to use, but they're few, far-between, and low to the ground. Binoculars are great for examining the LEGO® creations from a distance, and for seeing fine detail when you're as close to them as you can get (a fence keeps you a few feet away from the beautiful buildings in Miniland). You may also want to bring a note pad, like I did, to take notes -- other people (hi Tom) have already photographed everything in the park and put it up on web sites. If you take a lot of photos, you'll later forget why you got a particular shot... better to write down what you're thinking while you're at the park!
Fun Town is fun. We skipped the kiddie rides (Driving School, Skipper School, Sky Patrol, etc.) and went into the buildings instead.
The Adventurers' Club is a tour through rooms themed to look like a jungle cave, an Egyptian temple, and an ice cavern. The 'story' is that you need to find six keys hidden through the areas (the keys spell I - M - A - G - I - N, and they are shown at the end of your tour on a plate with an E on it). The keys are hidden well enough that you're happy to find them after a few moments of searching -- they're not all obvious, but kids will be able to find them. And the LEGO® sculptures in this area are beautiful, especially the 'murals' in the Egyptian section. Look for the mural with a guy holding a camcorder!
The LEGO® Factory has four stages showing purportedly 'slowed-down' LEGO® production machines. The first shows you red 2x4 bricks being molded while you watch (by a mechanism labeled 'http://www.plasquip.dk/'), the second shows you the 'LEGO®' logo being silkscreened onto 1x4x4 yellow pieces (thin 'container' walls) while you watch, and the third shows wheels being snapped onto 2x4 axle bricks, and the fourth shows you all three previous pieces being put into boxes. However, look closely: the machines aren't actually creating anything! The silkscreening machine takes a blank piece and outputs a piece with a logo, but if a piece which already bears a logo somehow makes it down the line to the silkscreening machine, it outputs a blank piece! Turns out it's just swapping the pieces that go into it. While we watched, a LEGO® employee was frantically trying to catch the pieces which were going through the system 'backwards' and remove them.
Cool Club has some great creations inside, most notably a map of southern California made in an unusual way -- the water was a sea of wavy blue flags (looking down on their tops!), the mountains were tightly-packed minifigs wearing cowboy hats, et cetera. Very clever!
Also here is the Fun Town Market, which is the park's ONLY restaurant with interior seating. By mid-afternoon it was really cold and wet outdoors, and of course the restaurant was packed tight with no hope of getting a seat inside. But near the front are some display cases with some old LEGO® sets in great condition (a pirate ship, a Homemakers set from the 70's, a little blue shovel truck and a tow truck from the early 70's, and some Samsonite sets) which are definitely worth seeing.
Castle Hill was the next stop through the park, and it was my favorite area. The Enchanted Walk is a beautiful stroll across two small bridges, and the walk is surrounded by butterflies, dragonflies, rabbits, foxes, quail, and trout which glisten with translucent bricks. We ate at The Knight's Table (note that the 'ice cubes' on the Coca-Cola signs are in the shape of 2x2 DUPLO™ blocks, and that there are minifigs on the Minute Maid signs), then shopped at King's Market. There you can buy a plush green LEGO® dragon with red wings, nicely-made foam shields (with either a Royal Knights or a Wolfpack logo, and velcro straps to hold it to your arm), and foam swords and katana. If you feel like building, there's a small hut here with LOTS of LEGO® castle wall pieces in bins inside, and plenty of plates to build on.
I skipped the Dragon roller-coaster -- perhaps next time!
Finally... Miniland. THIS is why I came to the park. I easily spent about two hours scribbling down a dozen pages of detailed notes on the place... the sheer level of detail on the buildings is simply astounding, and the way they use conventional pieces in nonconventional ways is awe-inspiring. I'm going to post another post filled with nothing but my notes from Miniland. :) For now, suffice it to say that you should look for the dead chickens hanging in the window of a grocery store in Chinatown.
Interestingly enough, while Miniland used a vast and wide array of rare pieces for all sorts of clever purposes, they used what appeared to be ABS chaff -- raw plastic granules -- for things such as garbage in trash cans, scrub vegetation, and cargo in one of the barges. Also, many of the creations in Miniland were crawling with tiny, tiny speck-bugs, only visible through binoculars. Weird. The buildings use mostly 'official' LEGO® colors, including lots of brown and green and a little bit of pink, but no orange. They also use far too much of the new light blue that appears only in two Throwbots sets, and they even use some translucent light blue which has never appeared in any set, as far as I know.
Cars, trucks, trains, and boats continually wend their way through Miniland. The cars and trucks are guided by wires under the road, and they even make some stops. One sign says that the vehicles in Miniland are controlled by twelve computers and 300,000 yards of wire. Yow!
It was around here that I ran into the President of LEGOLAND® -- a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Michon who had gotten the title for the day. He gave me his autograph and the URL of his web site ("http://come.to/tbmichon"), and I gave him my Netscape business card and the URL to LUGNET™ ("http://www.lugnet.com/"). It turns out he's actually fairly famous -- his LEGO® skills have gotten him onto several talk shows! Accompanying him was a LEGO® employee (name tag "CAR") who identified herself as the Mayor of LEGOLAND®. She told me that all of the models in the park were coated with fifteen layers of ultraviolet protection, but even so they're replaced every three to five years. The miniature trees used in the park are also replaced every few years, and it's possible for fans to purchase the old ones.
Also around this area I noticed a guy wearing a LUGNET™ tee shirt -- turns out it was Larry Pieniazek and family!
The last area was the Imagination Zone, but I spent so much time in Miniland that I didn't have much time here. It's got lots of areas to sit and build with anything from DUPLO™ to Mindstorms™, and it's got an impressive sculpture of Einstein's head and a larger-than-life dinosaur made of giant bricks that are made from LEGO® bricks. Wow. :)
One final stop on our way to finishing our loop around the lake was the boat ride through the lake itself. I wasn't impressed -- it tries to be cute and serious at the same time; the woman driving the boat kept talking about the LEGO® models (the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore, the Taj Mahal, etc.) as if they were their real-life counterparts. When she said "this took thirty years to build," I think some people thought she meant the models. Also, only Mount Rushmore's faces were LEGO®; I think I've seen a much better-looking sculpture of it which was entirely LEGO®, including the surrounding rock.
A sign somewhere in the park said that thirty million LEGO® bricks were used in its construction. That actually seems a bit low to me. There were a LOT of sculptures... but believe it or not, even though I'm a rabid enthusiast, I got a little tired of them (except Miniland) near the end. Most of the sculptures outside Miniland were made entirely of 2xN bricks; given an unlimited supply of LEGO®, some experience working with three-dimensional sculptures, and plenty of time and patience, I don't see why anyone here couldn't have made them. I guess once you've seen a thirty-four-foot-long red dinosaur made entirely of 2xN bricks, it'll take a lot to be impressed again. ;)
Two other random observations about the park: Unlike Disneyland, there is no ambient music piped over the loudspeakers at the park. Music is apparently reserved for only a few of the queue areas. Also, wild birds haven't found the park yet, so park goers don't yet have to fight off pigeons and seagulls.
That's all for now -- I'll post detailed notes about Miniland when I get a chance!