Studio Tour at Universal

One of the activities available at Universal Studios is a tour of the actual studio areas. As the wait time got down to under 5 minutes at one point on Tuesday, we headed over to do the 1 hour tour before lunch. For the tour you ride in articulated electric trams with a guide and a driver. Trams (and previously buses) have been used for similar tours since the early days of the studio.

The tour goes through working studio areas, including past various offices and sound stages (where indoor filming takes place), as well as outdoor back lots where street and outdoor shooting takes place. The Universal outdoor sets are used by lots of other studios who no longer maintain such large back lot sets. This means that the same sets (just "redressed") are used for lots of different movies and TV shows.

One of the coolest "real" things we got to see was a demo of rain and flash-flooding effects on one of the village sets (along with some recent movie footage of it being used).

As well as the actual working areas, the tour also included a 3D King Kong experience, semi-live Jaws show, a current film set, a Fast and Furious experience, and a little taste of classic Psycho. I think we all enjoyed King Kong and Jaws the most.

All in all, definitely worth the time for a visit.