Concept art for the Spectacle Night Parade.
We finally have some great footage of the new Spectacle Night Parade at Universal Studios Japan, featuring a segment devoted to Jurassic World. It's pretty fantastic - take a look below:
So it looks like this section of the parade starts off with a full Stegosaurus enclosure with alarming red lights flashing high above. Inside the enclosure, you can see a full bodied Stegosaurus animatronic with limited motion in the head and tail - very cool! The float is fully dressed with flora that attempts to blend into the projected background on the city buildings. From the video, the projection mapping isn't very convincing, but it typically never is via video. Every now and then you can see dinosaur heads pop out from the jungle, which is a fun touch.
Behind the Stegosaurus float roams a lone Parasaurolophus attempting to find it's way as dinosaur wranglers attempt to contain the asset. This Parasaur fully replicates the models we've seen from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, with the only difference being a human inside. Thankfully, the human legs are inside the dinosaur legs and not relegated to black stockings attempting to blend into the darkness.
Slowly crawling behind the Parasaurolophus, you can find two stationary Gyrospheres on top of the individual planter floats. This must be the easiest, but most boring job in the parade - sitting inside the Gyroshperes, acting in awe of everything going on around you. The four actors inside display a range of emotions as two individuals portray park workers driving the vehicles and the other two are park guests.
Following behind the Gyrospheres are a few dinosaur handlers carrying around super cute dinosaurs. With two wranglers on either side of the parade, you can see a Triceratops and Brachiosaurus being handled with care. In baby form, these two dinos are incredibly cute and serve as a distraction from the pending breakout of the next batch of dinosaurs.
Closing the gap close behind, the next float stands very tall, containing a giant cage holding three Velociraptors. It looks like the raptors are supposed to be Blue, Charlie and Delta. During the parade, you hear a power failure and the raptors come barreling down the ramp, causing havoc on the parade route. These dinosaurs are being portrayed by humans and not animatronics or puppeteering. While the Parasaurolophus was a tad more convincing, the Velociraptors are less so. Usually walking Velociraptor costumes are far less appealing visually than other costumed dinosaurs - maybe it's the stature and posture of the dinosaurs that makes it visually flawed. Either way, this section contains several dino wranglers attempting to Pratt-keep the raptors back into their pen, with one being dressed closely to Owen Grady from Jurassic World.
Wrapping up this segment on the parade comes to lumbering Tyrannosaurus Rex perched high atop the final moving hill, with especially devilish eyes. This T. Rex is a fully animatronic figure that is pretty impressive for a moving float. It very closely resembles the model used at the peak of Jurassic Park: The Ride right before you plunge to the depths of that ride, but with this dinosaur being full bodied. It stands upon a pedestal that rotates a tad, giving it some range, but also had a wide range of motion on the tail and head. The mouth is fully operational, taking every chance to roar at the park guests and even the tongue can be seen lifting inside the mouth. Very well done.
Finally, I wanted to take note of the score used here, as it fully re-orchestrates Michael Giacchino's music from Jurassic World in some especially fun ways. You can hear versions of 'Raptor Your Hear Out', 'Clearly His First Rodeo' and "Nine To Survival Job", but certainly reworked to sound more playful and energetic. There is quite a bit of new material here to bridge the gap between sequences in the parade, none of which I believe to be new music from Michael Giacchino, but we'll double check that.
Overall, this portion of the parade looks to be a grand slam and hopefully something we see interpreted over here in the two United States parks. We are certainly about to hit a time of transition for the stateside parks, so maybe this is something that could join the parks after the pending upheavals.
Article written by:
Brad Jost