I need to be honest with you. All of you. I got high on cannabis last week. And it wasn’t medicinal. It was purely recreational. Sure, I could go to a “Doctor” and tell him/her/them that I get anxious sometimes (I do) and they’d write me a prescription for “One joint daily as needed”, but I respect the medical community too much to do that (I’m also broke and I’m pretty sure all that costs money). I got high because I wanted to. Plain and simple.
I don’t know how weed affects everyone, but when I get high, I get a craving to watch weird stuff. I usually go to Tubi, my favorite streaming service. Tubi is like the wild west of streaming. They put anything up on that site in any quality. I watched a Shaw brothers kung fu flick that had to be ripped straight from a VHS. Almost all of Charles Bronson’s ouvre is on Tubi. And there’s enough micro-budget films shot-on-video to make your head spin. AND IT’S ALL FREE.
All that to say, Page and I were scrolling through Peacock the other night, very stoned, and stumbled across Inside the Worlds of Epic Universe. I immediately lit up, and quickly relaxed. I didn’t want to seem like a total theme-park-nut in front of Page. When I was little, my family would get the Walt Disney World Vacation Planning VHS tapes like this one:
I’d watch these endlessly, especially the Hollywood Studios segment. The Indiana Jones show, Fantasmic, Haunted Tower; it was all I wanted, and I watched the tape over and over to get ready for our trip down to Florida. My dad would also mail-in to receive tapes from different states’ tourism boards (because they were free) and we’d watch those together. Because of this, I’ve got an incredibly weird affinity for travel tapes. You can imagine how excited I was when I saw Inside the Worlds of Epic Universe even though I have absolutely no plans of going.
“Oh, this looks dumb” I said to Page, playing it totally cool.
“Yeah, really dumb”, she retorts.
“Should we watch it?” You’re coming on too strong, man
“Mmmm I don’t know if I’m in the mood for something like that”
YOU BLEW IT! Time to pull out the big guns. “What if we smoked another bowl?”
“Yeah, sure, why not”
So we smoked up and I giddily put the hour-long special on.
There’s nothing that can truly prepare you for how bored Joe Manganiello is throughout this whole show. It feels like he’s a dad forced to be at the theme park with his kids. He’s barely reacting on the rides, he’s putting up with the theme park actors, and he’s feigning an awestruck look whenever he enters a new building. His words betray his facial expressions at every turn.
Then he’s joined by an incredibly uncomfortable-looking Warwick Davis, who is reading off a cue card, hitting all of the buzzwords he can fit into one sentence. Throughout we’re treated with interviews from Michelle Yeoh, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Steven Spielberg; all whom wax poetically about storytelling.
We begin our magical journey in the Harry Potter world, which doubles down on the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them theme, 1920s Paris. I wondered for a bit why that film series rather than the iconic eight-film series, but I remembered we’re eventually going to get an HBO series of the Harry Potter books that will make the original films defunct. Joe talks to some wizarding students on his way to the circus in a scene that made me physically uncomfortable with second-hand embarrasment, these actors are trying their hardest standing in an empty theme park with Joe, working an animatronic book, but it’s really hard to watch.
We leave the wizarding world behind to enter the How to Train Your Dragon world? And Joe is joined by the actors of the live-action shot-for-shot remake, where they explicitly say this theme park has better set design than their actual film set. This segment plays out as a simultaneous ad for the park and an ad for the new film. Two for one! Not a whole lot happens in this bit, they ride a roller coaster and talk about how life-changing the new remake is. There is a pretty cool stage show that uses full-size animatronic dragons, that’s pretty cool
We make our way to Super Nintendo World! Which is pretty much just a Super Mario world with a Donkey Kong attraction (and if you really wanna get in the weeds, Donkey Kong is just a Mario villain). It’s also the shortest section; Joe talks us through three rides, none of which actually look that fun.
And the biggest segment, The Dark Universe, is also our last. This was probably the most intersesting, if only because Steven Spielberg is heavily interviewed. It kind of blew my mind learning he’s a creative consultant for Universal Results. He really is still a little kid at heart; the excitement he got as he looked around the unfinished park was infectious. The framing device for this world is that Victoria Frankenstein, the granddaughter of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Joe brings in Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Manganiello spots the Invisible Man, and says, “Ya know, I used to live in Hollywood, and I’d see housewives come out of clinics looking like that” to a complete thud. They ride an interactive ride, and that’s the end of our tour.
We close with more celebrity interviews, a red carpet premier of the parks, and we’re out. All-in-all, it was pretty much a snooze-fest. I really felt my attention wane almost immediately. Obviously I’m not the target demographic for this special, it’s a commercial meant to get kids to incessantly ask their parents to take them to Epic Universes just like I did when I was a kid watching the Disney Vacation Planner tape.
rating
2/5
Who should watch this TV special?
- Hyper-active children
- Fans of the second Fantastic Beasts movie?
- Joe Manganiello’s hairstylist
- Fans of corporate synergy
- Families with a spare $10K burning a hole in their pocket
