There’s a strange alchemy to theme park music. It’s most often compared to film scores, as befits the cinematic origins of Disney Imagineering and Universal Creative, but that doesn’t quite do the difference justice. Several cues from movies, famous and otherwise, are included below, each originally tuned and timed for the greatest emotional impact of a infinitesimally specific moment. A goodbye kiss. A forlorn look unanswered. A historic bolt of lightning. Take away that meaning and the music sounds different. A theme park soundtrack is as much about placemaking as it is scoring thousands of infinitesimally specific moments every day. Sitting on the curb for an afternoon parade. Holding a date’s hand for the first time in a jungle gym of switchbacks. Taking in one last look before the long walk back to the parking garage. Unlike a movie with a carefully composed score, there’s truly no telling which memories will last and to what accompaniment. Fortunately, Universal Orlando has no shortage of hits.
Back to the Future – Universal Studios Florida Front Gate
This may be a ringer, but for good reason. Without Back to the Future, Universal Studios Florida wouldn’t exist.
Hollywood’s 30-foot-tall King Kong animatronic might’ve convinced Steven Spielberg that Universal could build an attraction to rival the competition, but Back to the Future convinced him the studio could build an entire park to match.
Though Back to the Future: The Ride missed Universal Studios Florida’s opening day by almost a year, the reckless soul of its source material was already poured into the park’s foundation; Christopher Lloyd reprised his most famous role for a promotional video so early it had to be faked at Universal Studios Hollywood.
As soon as ride footage existed, Back to the Future: The Ride took point on all the commercials and Alan Silvestri’s iconic score was adopted as the de facto theme of Universal Studios Florida. It became the very sound of “Riding the Movies.” For a while, at least.
In 1996, T2-3D took some of its thunder as the new standard in theme park entertainment and semi-sequels. With the infamously misguided advent of “Universal Studios Escape,” the park became a resort and “Riding the Movies” was no longer the only amenity. Doc and the Delorean still appeared occasionally in commercials, but the theme never left the ‘90s. As HD TVs and internet advertising exploded, Back to the Future: The Ride quickly ran out of road. All of its press kit materials were mastered in the finest standard definition of 1991. Short of clips from the actual films, there wasn’t much to show. By the 2007 release of Universal’s first planning DVD, it was already gone.
But the music lives on. The orchestra still echoes between the studio arches. It means what it always did – Ride the Movies – but now matters more as a history lesson than mission statement. Universal doesn’t often indulge nostalgia, but that driving Back to the Future theme strikes a warm, fuzzy chord with any long-time visitor.
As much as the park has changed, the spirit endures. At precisely 88 miles-per-hour.
Ocean Trader Market – Port of Entry
Universal Studios Florida has the Back to the Future theme. Islands of Adventure has “Ocean Trader Market.” Both are bone-deep sonic reminders that you’re not in Kansas or Kentucky or wherever you flew in from anymore. To paraphrase a resident alien of the resort, you’ve arrived.
Technically speaking, Islands of Adventure has a dedicated entrance theme – “The Call to Adventure” – but it plays about as frequently as “Ocean Trader Market” but never as long. Besides, only one of the two tracks follows you in.
When Universal Creative hired soundtrack producer John Rust to give the Islands auditory life, he didn’t have much to go on besides concept art. What would a land of cartoons sound like? What kind of instruments do Seuss characters play? Does Spider-Man dig techno? The park was his oyster. For the more traditionally orchestrated themes, he enlisted William Kidd, protégé of the great John Williams and accomplished composer in his own right.
Anyone disappointed that the bombastic “Call to Adventure” or its end-of-day inversion, “The Adventure Lives On,” didn’t make this list should take solace in the credit – William Kidd did it all. The composer wrote all of the music for The Lost Continent and Port of Entry, as well as one song for Seuss Landing.
None of them, however, set the scene as well as “Ocean Trader Market.”
It starts quiet, simple, faraway. A lonely xylophone. The twinkle of enchanted windchimes. Intermittent bird calls. Rhythmic claps. It’s as much music as it is noise, the easy heartbeat of a city too weird, too wonderful to ever exist. But it does, and just when you start to believe it, the wistful strings swoop in and carry you away.
Islands of Adventure was the first theme park with a completely custom soundtrack upon opening – even EPCOT Center borrowed some Alan Parsons Project. The 1999 and 2000 CD releases flirt with triple-digit prices on Ebay, if they show up at all anymore. Scarcity notwithstanding, there’s a good reason for the price.
It’s some of the most transportive music ever written for a theme park, and “Ocean Trader Market” is as transportive as it gets.
Higher and Higher – New York
Universal Creative gets due credit for raising the bar in themed environments with Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, but those achievements tend to overshadow a much earlier, but no less impressive feat of entertainment design – New York.
The area’s origin doesn’t do it any favors in the mythmaking department. Universal’s New York was built to be a good-enough fake. It was so good, in fact, that it lured at least one Disney production – the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Oscar – away from their own New York sets. Building the facades to withstand up-close theme park crowds was a secondary objective. Any intermittent chintz could be written off as movie magic.
But look past the painted flats of the New York Public Library and you’ll find a living, breathing borough, or at least a still-life approximation. Nazarman’s Pawnshop shows off its latest wares behind glass. Exhausted passersby have their pick of stoops. Alleys honeycomb the block, all the way from Hackenburg Appliances to the waterfront. The closer you look, the more detail you’ll notice. It’s a testament to the original design and construction that, even as the rest of the park has transitioned away from the backlot blueprints, New York has remained largely the same.
What it’s missing, at least on a slow day, is a little vitality. The Blues Brothers make their daily appearances, sometimes with another singing show to carry the load, but there’s very little activity past Delancey Street. Though the antique cars date it with a shiny, chrome bow, New York used to be a lot livelier.
The Ghostbusters alone had two different street shows on stages that haven’t been used since. That’s not to mention how often they’d cruise around town in the Ecto-1 or, on special occasions, join the late-night Finnegan’s crowd for a singalong. Though there were other residents of NYC over the years – a revolving door of licensed cartoon characters, The Shadow, etc. – none of them gave it quite the same pulse as the Ghostbusters.
Besides the newspaper clipping in a Race Through New York façade and the Firehouse that’s long had its serial numbers filed off, the only other trace of the franchise is hidden in plain sight, invisible to anybody not intimately familiar with the soundtrack of Ghostbusters II.
Howard Huntsberry’s cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” still bounces around the backstreets. It’s not hard to notice – the rest of the music loop is all showtunes and Sinatra. Once upon a time, that loop also included cues from Elmer Bernstein’s metro-magical score for the first film. Now all that’s left is an infectious outlier, a pop celebration of New York City from a pop celebration of New York City.
To quote the movie it came from: “New York – what a town!”
Jurassic Park Calypso – Jurassic Park
John Williams had to show up somewhere. His work on the E.T. Adventure and Wizarding World would crowd, if not clinch the honorable mentions. But the most interesting Williams cue on property is the one he only wrote.
Arranged by Lou Forestieri as part of John Rust’s Islands of Adventure soundtrack, “Jurassic Park Calypso” is exactly what it says on the tin. The immediately iconic theme trades its grandeur for effervescence. The flute and steel drum are so light they might blow away with the afternoon storm. It’s a marked and breezy departure from the other Williams scores at Universal, which are all more or less pulled clean from their cinematic sources.
“Jurassic Park Calypso” tells a story. It may sound like a temp track from a Sandals commercial, but that’s the point. It is the theme song to a Jurassic Park that never existed, not even within the fictional universe of the films. It’s how an actual resort, free from corporate espionage and (most) technical difficulties, would sound. The borrowed notes aren’t meant to inspire the franchise-standard awe, but a cozy familiarity. It’s still a jungle paradise with genetically resurrected dinosaurs, but here you can stop the admire the electric fences. The danger in this Jurassic Park is only on demand.
Besides its easy-listening charms, “Calypso” also begs a fun meta-fictional question: Does the Jurassic Park theme exist within the world of Jurassic Park? The closest analogue is Octopussy, the thirteenth James Bond adventure, in which a foreign contact gets 007’s attention by playing a few notes of his iconic theme song. Is it a code for something? Is the John Williams score a dramatic take on a hypothetical ad jingle?
“Jurassic Park Calypso” offers no such answer, but it does have a lot of steel drum. And that’s even better.
The Simpsons End Credits Theme (Hill Street Blues Homage) – Springfield
The Simpsons brought order to a stretch of Universal Studios Florida that had previously known only chaos.
World Expo was a free-for-all from day one, when it was called the somehow more generic Expo Center. No city sets to fall back on. Not even a clear purpose like Production Central. In the designers’ defense, how else do you connect the E.T. Adventure, two sets from Psycho IV, a Hard Rock Café, and the still-unbuilt Back to the Future: The Ride?
Beyond the Institute of Future Technology and a cafeteria that served mall Chinese food, the concept of a world’s fair didn’t hold much water. In 1999, everything but the lagoon-front property seceded into Woody Woodypecker’s Kidzone. A number of the attractions intended for the prime real estate occupied by Swamp Thing sets could’ve fit the theme – an Apollo 13 roller coaster housed in a replica of Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building was the best fit – but it took 2000’s Men in Black: Alien Attack to actually make it work. At least, for a while.
Back to the Future: The Ride closed in 2007 to be replaced by The Simpsons Ride in 2008. The International Food and Film Festival lasted four years after that as a strangely strait-laced food court for Krustyland.
In the summer of 2013, the last original stretch of Expo became Springfield, Home of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. It finally had character, and how.
Simpsons fans could spend the better part of a day squinting out the jokes in Fast Food Boulevard alone. The Duff Beer flows daily and, unlike in the show, from a different tap than the Duff Lite and Duff Dry. So many visitors leaned on Chief Wiggums all-black squad car for a photo-op that the resulting burns forced Universal to repaint it white. London across the water may be a grander sight, but in all its tiniest details, Springfield feels like it’s always been around.
The soundtrack loop is a quiet reminder that the show, for all intents and purposes, has always been around. One-off renditions of Danny Elfman’s unmistakable theme intermingle with the original and none mark the passage of time better than series composer Alf Clausen’s send-up of Hill Street Blues.
In the sixth season episode, “The Springfield Connection,” matriarch Marge joins the local police force in an adequately veiled attempt to reference as much cop media as possible, including the 98-times-Emmy-nominated Hill Street Blues. Not even TV theme song maestro Mike Post was spared. Clausen translated filtered the usual end credits music through Post’s iconic Hill Street lilt and made one of the gentlest pieces of music in the show’s 30-plus seasons.
Anyone unfamiliar with the parody can still spot it by the horns and Local-On-The-Eights tranquility. The theme may only last about 40 seconds but hearing it over your beverage of choice while lounging down by the lagoon is as close as a day at Universal gets to therapy.
Toon Walk – Toon Lagoon
Toon Lagoon gets a bum rap.
When Islands of Adventure was originally conceived in the mid-90s, Jay Ward’s stable of off-kilter characters was enjoying a home video renaissance. Rocky and Bullwinkle enjoyed their own show over at the Studios. A simple Boris Badenov animatronic was even built into a third story window above the current Film Vault. Popeye has always enjoyed a similar popularity to Betty Boop – guaranteed to move merchandise despite no new developments with the character in the last half century – so nabbing his rights by way of the King Features Syndicate library was another obvious slam dunk.
Dinosaurs never go out of style. Marvel superheroes miraculously appreciated in value. Dr. Seuss seems to exist apart from time as we know it. But now Dudley Do-Right, Wossamotta U, and Popeye’s extended family have all seen better days.
Some of that’s inherent in the design. Outside of Ripsaw Falls and the Sweet Haven cul-de-sac, Toon Lagoon is an environment built entirely in the abstract. It’s as cohesive and dimensional as a stack of Sunday Funnies. The flatness of it all, down to Dudley Do-Right’s budget-cut figures, only took more heat as the years turned to decades and cutting-edge neighbors moved in across the pond.
In its defense, however, the Lagoon has atmosphere to spare. It is the ur-cartoon, the fundamental text of all animated tomfoolery and its maximalist sum. It’s equal parts translation and expression, about as detailed as a mission statement like this can get. If the Springfield faithful can lose an afternoon on those easter eggs, students of the ‘toon could spend several days on the Island and not notice everything. It helps to have a catchy soundtrack for the snooping.
“Toon Walk” was written by Chip Smith and Tony Humecke, a team of musicians that handled most of the park’s sillier songs. What sets it apart from the other nearby noise is its originality. Without directly aping a single cartoon, it sounds like every cartoon. It’s all squealing brass and twinkling piano, played with the kind of bounce that makes silly walks all but infectious.
“The Funny Business,” by decorated Broadway composer Andrew Lippa, is a similarly superb tone piece for Toon Lagoon and some discerning ears may prefer it, but it doesn’t quite have the squish or stretch of “Toon Walk.” The former sounds like the greatest golden age cartoon never made. The latter makes the listener feel like they’re inside it.
Will and Anna – Universal Studios Florida Front Gate
Every theme park worth its salt has a weepy closing number for the end of the day and it doesn’t get much weepier than the score to a Richard Curtis romantic comedy.
Notting Hill won a BAFTA Award for Most Popular Film in 2000. It was nominated for three Golden Globes. The soundtrack, including two tracks of Trevor Jones’s heartstringy score, beat out The Matrix, Fight Club, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for a Brit Award, the most prestigious pop music honor in the UK.
And yet most Universal guests would be hard-pressed to place it as it croons from the speakers. There’s more obscure music in the mix – an ethereal chorus from Conrad Pope’s Pavilion of Women score wins that race – but nothing so understated.
It lasts barely a minute. Unless you stop to tie your shoe on one of the planters at the right moment, you’ll miss it entirely. The only giveaway, before the band strikes up, is the lonely acoustic guitar that starts it off. Some of the other samples are mysterious, even ominous, but “Will and Anna” is distinctly downbeat.
Though it was intended to illustrate the mismatched love of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, it doubles beautifully for the exhausted melancholy of leaving a theme park. It’s a welcome end – the promise of a fast-approaching hotel room – with a tragic question mark – when will you next pass below the studio gates? It has the sweeping, wistful sadness of a perfect date that makes the sight of an unmarked calendar too much to bear. “Will and Anna” might play all day long, but when night falls and the crowd thins and all that’s left is the emporium and the parallel palms, it’s absolute poetry.
From Back to the Future to Notting Hill, the perfect bookends to a perfect Universal vacation.
