I think that may qualify for the longest title I've ever had... which is fitting since this ride had the longest line I've ever seen.
Last month my wife and I took our college aged kids to the new park at Universal Studios Orlando. This new park is called Epic Universe and for the most part, it really lived up to it's name. I'll write more about the entire park later but for now I want to focus on one particular ride: Mario Kart Bowser's Challenge.
Let me just say that this ride did not make me miss when my kids were young and I had to take them on some really stupid rides. Luckily for me, my kids are grown and they, I or anyone on earth over the age of eight will ever want to go on this ride again. It was absolutely horrendous. becuase I have been to Disney World about a half dozen times, I can absolutely see how this "idea" was generated. I bet it went a little like this... "So Disney has those Toy Story and Buzz Lightyear rides where you sit in a car and you firs lasers or balls at targets throughout the ride. It seems like a relatively cheap ride. We need to do that... but with Mario!" That is 100% what this ride is. It is a ripoff of the Toy Story ride where you shoot things at targets in the midway or aliens working for Zurg. To be honest, that really isn't a bad idea. Those rides are fun enough. Kids love Mario Kart so it would seem like this was a slum dunk for fun. But oh my god it is not.
This ride constantly has one of the longest lines in the entire park. It routinely gets to be almost four hours long. Yes FOUR FREAKING HOURS! And I get it. If you tell a little kid there is a Mario Kart ride, they are going to want to ride it. They are not going to understand, "We will be sitting in line for hours doing nothing." They will simply say "Give me my Mario!!!!". Luckily 99% of kids have cell phones so they can just play games for hours while they wait. Which is every parent's dream. "I paid 400 bucks for my kid to sit on the ground and play video games for hours. Awesome!"
Why doe sit have such a long line you may ask? Well first, every kid wants to ride it. Duh. But more importantly according to staff and the internet, the ride constantly breaks down. On the day we were there, it broke down at least three times. So the wait times listed when you walk into this trap mean absolutely nothing. It could be an hour... it could be four. Great.
Our group ran into a little problem. Because I am insane, I got the troops up at the crack of dawn to make sure we would be at the park before the gates opened (those in the know call this "rope drop"). after doing some research, I found out the best move is to bypass the Mario Kart ride and head for Donkey Kong. We did and we loved it! We even went right back on. After we got off, we had time to jump into a relatively short Mario Kart ride. But my entire group said they did not want to go. Awesome!!!!! Later in the day I discovered that my son did not realize it was a Mario Kart ride. He thought it was some other type of Mario ride. Being a chip off the old block and a sucker for nostalgia, my son really wanted to go on this ride. But "luckily" we had paid double the admission price so we had a fast pass for this ride only one of us cared about. We walked up to the line and saw that the regular wait was a little over two hours. I asked how long that meant a fast pass was and was told "About an hour". Holy shit! I paid a ton of money for that fast pass and I'd still be waiting an hour? Because we had done everything else already and we didn't have any little kids who might meltdown, we decided to give it a try.
The line to the ride does look cool. It is very Mario themed so there was plenty to look at. We waited about an hour and half and finally got on. It honestly wasn't that bad and we had fun chatting in line. As soon as the ride started, I immediately thought, "This ride is so dumb". It really is just a ripoff of Buzz Lightyear but instead of shooting physical things, you shoot virtual things that are displayed on an uncomfortable screen you wear on your head and face. Perhaps an eight year old would dig this but we all thought it was pretty dumb.
You're NEVER leaving!
OK. So we waited a while for a dumb ride. No big deal. We do that all the time. But wait! Remember when I said the ride breaks down all the time? Well sure enough it broke down while we were on it. Because I couldn't wait for the ride to end from the second it started, this delay especially sucked. The worst part was that even though the ride is indoors and not on a track, they made us just sit there for 30 minutes while they tried to fix it. Just let us out! To make matters worse, I have a thimble sized bladder. After waiting 90 minutes and then sitting there for another 25 minutes, I really had to take a piss. I swear if I had to sit for a minute longer, they would have needed a mop.
If you go to Epic Universe and you know you can't escape without your 8 year old riding this ride, do it immediately before it breaks. Or just bribe them. It will be well worth it.