Universal Studios Singapore TR

[Garet]

So we decided to surprise our son, who is in love with Minions and Nintendo with a trip to Universal Studios Japan for his 9th birthday. Flying Dinosaur has been on my bucket list for ages, and I do love Nintendo so we started planning. As we sat about budgeting, we were really unsure about the fast-pass situation. They'd been expensive before but with mine-cart now open, the new prices had just gone through the roof. Then 2 things happened. First Flying Dinosaur announced maintenance for when we would go, and my son suddenly found a third interest: Transformers....well mostly Bumblebee.

When we looked at the cost of flying over for four days in Osaka with hotel and including USJ tickets and fast passes, which bear in mind is only a 90-minute flight from us, we actually found that same money could be streched enough to get us 7 days in Singapore (6 hour flight) in a nice hotel on the beach. As much as I love USJ I think the income bracket we are on is not the target market anymore, and it was just a no-brainer for us to use the money to take a long vacation and do Minions Land in Singapore with Transformers even if it meant missing out on my chance for Flying Dinosaur and Nintendo again.



So here we are at Universal Singapore...
 

So controversial opinion: This was my second trip to Universal Singapore. It's a nice park, but.... my opinion hasn't changed in that it still feels like a 'casino/resort permission park.' You see a lot of places in Asia, even in Korea, where companies want to set up a casino/hotel or resort/shopping area and to get permission, they include a park to make sure to get the rights, but you can tell the park is just there to get other things through. For example in Korea some parks list even playgrounds, talking trees, or gift shops on the attractions page just to try and make the list look bigger than it is.

Universal is much nicer than any others but it still felt a little bit that way on my 2nd visit.

The selfie game has been raised in Singapore. I didn't see too many selfies sticks but saw families with small drones that would hover in front of them instead to take the family photos.


The park opening had this lady hold a cheering contest on both sides. Winners were given fast passes, but they seemed to only pick from the front row, so if you want a chance, arrive early. My son and some other children were a little off center, but it seemed the policy is only front row people in the actual entry lines.

Don't be fooled that the park is still very quiet. We let the opening rush in first so we could enjoy the stroll but the park is quite busy in the mornings. Lines dropped near the end of the day but every ride averaged 30-60 minutes until the evening.

The covers over the New York area were a welcome respite from the heat. Again, most people were running to rides. Sesame Street was already 40 minutes when we passed it, but we'd heard from others that ride would drop significantly later.

So our first stop was Lights, Camera, Action!
 

It's a shame these types of rides are disappearing. It's easy to forget that there are lots of children who have no idea how movie magic is made. Yes, it's very manufactured to an adult but for my 9 year old, this ended up being his favorite thing. Seeing 'Behind the scenes' blew his mind and was his favorite of the day despite his love of Minions and Bumblebee.

It was at this point I realised my choice of where to stand was a huge mistake.

 

 

 

Transformers was a 60-minute queue but was another ride we'd been advised to go back to in the afternoon.

My son wanted to meet Bumblebee but also really wanted a talking encounter with Megatron. Hong Kong Disneyland had trained it into my son that if you weren't in line for a character before they arrived, you weren't getting that meeting, so we were made to line up since the staff told us Bumblebee was coming. The announcements however had been taken over by Megatron....

 

 

 

...Who seemed to be having a bit of an identity crisis.

Oh well, my son still got to meet a Transformer.

So we rode this since we heard Bumblebee would be coming soon and there were no people in line at all... and yet as we went to board we saw people still using their fast-passes despite there being less than 8 people in line. It just seems a waste to not save it in case the lines get longer later.

Last time I was here, this ride duelled, had 4 across trains (and ran 2 of them), and had a single-rider line. It's a shame that for the star attraction it's capacity and duelling has been cut.

While we waited for Bumblebee, we got a birthday popcorn (Thanks Universal) and the Bumblebee soda cup as a birthday present.

Success! And a happy 9 year old.

Treasure Hunters is not on the fast-pass system and its line never dropped below 50 minutes when we visited so run there or canopy flyers when you visit.

My son really wanted to try Battlestar but having never ridden a roller-coaster that inverts or an inverted coaster, he was pretty nervous. He wasn't sure about Humans launch either so we opted to try Mummy to prepare him with it's smaller launch.
Sadly the ride broke down and after a while everyone was kicked out the line.

So we headed over to Enchanted Airways instead. A fun roller-coaster but with only one train and fast-pass people made for slow operations. Line stated 25 minutes but we waited maybe 35-40.

Having a quick explore around Far Far Away Land.

Shrek 4D used to be everywhere, but is Singapore now the only park that shows it regularly? Japan's is still around but always seems to be replaced by some other even film.

 
And a ride I'd forgotten existed at the exit. Low capacity and loading and unloading means it can take a while to get on.
Onto the main reason for our trip. Our son loves Minions and so we spent a lot of time here. Even though these rides are only on Fast Lane plus they seemed to have the shortest lines of the whole park, walk on for the merry go round, 15 minutes for the other flat ride and Minion Mayhem was 25-30 minutes all day.

The area is full of photo opportunities. A lot of people were instagramming but be warned that you could wait a while to take photos. Whereas kids and families would snap apicture together and move on, we saw a lot of solo adults or couple who would take their picture run back to camera, check, adjust, change some things and do quite a few times until they got the picture they wanted.

The only photo opportunity we missed were the girls. They were leaving when we arrived. They aren't listed on the app outside of Gru family time, but they set up for photo oppurtunities at the end of Minion Minute.

This Minion Mayhem was built from the ground up and not taking over an existing ride. However it is the Hanna-Barabara set -up, not BTTF/Simpson's style and it's also the 2D version.

We finally got to encounter a Minion as we got off the ride.

I'm not the biggest fan of Minions but my son loves them and made me photograph a lot so enjoy the photo dump of Minions Land.

Part of his birthday treat was getting to eart at the Minions restaurant so we ordered a lot of food off the menu for him to try.

A very lucky bathroom break. Since there was no bathroom in the restaurant, we stepped outside and Gru and Lucy showed up just as we were heading back.

We rode this and broke down on it for a good 10-15 minutes before they could get it going again. Not sure if it was having a bad day but it was getting stuck quite often throughout the day and when eating. 

A huge thanks to Dejiki who recommended using the Minion Minute to get photo ops with the Minions. We headed over as they were dancing to where we knew they'd taken pictures and were first in line. After the VIPs had been through hr got a 'birthday hug' from the Minions.
 
This stilt walker was also amazing, dancing and singing happy birthday in the Singapore heat takes more skills than I'll ever have.

And we just managed to get the second Minion photo op as well at the other end of the street,

Sesame Street had dropped to a 5 minute line and was the only new ride except Minions I hadn't experienced. I still have no idea what this ride was about.

Transformers had gone from a 60 minute line to walk-on and I really love the Spider-Man ride system (fingers crossed the rumors about the Godzilla vs Kong ride coming to Lotte World are true) so we grabbed a few rides.


And Megatron finally made an appearance. To a 9-year old he said:

A birthday boy!
Good!
Then you can recognize yet another insignificant day in your meaningless life!

He was very happy to have finally gotten roasted by Megatron.



Mummy was still down but my son worked up the courage to ride the Human side. It was running two trains, so the wait was about 40 minutes. Surprisingly, he then decided to brave Cylon. However, that only had one train so the wait was over 60 minutes since here too there were a lot of fast pass riders. If it's not duelling, I really wish they could figure out some system for loose items. They wanded you at the start of the line but then also at the end anyway. The cattle pens really crawled when there's nothing to do or look at. The Battlestar theme doesn't seem to have aged that well because nobody at all was watching the screens or characters.

Speaking of crawling lines. Mummy finally reopened with a 30 minute wait but.... for whatever reason they were only running one station and despite five trains only allowing one onto the track and double stacking them behind the unload. Since it'd been down all day, there was also a lot of fast pass people to get through so we ended up with a much, much longer wait.

Since the Waterworld show wasn't operating we'd planned to spend the last two hours at the Jurassic section (60 minute lines) and then grab Puss in Boots last (90 minute line). However, we'd lost some time broken down on the Minion ride and both in the Mummy line when it broke down and reduced operations so we gave the kid a choice: Puss in Boots or Jurassic roller-coaster and rapids. He chose Jurassic.

Rapid was down from 60 minutes to a 20-minute line so we jumped in line. It broke down and as we waited in the line the clock ticked closer and closer to closing time. After a good 30-40 minutes we bailed so he could choose a birthday gift from the Minion Store.

He was quite bummed he'd made the wrong choice and missed out, and it seemed a shame to end his birthday trip on a downer so I took a chance....



... we went to guest services and I was honest. 'We broke down in the Jurassic line and he missed out. It's my fault but we'll probably never be back in Singapore and we're staying on the island. Is there anyway if I bring him tomorrow he can get the ride he missed?'

I honestly expected a 99% chance of them saying sorry for the break-down but things just happen but at least wanted to show my son we tried. They asked if that was our only break-down so again I was honest and said we got stuck on the balloon ride and the Mummy line. They asked for times which thankfully we had from photos or messages and they then checked on the computer to verify the rides had gone down at those times.

We were told to come back an hour after opening the next day (Opening being too busy for guest services) and we'd be allowed two rides of our choice. He asked for Jurassic rapids and coaster but since Canopy Flyers doesn't have an express line it was changed to Puss in Boots.


A really lovely worker met us and was so amazing. She could have easily rushed us through for our rides and gotten out as quick as possible but she took so much time. As she escorted us to Jurassic she took us on a path through Minion Land and Far Far Away with photo spots stopping and taking pictures. When we arrived at Jurassic since the rain had just passed through, Canopy Flyers had only a 10 minute line. She couldn't escort us but trusted my son not to run off and let him grab that extra credit he missed so he was really over the moon. We then finally got the rapids ride done.

And escorted onto Puss in Boots....

.. and in a really lovely gesture let him have a birthday meet and greet with Po and Tigress on the way out of the park as well as gifting him a birthday popcorn when she could of easily just made us leave.

After which we really had to leave. If you made it this far, thank you for reading.

[jedimaster1227]

Great report! As of the two remaining Universal destinations I've yet to experience firsthand, I appreciate seeing these kinds of updates on how the park is doing! Thank you for sharing this with us!

[Ed Farmer]

Glad that worked out for you at the end- really neat of them to do that.

[Nrthwnd]

Now that's what I'd call " Awesome Customer Service!" Glad it worked out for your birthday boy...and all those hugs, and popcorn, too!