The live entertainment team at Universal Creative, the designers and writers behind Universal theme parks, was smaller in those days, well before its ranks swelled thanks to the growth of the annual Halloween Horror Nights events. The success of the initial Universal appearances led to the announcement of a permanent Barney show to open in 1995 - a rare instance where a theme park built an attraction at the height of an intellectual property’s popularity. In-person appearances garnered huge crowds, with one stop at a Maryland mall that year attracting 40,000 people.Īn early Barney appearance at Universal Studios Florida (Universal) At the time, “Barney & Friends” was being watched by an estimated 5 million children every week on PBS stations and sold $500 million in merchandise annually. Universal’s answer was a big purple dinosaur.įrom temporary attraction to permanent showīarney was the hottest brand in kids’ entertainment when the character first appeared at Universal Studios Florida in 1993 for a series of special shows at the park’s Animal Actors stage. “Its biggest criticism was that there was lots of stuff for older kids, teenagers, young adults, but it didn’t have anything to really please little kids the way that the attractions at the Magic Kingdom did.” “That was, from the very start, Universal’s biggest weakness,” said Seth Kubersky, author of “The Unofficial Guide to Universal Orlando” and a former Universal team member. With its opening day disaster long forgotten, a new Jaws ride in operation by 1993 and additions like Back to the Future: The Ride, the park’s “Ride the Movies” motif of high-tech, often high-thrill attractions appeared to have found its audience.īut there was one glaring problem: that audience didn’t appear to include younger kids. theme parks.īeginning with its first full year of operation in 1991, Universal consistently recorded the highest attendance of any non-Disney theme park in the U.S. It didn’t take long after Universal Studios Florida’s 1990 opening for the Orlando park to carve out an enviable spot among U.S.
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