"We're confident that our King Kong attraction is the largest, most intense 3-D experience on the planet," and that's no idle boast coming from the mouth of spectacle maven Peter Jackson. He's talking about King Kong 360 3-D, which starts beating its chest July 1 at the Universal Studioses Hollywood theme park.
"Our intention was to create an enormously spectacular and immersive 3-D experience and we're pretty confident we've done that," added Jackson, who developed the attraction after directing 2005's King Kong remake.
Here's how it works: Visitors wearing 3-D glasses get on a tram and enter a darkened soundstage that projects, via Surround Digital 3-D projection, the wild Skull Island environment complete with raptors and dinosaurs. Then King Kong, visualized as a 6,000-pound silverback gorilla, makes his entrance and does battle with a giant Tyrannosaurus rex.
The Skull Island setting is built on the ashes of the theme park's original animatronic King Kong, which was destroyed in a 2008 fire. Jackson decided a mechanistic reworking of the beast would be less scary than this immersive, funhouse-on-steroids approach. "Presenting King Kong in 3-D at 60 frames a second with interactive movement and effects," he said in a statement, "is more realistic than an animatronic would ever be."
Check the Universal Studioses Hollywood website for King Kong 360 3-D details.
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