Welcome to For Your Amusement, a theme park podcast that aims to exhaustively evaluate the world's most popular theme park attractions to determine if they are world class.

I'm Ryan Bergara.

I'm Byron Marin.

And for this episode's featured attraction, we heal the ouch of the green planet so we can hang with our guy, an ET adventure in Universal Studios, Orlando. And joining us today on The Pedals is none other than Jenny Nicholson. That's me. Thank you for joining us here in the Tiki Room. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And, you know, this will please a lot of you. A lot of you were requesting Jenny and I was reading those comments and being like, we are going to have Jenny on the show, but I didn't want to reveal it. When it comes to the show, we have our guests pick the rides, and you picked E.T. Adventure. Do you want to give a little spiel on why? I love it so much, so that's why I picked it. It's definitely not like your marquee attraction, though. It's not like your rise of the resistance or something like that. Yeah, it's underappreciated, I think. And I think it feels like a ride from a bygone era. I agree with that. It's like old universal. Yeah. And I will put the disclaimer here that I am not questioning that in the sense of like I don't believe

it's a worthy attraction. This is actually one of my favorite rides of all time. Good.

Pass the first test, nailed it. But Jenny, this must mean that you're a massive fan of the

film, right? I still have not seen the film. But I have been on the ride. That is bonkers. That's like me when I first watched Waterworld, the show. I didn't even know there was a movie. No, there's the same thing. It's fine. Yeah, the show is way better. But E.T. Come on now. It's a classic. I've probably seen it when I was very young. But if I have, I don't remember it. So, but I do know what happens. Now, Byron is going to deliver the history here. Since this is your ride, I imagine you're already an expert on this. So if you have any comments, critiques, just go ahead and interrupt him and be like, hey, that's wrong. Okay. Step on in. Let us know if we bot to add on. If you want to add on. I'm here to learn.

I'm excited.

All right.

Let's get into it. June 11th, 1982. The Steven Spielberg directed film E.T. The extraterrestrial gets its theatrical release. The film surpasses Star Wars to become the highest grossing film of all time, a record that E.T. held for 11 years, eventually bested by another little Steven Spielberg flick entitled Jurassic Park in 1993. But as for E.T., a few years after the film's

massive theatrical hall, and roughly 20 years after Universal Studios Hollywood officially opened

as a theme park, that would be July of 1964,

Universal began development on their second theme park

to take place in Orlando, Florida.

They bring on Steven Spielberg as a creative consultant,

which naturally leads to the team's interest

in creating an attraction based on the world's new,

favorite little alien.

Steven Spielberg and at the time Universal VP Peter Alexander, who by the way was a former college roommate of Steven Spielberg's, um, spearheads the creative process on the ET ride,

and they are met with the challenge of condensing the two-hour emotional arc from the film

into an experience that is over in a matter of minutes.

Alexander pitches the idea of featuring elements

...