“Universal Fan Fest Nights” is a weirdly muted name for what has quickly become Universal Hollywood’s best event. It evokes meet-and-greets and celebrity signings, fans lining up at folding tables in stark convention centers to spend a few seconds with a Star Trek actor. Last year’s debut Fan Fest made it clear Universal had far grander ambitions, though; its Star Trek experience took guests through a detailed recreation of the Enterprise, using Hollywood-quality sets, special effects, and live actors to immerse them in an original story aboard the iconic ship. Fan Fest Nights is a cousin to the company’s beloved Halloween Horror Nights event, turning fictional stories into short-lived physical realities, but with a greater emphasis on interaction and narrative; it accomplishes much of what Disney’s ill-fated Galactic Starcruiser hotel aspired to, without the risk of becoming known (perhaps unwarrantedly) as an all-time disaster. As theme parks have fully settled on exploiting popular intellectual properties instead of creating new concepts, Fan Fest represents a constant rotation of fresh but familiar experiences to keep guests coming through the gate, without the expense or construction time of permanent new attractions.
This year’s event, which runs at Universal Hollywood on select nights through May 16, brings back one of last year’s standout experiences, while using new ones to experiment with how to tell these kinds of stories. And although nothing at Fan Fest Nights is even interested in shooting for the quality and depth of immersive theater like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, it still shows how uniquely powerful theme parks are at letting us live the unreal, even if only for a very short time.
Returning from last year is Dungeons & Dragons: Secrets Of Waterdeep, where a dwarf and a horned tiefling guide guests through their own D&D adventure. The story’s nothing special—there’s a magical MacGuffin you need to find before your evil enemy can—but the experience’s design is fantastic; it smartly condenses the core of Dungeons & Dragons into an easily digestible, 10-minute quest that you can commit to as wholly or partially as you like. Its most striking moments come from a pair of unexpected visitors, an animatronic Mimic that snaps at one of your guide’s hands as they reach for what they assume is a treasure chest, and an enormous, lifelike Beholder created by Jim Henson Productions. The reveal of Xanathar—a character whose history stretches back to 1987—is truly jawdropping, as he appears to float above his perch with his eye, mouth, and tentacles constantly moving. It’s such an impressive spectacle that it actually makes it hard to focus on the story, with all your attention beholding this creature instead of listening to your hosts’ dialogue. Secrets Of Waterdeep isn’t quite the ideal execution of the whole Fan Fest Nights concept—its strictly linear story doesn’t really give guests any agency—but its sterling production values should serve as a measuring stick for any future additions to the event.
One of this year’s new experiences offers a more bespoke story, letting guests approach its plot points in their own order and at their own pace, while also having them engage more actively with the story. Scooby-Doo X Universal Monsters is essentially a live episode of the cartoon, complete with barely-explained cameos from the Universal Monsters. And it makes full use of Universal’s status as an actual movie lot, letting guests roam through the same Little Europe set that many of those classic horror films were shot on. (Today’s buildings aren’t the same ones you’ll see in those movies, though; they were rebuilt after a fire in the ’60s.) A masked villain called The Phantom Director is trying to shut down production of a film, and guests help Scooby and the gang crack the case. You’ll find clues by solving puzzles at four different stations, each one staffed by an actor playing one of Scooby’s pals, there for a photo or to help explain the puzzles. A colorful booklet serves as both a place to write down the clues and as a free keepsake to take home at the end of the night. Every few minutes the lights dim, the music stirs, and the Phantom Director, the masked villain of the piece, calls upon Dracula or The Bride to scare away those meddling kids. It all culminates in a grand finale that recreates the stock Scooby-Doo cartoon ending in Little Europe’s Court Of Miracles, with the gang unmasking the saboteur trying to shut down production of a film.
This doesn’t just tell a story; it basically turns it into a game, an escape room-style interactive experience spread throughout a small fake village you might recognize from shows like The Good Place. It captures the child-friendly tone and atmosphere of the original Scooby-Doo cartoon to a surprising degree, with a clever bit of knowing humor absent in the strictly for-kids TV show. It’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to living in a Scooby-Doo mystery, and it could only be done this well as this kind of live, immersive theater; if it was a ride or staged attraction, it wouldn’t have the participatory spark that really makes it work.
There’s more to do at Fan Fest Nights this year—a One Piece stunt show is particularly good, and especially popular—but the Dungeons & Dragons and Scooby-Doo experiences best display the strength of this kind of entertainment. These aren’t just meet and greets or well-dressed walkthroughs; they use the immediacy of theater and the transformative power of theme park design to create something you’ll feel and remember and could never experience otherwise. That’s exactly what theme parks should offer, and other parks better be looking at Universal Fan Fest Nights for inspiration.
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