The TV Critics press tour began yesterday with a day of set visits, mostly accomplished between the neighboring sets of Fox and Universal, up and around the narrow roads usually traversed by trams full of tourists.
Trams and visits seems at time to be the chief bread and butter of these sprawling hills of facades and empty city sets. As much care seems to be taken to bring trams into tour-made attractions turned rides like the earthquake hitting the subway station, the mechanical Jaws jumping out of a pond or the new “King Kong” ride, which is essentially a 360-degree 3D screen around a rattling tram affixed with fake dinosaur spit (which turns out to be refreshingly cold water).
The bus driver taking the biggest coach bus from the Beverly Hilton to Universal kept getting stuck on different turns up hills and had to be carefully backed down. The clock was rolling on the availability of the cast of “Desperate Housewives” on Wisteria Lane, but the bus at one point seemed to stop.
Well, after what seemed like a simple turn (many of us had been on the Universal set visit tour tram so knew it was north of the Jaws pond), we got there fine, with plenty of time.
Next stop was Warner Brothers, where they welcomed critics in the theater for a longish session on the new animation there made to seem longer by the fact that they’d never go to the critics for questions. This was supposed to be a press conference, after all. Like many panels, this one seemed still recovering from Comic-Con, where presentations like this are considered successful. Eventually reporters got to ask a few questions.
There was a lunch there after, and people could pose with big plush walkaround Bugs and Daffy and Scooby-Doo characters who were not otherwise available for comment. They served pizza and salad and odd cereal-based deserts. But also, they had a plate of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, apropos of nothing. There was no Elvis cartoon show coming for example. It was the only time I had seen such cuisine offered outside of Graceland.
To kill some time, critics were taken on the “highlights” tour of the WB set, something I had paid to see only a couple years ago. The tourguide was chirpy and full of information, but didn’t quite react to the fact that their trams were full of critics who knew more useless TV trivia than they could imagine. No need to drive by a set and say, “for those of you who remember the series ‘Friends’”…
Still, it’s always amazing to drive around these backlots and see the house where James Dean lived in “East of Eden” (also used for a dozen other productions), or the storefront where “House of Wax” came. Along all the forgettable stuff made here, there was occasionally greatness on these tram-tred roads too.