A week before I left New Hampshire, I had the most bizarre dream.
As a kid, I was obsessed with Nickelodeon. If I had control of the television, it would be on 24-hours a day, every day with only the occasional interruption of Darkwing Duck on the Disney Channel, or Sailor Moon on Toonami. It defined my childhood in a number of different ways, and somewhat embarrassingly, helped make me who I am today. One of my most distinct memories of the channel was the small bumper at the end of all their live action programs, where a voice would proclaim that the show you'd just watched had been "filmed before a life studio audience at Nickelodeon Studios, at Universal Studios, Florida" while an image of the outrageously colored, animal print studio played beneath it. For those without this particular memory, the building in question looked like this:
As a kid, this was the ideal, and for a kid living up in New Hampshire, it was somewhat of an unobtainable ideal. Making it here was akin to reaching the Holy Land. I had had one chance to see it when I was around eight and my family took a trip to Disney World. While frantically scheduling our one week there, we kept trying to find a day to fit Universal in, and after much struggle I finally said "Let's just stay at Disney World." At that point, my thought was that the studio wasn't going anywhere. I'd have my whole life to see it, and thus, there was no rush. And Disney World had a castle.
Flash forward to 2005. Most of Nickelodeon's live action productions had moved to California, which meant that the building was purely being used for its "Studio Tour" attraction. However, with nothing happening in the studio, there was little for guests to actually tour, and attendance was dramatically low. After one last attempt at reviving the place with a new paint job and a few new shows, Nickelodeon decided to officially close the studio on April 30th, 2005. The iconic slime geyser in front of Sound Stage 18 was dismantled in May, and the famed "Nickelodeon splat sign" was removed in January 2006. The building stayed there, somewhat of a shell, until June 1, 2007, when just Stage 18 was remodeled into a theater for the Blue Man Group.
To say I was disappointed was somewhat of an understatement. I was sad, but I eventually realized that change is a rather fundamental part of life, and thus, I got over it. As a kid, I had gotten used to the idea that it was an unobtainable dream, so it wasn't hard to accept that, now that it was essentially gone, I would probably never see it. I moved on with my life. I became an adult, I started college, I saw an actual Holy Land, and at around the age of 22 decided to leave college for a bit and spend six months in South America.
And this is where things got a little weird.
About a week before I left, I had a dream that I was standing on the slime geyser. The sky was grey, and though it wasn't night, it certainly wasn't day. Nickelodeon Studios stood before me, the splat sign still there, but otherwise completely abandoned. Mark Summer (you know, the guy from Double Dare) stood as the sole other person in the area, and announced that it was time for Slime Time Live. He vanished, and I fell from the geyser into the slime. I looked around and saw a small garage next to the studio, where large, empty costumes of various Nickelodeon characters lay lifeless on the ground. I climbed back up the geyser for a better view of the studio, and as I stared at it, something about it seemed horrifically, profoundly wrong. I can't really explain what it was, but the sheer wrongness of it was so frightening that when I woke up, I had to desperately remind myself where I was.
It was a little perturbing.
As I packed and prepared myself, trying to find time to see my friends and family before I left, I kept going back to that dream. I'm not really one to put much stock in the importance of dreams. I think they're interesting, and important to consider, but beyond that, I've never really felt they have any particular real world context. Dreams and nightmares just happen, and as vivid or frightening as they may seem, they're ultimately just something you have to live with.
But this dream stuck with me. I couldn't decide if it was the atmosphere or the tone, or just the fact that it was seriously creepy, but for some reason, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was important.
A few days before I left I found out I had a layover in Orlando on my way to Bogota. The coincidence was not lost on me. It was only four hours long, which everyone told me was not enough time to leave the airport, but despite that, I began secretly plotting ways to get out to Universal City Walk where the former Holy Land of my childhood now stood. I knew it wasn't really Nickelodeon Studios anymore, and that everything that might have possibly marked it as such was probably gone, but for some reason I didn't care. I had to see it. I had to stand there and look up at the now nearly unrecognizable building and find the thing that had held so much meaning to me as a child. I'm sure there was some legitimate psychological reason for why this ridiculous thing was suddenly so damn important to me, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what it was.
Eventually, through all the obsessive planning and Google searching, I realized there was just no possible I would be able to fit it in without being in danger of missing my flight to Colombia. As I had done in my childhood, I resigned myself once again to being unable to make it to the studio. I put it to the back of my mind, and focused on the trip ahead. Packing, packing, and more packing.
Now, I have a complicated relationship with the concept of fate. I'm not sure if I'd be able to call something this relatively insignificant as an act of fortune or destiny, but when I arrived at Logan airport and was told I could catch an earlier flight to Orlando, giving me six hours instead of four, it certainly felt like some sort of bizarre, ridiculous sign.
Throughout the flight, I struggled with what to do. Six hours was still not much time, and finding a way to get from the airport to Universal would be difficult, and possibly expensive. I asked around and discovered from the person sitting next to me that there was a shuttle that could take me there and back for around twenty dollars, and that as long as I reserved it the second I got off the plane, it could probably get me back in time. Still, I struggled. This was crazy. It was risky and insane and all it would get me was a look at a big blue building and a sunburn. The smart thing would have been to do what I had previously done, and stayed safely at the airport without making my trip any more complicated than it already was.
But then, was that really why I was going on this trip? I thought back to when I originally made the decision, to when I was depressed and trapped, dealing with something frighteningly mature and feeling as if I had little control over it. I had wanted an adventure. I had wanted to leave my familiar, comforting world and do something completely different - something with meaning, and intrigue, and a kind of excitement I'd yet to experience. This was my time to do something crazy, something totally, personally insane.
When I got off the plane I had made a decision. Too many things had fallen into place. The dream, the layover, the sudden extended time, sitting right next to the person with shuttle information - it was as if every time I had tried to retreat into habit, to return to that childhood resignation that this plan was impossible, something happened to make it easier for me. As ridiculous as it sounds, it was almost as if the universe itself wanted me to be there. And rather than second guessing myself, rather than giving in to the safe, easy route, as soon as I left the terminal, I headed for the shuttle area - and low and behold, there was one right about to leave.
I was there within an hour.
The building now looks like this:
It's blue and white rather than green and orange, there's no slime geyser, and sound stage 18 has been replaced with the looming faces of the Blue Man Group. But you can still see it. You can see the stairs that were once bright yellow, and and the same weird, random pillars that made the place distinct. If you look hard enough, there are certain places that haven't even bothered to disguise the building's roots. I confused several other tourists by nearly screaming when I found this:
It was a strange, bizarre victory. After years of being convinced I would never make it, after so much change and growth and moving on, I finally stood outside Nickelodeon Studios. Even though it was blue, I can now say I've been there through no one's efforts but my own and the oddly accommodating universe. I wanted to do something I'd never done - something I'd always wanted to do but had never gotten the chance - and so, I set out on my own and did it.
It is with that spirit that I began this trip. And in a slightly less life-affirming way, it within that same spirit that I begin this blog.
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