Expanding Epic Universe, Part II: An Armchair-Imagineered Build-Out of Universal Orlando’s Cosmic Theme Park

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: ISLE OF BERK

Background

Thanks to the long-running Shrek 4D – a staple of Universal Studios theme parks – you’d be forgiven for thinking that DreamWorks Animation has always been a division of Universal. But actually, DreamWorks Animation was only acquired by Comcast (and therefore, nested under Universal Pictures) in 2016. The $3.8 billion deal was – by the numbers – equivalent to Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm or Marvel, and (alongside Illumination) provided Universal with two in-house animation studios – just like Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar at Disney. Of course, just ask an animation fan and they’ll tell you a myriad of ways – for better and worse – that DreamWorks is different from both.

Listen, it’s fair in some ways to generalize that as a whole, DreamWorks Animation tends to be less… shall we say, timeless than Disney or Pixar. Thanks to the studio’s breakthrough with 2001’s Shrek, DreamWorks has never shied away from (again, I’m painting with an intentionally broad brush here) fart jokes, top 40 soundtracks, “stunt casting,” and a general kind of irreverence and modernity that Disney and Pixar tend to avoid. To be fair, DreamWorks went the earnest route (The Price of Egypt! Chicken Run! Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron! Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas!) and saw that none of it did Shrek business. Ergo, Shrek 2, 3, 4, and soon 5; Shark Tale; Bee Movie; Megamind; Kung Fu Panda; The Boss Baby; Captain Underpants; Trolls.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that and there’s clearly a place for it, but it is nice to find the standouts in DreamWorks’ catalogue and embrace them for their heart. There’s no question that one is 2010’s How To Train Your Dragon. A vast expansion and reinterpretation of a Cressida Cowell novel, the film takes place on the Isle of Berk – a far-flung fantasy world where Vikings live in constant battle with dragons. Despite society’s insistence that humans and dragons can never coexist, Hiccup (the awkward son of the island’s chieftain) befriends “Toothless” – a rare and deadly “Night Fury” species of dragon – suggesting that maybe humans and dragons are better together…

Imagine if you will a DreamWorks Animation film with a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes. This was a film that rose above the admittedly often-timely output people had come to expect from DreamWorks post-Shrek, and launched its own media franchise with a second (2014) and third (2019) entry, three television series, six short films, comic books, graphics novels, an arena show, and a Disney-style live-action remake in 2025, just about all of which has been met with universal critical acclaim.

But altogether, what’s clear about the Dragon franchise is that it connects. Heartfelt, grand in scale, and yes, “epic,” the series already has the emotional makings of a theme-park-able IP. But even better, it has the physical world of one, too, via the Isle of Berk – a hyper-saturated world of stylized characters, cliff faces, flame roasted meats, mead halls, and all manner of Viking contraptions.

As we previously discussed, there’s also the pre-Universal licensing of the series to a number of theme parks, including a family land at Germany’s Heide Park, the aforementioned dark ride at Dubai’s MotionGate, and a racing waterslide at the DreamWorks Water Park at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.

Which brings us here – to the Isle of Berk at Universal Epic Universe. Aside from Celestial Garden, the Isle of Berk is certainly the largest land at the park in terms of circulation space, and arguably the most “built-out”, too. When guests step through the portal, they first emerge in a rocky outcropping where a log is carved with the “first touch” between Hiccup and Toothless – really, all the prologue we need to understand what’s come before and led us here.

From there, guests emerge on a dock across the water from the island proper. The Isle of Berk is a land of plenty, in this case including plenty of things to do and see. Attraction wise, there are three rides – more than any other land in the real-life Epic Universe, including Celestial Park, mind you – plus at least three other “attractions” that you wouldn’t want to miss.

For example, there’s DRAGON RACER’S RALLY – a dual/duel installation of the (rare in the U.S.) Gerstlauer Sky Fly flat ride. These are really cool rides where riders load into one of twelve individual seats suspended from a platform overhead. The platform (attached to a giant, leaning arm) lifts and begins to revolve, rising and falling in arcs. Each seat, meanwhile, comes with two articulating wings that can be rocked forward, backward, together, or independently to cause the rider to tilt side to side or – with enough practice and momentum – even completely turn upside down.

Narratively, it also introduces one of the key components of rides in Isle of Berk – that they’re hearty, wooden, Viking-built trials designed to prepare us for training real dragons. It’s a very smart “wrap” that demonstrates how even an immersive land can put flat rides front and center. The problem is that a Sky Fly holds 12 passengers. So if you cut the ride cycle as short as reasonably possible, its theoretical hourly capacity is 360 people per hour. That means that even Universal’s doubled version would be able to handle 720 people per hour best case scenario, which is capacity equivalent of California Adventure’s Golden Zephyr. That might be okay if Dragon Racers didn’t look a whole lot more like a “gotta-try-it” experience, and wasn’t 1/11th of the park’s entire ride count.

Elsewhere in the land, VIKING TRAINING CAMP provides a single-entrance family exploration zone whose closest comparison would be Islands’ Camp Jurassic. The multi-level zone includes climbing towers, slides, suspension bridges, an agility course, an interactive sheep-launcher game, and sections devoted entirely to toddler-aged explorers.

The “no height requirement” appeal continues with FYRE DRILL, that interactive Splash Battle ride that I already accidentally let slip isn’t going to survive my build-out and instead is “relocated” in a sense to Celestial Garden.

While Isle of Berk doesn’t have a Wand or Power-Up Band equivalent, you could probably spend an entire afternoon scouring the land for dragons, which are located everywhere in the land – a surprising number as full motion animatronic figures. It’s actually hard to overstate how alive the Isle of Berk is; through that lens, perhaps the most “living” of all the Living Lands.

It’s just filled with dragons. Dragons that blow ice breath. Dragons that are asleep. Dragons who power “family driers.” Dragons who fight over fish. Dragons hiding in their houses. Coming soon, Dragons who literally fly overhead (thanks to a small army of drones). And of course, the much-social-media’ed HADDOCK PADDOCK where you can meet the real, life-sized Toothless in one of the most talked-about meet-and-greets ever.

The main attraction is HICCUP’S WING GLIDERS. This coaster is often described as a family-sized version of Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure, which is a pretty apt comparison. Both rides are manufactured by Intamin; both are multi-launch, forward-backward coasters; both stick low to the ground as terrain-hugging rides; and both again demonstrate Universal’s belief that earth-toned coaster track can exist in these immersive worlds as long as the resulting ride experience is worth the intrusion.

On Hiccup’s Wing Gliders, it is. Trains roll out of the loading station and into a hut where Hiccup plans to attach the (necessary) wings to our Wing Glider trains… but a frustrated Toothless (via a full-scaled animatronic) huffs and puffs and hits the launch button, dropping counterweights and sending the trains soaring out over the lagoon, diving under bridges, and rolling into a “Gronkle” nest before a final launch gives us the soaring, majestic free flight to the film’s iconic score that we’ve been waiting for. It’s arguably over too soon and another 500 feet of track would’ve really made this a standout, but there’s no doubt this is the land’s E-Ticket.

(Not for nothing, but I do think the name of the coaster and the Sky Fly should probably be swapped. Even though we just mentioned Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure, I still think “[Characters] [Adjective] [Noun]” inherently feels very “supporting flat ride” to me anyway, and “Hiccup’s Wing Gliders” seems especially fitting for a ride where you actually manipulate wings to glide. Meanwhile, in my opinion, “Dragon Racers Rally” sounds like the name of a headlining launched coaster that races through the land, but y’know, just my opinion.)

The land also includes a 1,000 seat theater showing THE UNTRAINABLE DRAGON – a show that actually debuted at Universal Studios Beijing in 2021 to rave reviews, and thus made the move to Epic Universe. Here, this massive pageant of projections, stunts, and gargantuan puppets is contextualized more as an “in-universe” tribute to the story of how Vikings and Dragons came together, which fits beautifully in the land. It’s definitely a “non-ride” headliner and shouldn’t be counted out of the park’s overall appeal!

The result is that the land, as it exists today, is pretty satisfyingly “complete.” We have a thrilling family coaster, a thrilling flat ride, an all-ages water ride, an exploration area, and a major theatrical production all in one land. It’s also physically full, with very little space to expand or add, which speaks to Universal’s commitment to stocking this park’s “family land” with plenty to do from the get-go. So I didn’t have to do much here…

Build-Out

This is definitely the least radical expansion or build-out in the park, and it’s also one that I think is fairly obvious. In addition to the subtraction we already acknowledged (Fyre Drill), I have made three additions to the Isle of Berk.

The first is HOOLIGAN HURL, a Zamperla Disk’o. These rides can be found at a number of amusement parks, but have never yet been incorporated in Orlando or California’s major parks. These things are a lot of fun. There are various models of various sizes, but the one I’ve penciled in here is the largest and most elaborate. The ride vehicle contained 40 riders facing outward from a circular ride platform. A “Flight of Passage” style restraint rises and rests against riders’ backs. The disk then begins its powered journey along a “W” shaped track layout, increasing in speed as it rocks back and forth over the central hill, all while the ride platform rotates.

Given Berk’s ability to absorb and wrap flats, I think this is a perfect place to make it happen, and even better, a park already gave this model of ride a “Viking” design overlay, which at least gives us a glimpse into what the ride can look like with a Berk-esque wrap, above! Sure, like all flat rides, it’s limited in capacity – only 600 people per hour – but if we think of this as a replacement for Fyre Drill and one component of a stacked land, it works!

Speaking of which, even though we’ve “replaced” Fyre Drill’s capacity with Hooligan Hurl and its ride experience with an equivalent attraction in Celestial Garden, we still have a gap to fill in the land: a no-height-requirement ride for the whole family. Universal is frequently chided for having not enough to do for families, so imagine if the clear “family land” at Epic Universe had nothing for kids under 40″ tall. My solution here is BERK BALLOONS – a Zamperla Balloon Race model flat ride, the same model as California Adventure’s Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind.

Here, in keeping with Berk’s framing device, we’d see this “wooden” contraption as an altitude test for young Vikings, preparing them to take to the skies on more elaborate trials like Dragon Racers Rally and the Wing Gliders as they grow. I liked the idea that the spherical “balloons” here would look like puffed up Gronkles, clearly crafted from fabric and carved wood pieces. The appearance, then, is that these crafted Gronkles would rise and fall, carrying baskets with riders as they take to the skies for their first intro to flight.

The reason Fyre Drill is gone, meanwhile, is to accommodate a new headliner that I think the park really, really needs: a Dragons dark ride. In the real world, Berk is the only “world” (other than Celestial Park) at Epic Universe that doesn’t have a dark ride. That’s okay, especially because the show certainly fulfills a lot of the same requirements (indoors, temperature controlled, “story-based,” etc.) But it does seem a shame to have such a rich, vibrant world have nothing else but outdoor coasters and flat rides. (Remember, parks in the Middle East and Germany have already seen the potential here and built Dragons dark rides, so imagine what Universal’s budget could do!)

My solution is SPITFYRE FALLS – an E-Ticket dark ride / flume ride in the style of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Since the “book report” is taken care of via the Untrainable show, this ride allows us to set off on a new adventure in the world of Dragons, providing Epic Universe with a summer-ready cool-down and yet another world class dark ride in one. For the mountain itself, I drew inspiration from early, unused concepts of Berk shared in The Art of How To Train Your Dragon by Tracey Miller-Zarneke.

One of the early concepts for bringing the world to life was that Berk should be a hostile world of contrasts – fire and ice, representing Dragons and Vikings. While that didn’t stick around in the final production design, necessarily, I thought that an adaptation of the concept should create a compellingly-intimidating peak, even if we replace the snow with grass so that it doesn’t feel too pulled out of the established universe. We’d still end up with a very compelling series of “lavafalls” and steaming lagoons chasms where the molten lava meets the cool ocean around Berk, creating a really compelling environment for Viking boats to set sail.

Since the “book report” is taken care of via the stage show, the result here would be that this new, unseen-on-screen place would serve as the setting of a totally original adventure through the world of Dragons.

Even wedging in these three attractions takes the removal of one and some serious “dreaminess” – which speaks to how full and built-out this world already is! But I still think it’s inherently a “plus” in the build-out sense since it gives Berk two new flat rides and an E-Ticket dark ride / flume ride – two things that benefit the land and brand while also strengthen Epic Universe as a whole. Which leaves us with a single remaining world to explore – the one on the park’s final, land-sized expansion pad…