While I’ve only been lucky enough to spend a single day at Epic Universe so far, that one day delivered one of the most incredible theme parks I’ve ever seen. As a mega-fan of themed entertainment and classic cinema, my favorite land in the park has to be the Universal Monsters-inspired Dark Universe. It has one of the best rides at all of Epic Universe, and boasts countless references to the classic Universal horror movies.
Dark Universe is technically set decades after the events of the movie Frankenstein, and the attraction The Frankenstein Experiment: Monsters Unchained introduces Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s granddaughter, Victoria, as the central character. However, the original Doctor from 1931's Frankenstein is seen via portrait in the ride’s queue. Chris Frisella, Executive Producer for the Dark Universe land recently told SFX on CinemaBlend that the team actually pulled out and dug through nearly 100-year-old contracts to be absolutely sure they had the rights to use the likeness of actor Colin Clive. He explained:
These are 100-year-old films, or younger, that are owned by Universal, but still there are agreements and contracts that were signed. So we have to go back and check those things. As we were looking at likeness rights, the legal team in Hollywood dug up the contract we had with [Frankenstein actor] Colin Clive to just check and make sure that we could use his likeness. Isn’t that crazy? We saw in that contract the ship that they had booked them on, to travel from London to the United States. It was just really cool stuff. And we discovered that we could use his likeness rights!
While the fact that Universal Pictures is over 100 years old is something I am consciously aware of, I’m not sure I ever considered that somewhere the company still has paperwork from that long ago. It’s blowing me away to think about some people digging through those documents in order to find the contract and verify what it said. Congratulations go to the lawyer who worded the contract in such a way that almost a century later Universal would be able to use Colin Clive’s likeness at a new theme park in Florida.
While Universal was welcoming visitors to its backlot as early as 1915, the Universal Studio Tour only celebrated its 60th anniversary last year. The rest of the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park came much later. There was certainly no way to know how Universal might want to use an actor's likeness decades later.
As with any theme park, it’s the little details that elevate the experience from something good to something great. A portrait of Dr. Victor Frankenstein that didn’t look like Colin Clive just wouldn’t have been the same. It's far from the only callback to the original Frankenstein that can be found in Dark Universe.
It was a somewhat lucky break that the contract gave Universal the rights to his likeness, I expect Universal would have gone to Clive’s family to try and get the rights if the contract didn’t already grant them, but the same thing would have been necessary if the contract simply couldn’t be found, which feels like the more likely result of trying to find a document after almost 100 years.
The fact that Dark Universe’s Victoria Frankenstein is canonically the granddaughter of the doctor from Universal’s original Frankenstein gives the already incredible attraction some extra weight. Monsters Unchained is the best attraction at Epic Universe, according to many, and these little details only make it better.
