Universal Studios Hollywood, Studio Tour · 1975 to 2013
The tram stayed level the whole time. The tunnel was what turned.
For close to forty years the Studio Tour drove trams through a tunnel that felt like it was flipping them over, even though the tram stayed on a flat road the whole time. The tunnel itself was a huge painted drum turning around that road, and that was enough to make people grab the rail. It opened in 1975 as the Glacier Avalanche, was repainted for Dante’s Peak in 1997 and The Mummy in 2001, and closed on September 3, 2013. Fast & Furious Supercharged was built in its place, and that ride has since closed too.
Step 1 of 4
The tram drives straight through on a level road. The road is held up from outside the tunnel at both ends, so it never touches the walls.
The real drum speed was never published, so the speeds here are only for the demo.
Since 1915
Carl Laemmle opened Universal City to visitors in 1915. For 25 cents you could watch movies being made. The tram tour as we know it started on July 15, 1964, with the striped Glamor Trams.
By the 1970s, driving past sets wasn’t enough anymore, and Universal started building things that happened to the tram.
The disaster years
1973 brought the parting of the Red Sea and a burning house. 1974 added a rockslide and a collapsing bridge. 1975 was a runaway train and the Glacier Avalanche, and in 1976 the shark from JAWS showed up.
The avalanche was tied to The Eiger Sanction, a 1975 Clint Eastwood thriller set on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. Trams drove into an ice cave, and then the cave started to turn.
Sensurround
Universal had just used Sensurround in theaters for Earthquake. It was a set of huge low frequency speakers that made the whole room shake, and they put it in the tunnel too.
The walls, the noise and the shaking all told you the same thing, and that’s a big part of why people bought it. Any one of them on its own probably wouldn’t have done much.
1997 to 2025
The ice theme didn’t last, but the drum did. In 1997 it was repainted as a lava filled mine shaft for Dante’s Peak, and in May 2001 it became an ultraviolet tomb for The Mummy, with glowing Warrior Mummies added in 2006. The machine underneath stayed the same through all of it.
The tunnel closed on September 3, 2013 and was torn down later that month. Fast & Furious Supercharged opened on the site on June 25, 2015, and according to TheStudioTour.com the motor that used to turn the drum was set up in the first scene as a tribute. Supercharged closed for good on March 10, 2025, and Universal hasn’t said what will replace it or what happens to the motor.
Tap any case for a closer look.
Rob Young, CC BY 2.0Visitors pay 25 cents to watch films being shot.
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Photos from Wikimedia Commons under the licences listed, plus frames from the JPLAND21 Shorts.