On This Day: June 7, 1990 — Universal Studios Florida Opens

The Universal Studios Florida opening day on June 7, 1990 cost $631 million, took years to build, and was supposed to bury Disney-MGM Studios — the rival park that had beaten it to market by 13 months. Steven Spielberg cut the ribbon at 10:00 a.m. By noon, the King Kong ride was dead, the Jaws boats had thrown a fit, and Earthquake had stopped shaking. About a thousand of the 10,000 guests lined up at Guest Services demanding their money back. One man told a local reporter, “Disney doesn’t have anything to worry about.” It is, without exaggeration, one of the most disastrous grand openings in theme park history — and also one of the most fondly remembered, because if you grew up in the 90s, it was still magic.

The $631 Million Bet That Almost Buried Universal

MCA Universal had been kicking the idea of a Florida theme park around since the late 1960s. By the time it broke ground in 1988, it was no longer optional — Disney had already announced Disney-MGM Studios, set to open in May 1989. If Universal didn’t move fast, every kid east of the Mississippi was going to grow up thinking “studio tour” meant Mickey Mouse.

So Universal moved fast. They spent $631 million, which in 1990 dollars was a number that made Wall Street wince. They built 444 acres of soundstages, streets, lagoons, and animatronics. They convinced Steven Spielberg to sign on as a creative consultant. They locked in Nickelodeon — the hottest brand in kid TV — to anchor a production studio on-site. And they promised twelve major attractions on opening day, exactly double what Disney-MGM had launched with thirteen months earlier.

The plan was to overwhelm. The result was a fiasco that everyone involved would spend the next two years trying to outlive.

Ribbon Cutting at 10 AM, Catastrophe by Noon

Spielberg did the honors. Michael J. Fox was there, fresh off Back to the Future Part III, which had hit theaters two weeks earlier. Sylvester Stallone showed up too. The Orlando sun was already baking the asphalt by mid-morning, and 10,000 guests poured through the gates past the giant gold Universal globe.

The first hour went fine. Then, like dominoes, the headline rides started dropping.

Kongfrontation — the ride where a 13,000-pound, 39-foot-tall King Kong animatronic was supposed to grab your gondola over the East River — broke down before lunch. It would not consistently work all summer. It officially “reopened” August 4, 1990, almost two months after the park’s grand opening. Earthquake: The Big One, which simulated an 8.3-magnitude quake destroying a BART subway station, also went down repeatedly throughout the day. The biggest disaster of all was Jaws.

Jaws: The Ride That Ate $45 Million and Closed for Two Years

The Jaws attraction was supposed to be the centerpiece. Guests boarded a tour boat captained by a Skipper, motored out into a recreated Amity Harbor, and got attacked by a 32-foot, multi-ton hydraulic great white. On paper, it was supposed to rival Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean for engineering ambition.

On June 7, 1990, it did not work. By all reports, it had not worked properly during testing either. The hydraulic system controlling Bruce the shark was overloading constantly, the boats kept missing their cues, and the show building was reportedly flooding. Universal closed Jaws for most of opening day, then quietly shuttered it permanently on September 30, 1990 — just three and a half months after opening.

The company sued the original designer, Ride & Show Engineering, for $40 million. They hired Oceaneering International — the same firm that worked on deep-sea submersibles — to rebuild the entire attraction from scratch. The new Jaws ride didn’t open until 1993. By then, the park had quietly become profitable, but the original Jaws had become legend: the most expensive ride that never really ran.

The Ones That Worked: Ghostbusters, E.T., Hitchcock, Murder She Wrote

The same day that Kong, Jaws, and Earthquake imploded, four attractions just quietly did their jobs. The Ghostbusters Spooktacular ran every 25 minutes — a 12-minute live show featuring the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, four Ghostbusters proton-packing it out, and a final blast of confetti that absolutely melted Gen X kids who’d worn out their VHS copies of the film.

The E.T. Adventure was the other crown jewel that worked. Spielberg himself had insisted that the queue smell like a pine forest, that the bicycles really lift off the floor, and that E.T. say each guest’s name as they left. It still operates today — the only opening-day ride at Universal Studios Florida that has never closed.

The Murder, She Wrote Mystery Theatre and the Alfred Hitchcock: The Art of Making Movies show also ran without incident. Both were walk-through attractions, which is probably why they didn’t break — there were no hydraulic sharks involved.

Nickelodeon Studios Opens the Same Day — And Slime Geyser #1 Erupts

Lost in the chaos of broken thrill rides was something genuinely revolutionary. June 7, 1990 was also the day Nickelodeon Studios opened — the first television production facility in the world built specifically for kids’ programming. The 50,000-square-foot complex housed two soundstages, a Gak Kitchen where the green slime was actually mixed, and a public studio tour where every kid in the audience knew there was a non-zero chance of getting slimed.

The 17-foot Slime Geyser out front erupted for the first time that morning. Eyewitness accounts describe kids sprinting from the Universal globe at the front gate all the way across the park just to be there for the first green plume. Over the next 15 years, Nickelodeon Studios produced more than 2,000 episodes of shows like Double Dare, Legends of the Hidden Temple, GUTS, and Clarissa Explains It All. At its peak, it employed 400 people and pumped $110 million a year into Florida’s economy.

It closed for good on April 30, 2005, after Nickelodeon consolidated production in Los Angeles. The building is still there. The Slime Geyser is not.

Kongfrontation: 13,000 Pounds of Animatronic Ape

When Kongfrontation finally started running consistently in August 1990, it was a marvel. Two King Kong animatronics — each 13,000 pounds, 39 feet tall, with a 54-foot arm span — alternated turns reaching for your tram as it dangled 32 feet above a recreated New York East River. The ride incorporated banana breath. Actual banana-scented air blew at you when Kong roared. That detail, more than the engineering, is what survivors of the ride remember 35 years later.

Kongfrontation closed for good in 2002 to make room for Revenge of the Mummy. The two Kongs were dismantled. One animatronic head reportedly ended up at the Universal Orlando warehouse. The ride lives on only in fan tribute videos and the occasional Easter egg in newer Universal attractions.

Earthquake: The Big One — Charles Bronson’s Last Theme Park Job

The Earthquake: The Big One ride was based on the 1974 Charlton Heston disaster movie, which is a strange choice — by 1990 the movie was already 16 years old and largely forgotten outside late-night cable. But the attraction itself was a banger. You boarded a BART subway car at the “Embarcadero” station, the lights flickered, and an 8.3 magnitude quake hit. Sections of ceiling collapsed. A propane truck plunged toward you through a wall. Water flooded the platform. Charlton Heston narrated the pre-show.

It also did not work on opening day. The hydraulic systems for the collapsing platform reportedly fried in the Florida humidity. It got patched up over the following weeks and ran reliably for two decades. Universal finally retired it in 2007 and replaced it with Disaster!, themed around a fictional disaster-movie director played by Christopher Walken. That, in turn, was replaced by Fast & Furious: Supercharged in 2018.

The Opening Day Map: A Time Capsule

If you have a copy of the original Universal Studios Florida park map from 1990 in a box in your parents’ attic, do not throw it away. The 1990 layout is a snapshot of a theme park universe that has since been almost completely erased. Production Central, Hollywood, San Francisco / Amity, and Expo Center were the original “lands.” More than half of the attractions printed on that map no longer exist. Back to the Future: The Ride wasn’t even on it yet — it was delayed and didn’t open until May 1991, where it would become the park’s most beloved attraction for the next sixteen years.

For a deeper rabbit hole of decade-defining 1990 moments, our piece on Tank Man at Tiananmen Square covers the geopolitical shockwave that closed out the previous decade, and our recap of Tetris being born in Moscow tells the story of how a different Soviet-era artifact ended up shaping the 90s on every Game Boy in the world.

The Aftermath: 2-For-1 Tickets and a Two-Year Recovery

Universal did the only thing it could that summer: it gave tickets away. Two-for-one offers ran for most of June, July, and August. Mail-in rain checks went to anyone who could prove they’d visited on opening day. The Orlando press treated it as a juicy story for a few weeks, then moved on. Internally, Universal’s executives reportedly held a war-room meeting that lasted three days about whether to delay the planned Back to the Future ride to give engineering teams breathing room. They decided to push forward.

Within two years, Jaws was rebuilt and running. Kongfrontation was a fan favorite. Earthquake was patched. Back to the Future opened to lines that ran for hours. By 1994, Universal Studios Florida cleared 7.7 million guests a year and was the second-most-visited theme park in the country. The disastrous opening had become, in the rear-view mirror, just a story.

Universal would eventually go on to add Islands of Adventure in 1999, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in 2010, and the entire Epic Universe park in 2025. None of that happens without the wreckage of June 7, 1990 — the day that nearly killed the franchise and proved, in a strange way, that thrill rides could fail spectacularly in front of 10,000 paying customers and the company could still recover.

What June 7, 1990 Means Now

The honest take is that Disney-MGM Studios — the rival that Universal was trying to bury — closed for a substantial rethink in the 2010s, rebranded as Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and gave up the studio-tour conceit entirely. Universal Studios Florida is still there, still themed around movies, still pulling in over 10 million guests a year, and now towers over Disney-MGM in just about every measure. The bet that almost broke it became the bet that built it.

Theme park nostalgia is its own industry now. Fans collect the original 1990 brochures on eBay for $80 a pop. The Slime Geyser has its own subreddit. A photo of an opening-day E.T. Adventure queue sign sold at auction in 2024 for $1,200. If you were a kid in 1990 watching Nickelodeon and dreaming of Florida, June 7 is the day your imaginary theme park became real — even if half the rides were broken when you got there.

For more 1990 deep-dives, the On This Day archive at Retro Radical is a goldmine.

Sources

1. Theme Park Tribune — Nothing Worked as Planned: Universal Studios Florida’s Infamous Opening Day
2. Wikipedia — Universal Studios Florida (history, attendance, $631M cost)
3. Inside Universal — Universal Studios Florida: 30 Years of Riding the Movies
4. Orlando Informer — Let’s Tour 1990’s Universal Studios Florida
5. FOX 35 Orlando — On This Day: Universal Studios Florida Opens in 1990
6. Wikipedia — Nickelodeon Studios (Orlando)