The Experience: Seeing and Hearing Your Favorite Harry Potter Characters

The Trick: Giant Projection Screens

When the door opens and you enter the eight-person train compartment, you walk by a masterful piece of technology. Amazingly, you don’t even notice it. The doors that open and shut in unremarkable fashion are in no way ordinary. They’re extremely expensive projection monitors hidden in plain sight. You’ve possibly noticed that the Universal Studios employees don’t want you touching the doors. That’s why. They carefully slide the expensive pieces into piece while you’re distracted by the wall projections. It’s a clever misdirect that allows for an even better trick later in the ride.

Midway through the train ride, the attention switches from the wall to the doors. That’s because the projection displays contained inside those doors reveal a wonderful surprise. The outlines and voices of popular Harry Potter characters hint that they’re onboard the Hogwarts Express with you. Potter himself joins Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley on one of their usual train misadventures. One of them eats a spider – you can easily guess who – and then they move along to their regular Horcrux-related adventures. On the other voyage, the excitement directly involves the rider. A Dementor invades the train, but the Boy Who Lived casts a Patronus spell to dispel it from just outside the ride compartment. It’s the closest a Muggle ever comes to meeting a Dementor and living.

These special effects are unique in that the colors are effectively binary. Rather than recreate the actual Potter characters, Universal uses light and shadow to tell the story. The door monitors are white while Harry, Hermione, Ron, and the Dementor are all dark shadows. When Harry casts the saving spell, the doors explode into a dizzying white to reinforce the premise that he’s ridding the cabin of darkness. Once again, Harry Potter saves the day. And for his reward, he…well, you can watch this video to find out if you don’t already know. It includes both ride experiences.

The Experience: Vanishing Passengers at Platform 9 ¾

The Trick: One of Disney’s favorites, Pepper’s Ghost!

One of the signature aspects of the Hogswarts Express experience for Harry Potter is watching other passengers disappear in front of him. The trick requires a wizard to run through a brick wall, only it’s obviously not there. Wizards know this since the Platform 9 ¾ trick existed all the way back in the 1850s in the books.

Faced with the likely possibility of a huge line queue for Hogwarts Express, Universal park planners did something clever. They added a partial simulation of this premise. You don’t actually run through a wall, of course, as that would cause safety issues for all concerned. To those guests behind you in line, however, you do appear to disappear from sight. Study the 25-second mark of this video to see the trick unfold. You’ll notice that some passengers really get into it while others walk as if nothing has changed. That’s because from the perspective of the latter group, it’s true. A lot of folks walk right past this section, never realizing anything was different. It’s just an ordinary part of the line queue to them.

What Universal did here is place a couple of innocuous signs just past a flight of stairs. Those indicators are for Platforms 9 and 10. Fans of the franchise paying attention appreciate that something special is about to happen. Tired guests who have stood in line all day just see it as another segment of a long line.

Anyone watching the line in front of them will notice something strange, though. Thanks to the old Pepper’s ghost trick best known from Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, Universal can show a misleading picture. A clever glass setup reflects an image of a wall rather than the actual line queue. Through such a simple act, people walking down a normal path appear as wizards transporting through a brick wall. It’s a small touch that exemplifies what’s so magical about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Universal maximizes every little moment that can add an authentic touch to visiting this otherworldly realm.