Well, I decided that the Film Museum just wasn’t enough so I went somewhere a bit more exciting. Filmpark Babelsberg! Germany’s response to Universal Studios! Or maybe Universal Studios is the response, I’m not sure which park came first. I just know, as stated previously Studio Babelsberg is the oldest large scale movie company in the world. Got there about 10 minutes before they opened, and I was the second person to get in. There were only about two dozen people waiting, so it wasn’t exactly busy.

It, like Univ. Studios is a theme park dedicated to movies, with lots of large props along the main walkway down the park, painted on the ground to look like a film reel. The park however was very small, and had really only one ‘ride’, and a very modest number of attractions. The only real ride was a slow moving boat ride down a very small river, with figures from an old children’s series. The rest were walk-in, or show based attractions. One was a really cool pirate-high-seas-adventure-3d-motion machine-laser blasters game. Another was a 3d-motion machine rickshaw ride along the great wall of China. Highly artistic, as a funny rickshaw driver runs you up and down super steep drops and steep hills along the wall, running through an ancient Chinese village, before getting separated.

Another neat attraction was going into a U-Boat bunker, onboard a big (recreated) Cold War nuclear Submarine. While in the waiting room there are tv’s with video logs of the captain explaining in daily journals about how strange things are going on, and people are going crazy, while creepy stuff happens in the background. Each time the captain is acting a bit weirder. Everyone walks into the bridge and a few people are sat down to push buttons, and get some things going, while a ‘crew member’ dressed like a sailor explains the story of how the submarine was lost for years, and the crew started going mad, and psychotic. He interfaces on a phone and tv with a doctor on land, explaining what is going on, while clips of the now deranged and bloody-faced captain also play. (Everything was in German so sadly I didn’t really understand a word of it as he was talking for several minutes) While that’s going on, alarms are blasting, and buttons flashing all over as if on a sub in a state of emergency. After that, the crewman guides everyone into a hallway with lots of special effects, smog, air jets, walking into a cramped submarine hallway, with skeletons, and decapitated crewmembers and other decaying bodies in the offices and living quarters. (All props obviously) all while more special effects are playing, the crewman is shouting at everyone, when a mad doctor (another actor) bursts in starts running through everyone acting all crazy and deranged. Eventually it all ends and everyone safely exists the sub. All these previously mentioned attractions are at set times, so you gotta kinda show up at the right time, and hope you get there when one is coming up.

There was a studio with a bunch of original props and sets from the stop-motion German kid’s show Sandmännchen from the 1950’s and 60’s. Near that was a larger studio with a full set, and lots of more props. It even had offices where make-artists, set and prop creators would give demonstrations of them making things. At 2 o’clock, there is a call across the park for everyone to come see the stuntshow inside the giant volcano, which is a stadium that seats up to 2,500 people. It was a really cool, action scene (with no back story and no voice acting) about the main hero retrieving something from a crashed helicopter, while a gang of bad guys tries to get it from them. (Though the fighting was very obnoxiously fake looking and corny, despite what I would have thought from a movie-park.) The stunts were cool, and of course there was plenty of fire.

The main and final thing I did, (after walking all over the park, and seeing the tons of themed areas and large scale props they have set up all over) is the movie backlot tour. I came at a special time because that is when they had an English tour. Well, it turns out nobody else wanted to come along on the English tour, despite there being abut 50 people in line, and they can only take 30 at a time max. So I quite literally got a personal 1 on 1 tour through the film lots actively used for filming. There’s a big movie in Germany coming out, called “Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer.” – (Jim Button, and Lukas the Train Conductor). Jim Button, the main character, and a young black British boy does not speak German, so his lines in the movie are dubbed by someone else, which is hilarious. I got to visit one of the main sets from it, along with anyone else who goes on the tour. After that set we walked through the actual tent camp set from The Monuments Men, and saw a lot of the props, and the painstaking amount of work that had to go into making the props. Movie paintings cannot look like famous works of art (probably for forgery reasons, so it can’t be sold as an original) so all the works had to be a little different, whether there was an extra flower, or a bowl in a painting is a different color, etc… That also applies to buildings. The guide said buildings in Germany have a copyright of sorts, so movie buildings cannot be exact replicas of real buildings. The next place we went to was a live set, where the actual cast and crew of Germany’s most popular show “Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten” (Good times, bad times) were all standing around eating popsicles with a big ol’ camera there. The main villain from the series along with the director, and many extras were standing 30 feet from me. The setting takes place in Berlin, and one of the structures is based on a famous one in Berlin, which has busts of old German emperors on it (if I’m not mistaken.) Now since the buildings can’t be identical to real ones, the set designers instead carved their own faces and heads in place of the German leaders. Hahaha! And the tour ended shortly after that, and then I walked back a looonngg ways to my hotel. Little disappointed there wasn’t more to do, but the tour guide mentioned that the park is indeed in the middle of Studio Babelsberg, so they can’t have big rides, and roller coasters making all the extra noise.
Internet here still can’t seem to figure out how to work, sometimes it will upload images, sometimes it won’t work. I shrunk them down massively, and now images have about a 10% chance of successfully uploading, so everyone of these I’ve had to try to upload a dozen or more times. I’ll try again later… I also added more pictures to the bottom of my last day in Berlin “Nowhere… Near… Berlin” as well as finally managing to get images uploadd from all the palace walking I did yesterday! Check it out!