By Charly SHELTON

With the local theme parks reopened to guests, we finally get to experience the best new rides that summer 2020 was expected to offer. Disneyland opened “WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure.” Knott’s Berry Farm opened “Bear-y Tales: Return to the Fair.” And Universal Studios Hollywood kept pace in offering a new, technologically advanced ride with a colon in the name as well – “Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash.”

The new ride was set to open just two weeks after the park was shut down due to the approaching COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020. Now reopened and accommodating the summer swells of a (hopefully) vaccinated population swarming back to a theme park for the first time in over a year, Universal Studios Hollywood feels just as it always has. The crowds are thick, the weather is warm and stepping into that first blast of air conditioning after standing in an outdoor ride queue for an hour was a feeling sorely missed by this reporter.

The only difference with “Secret Life of Pets” is that there is hardly any outdoor queue. And although that “first blast” sensation after an outdoor queue is great, it’s even better when you don’t have to stand in the sun first. The indoor queue for the new ride is so extensive and cute that the time passes much more quickly with the several pre-shows setting up the premise of the ride and entertaining guests in the same family-fun tone and feel of the films the ride is based on.

The ride invites guests, who the other animals see as puppies, to board alleyway boxes and shuttle across town to get to the adoption fair and find families to love them. It’s a pretty standard dark ride (think Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride or Peter Pan’s Flight) but with several new tech additions. The big selling point is the camera that turns guests into puppies as they ride past mirrors, making dog lookalikes in real time. But honestly, more impressive is the use of projected set extensions to bring the world to life. When the guests roll through a fireworks factory, the animals from the film shoot all over the room in both projections and animatronic form, giving speed and life to the scene. Then, later at the groomers, Max the dog is seen swimming above the bathtub as an animatronic and then diving below as a projection, synced up perfectly to make the 2D and 3D elements combine into one effect. This is really well done and, despite the seemingly simple effect, it is a very complex task to pull off effectively.

Universal has always done some amazing things with projected set extensions (as in the “Transformers” ride and the new Mosasaur scene in “Jurassic World the Ride”), so it’s no surprise to see the technique used here on a more traditional ride type.

The whole experience is a good time, if not super intense, and makes for a fun outing for kids of the park who can’t ride much else. It’s nice to see a good ole fashioned dark ride keep pace in the world of “bigger, badder and more teeth” rides.

“Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash” is open now at Universal Studios Hollywood.