I’ve been to the London one twice - once in the 70s & once in the 80s. Enjoyed it both times. I don’t remember the prices, so it can’t have seemed too bad.
One time there was a “Dr Who” exhibition & there was a Dalek going “exterminate, exterminate” at a group of bewildered Asian tourists. I wish I had a photo of that moment.
Wow. It definitely can’t have been the 70s & 80s equivalent of that! (& the conversion rate from the NZ dollar would be far worse :eek: )
I also remember going to an attraction in the 80s which had some of the stuff not currently used in London on display. That was very odd, seeing all these shelves of waxwork heads. I thought it was Wookey Hole but there is nothing on there website.
Wrong!!!
The London Tussaud’s was definitely the BEST part of our vacation!
Take my word for it…
I know, because I was there…and it wasn’t 1972 and I wasn’t 8 yrs old.
It was 1971 and I was 9.
I went in the 80’s when I was about 13 and thought it was a truly bizarre thing. For a start, the queues were horrendous. I expect with online booking, this has improved but back then you queued around the block. Once inside, I found it a split between the vaguely amusing with all the slightly out of date popstars and the genuinely shocking (to me) Chamber of Horrors. Which was, as Cal Meacham, also found, recreations of various real life murders. I have no idea what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. To this day, gazing at the recreation of one of the rooms in 10 Rillington Place, complete with body sticking out of kitchen cupboard, is one of those things that I genuinely sometimes wonder if I just imagined. The tackiest thing ever.
Do they still DO this? Is the 10 Rillington Place set still there?
There aren’t any queues at all for the one in Bangkok. It’s on the sixth floor of a shopping center. On the second floor – or first floor for you Brits – we were eating in Outback recently and sat by the window overlooking the Madame Tussauds counter, which is on the ground floor. There’s an elevator there that will take you straight up to it. Staff will try to rope in anyone passing by, as it’s right next to the front entrance to the mall. They seemed to be doing okay roping people in, but there still weren’t all that many.
Hmmm. Madame Tussauds may be getting a little desperate. I mentioned the distinct lack of a queue at the Bangkok location. Now in Friday’s newspaper, I saw they’re offering a special price of 350 baht (US$11.50) for Thais and expats, discounted from the normal price of 800 baht. Less than half off. On top of that, there’s a joint package for here and a nearby aquarium called Siam Ocean World for 600 baht (US$19.75.) The aquarium is actually not bad, but we’ve only been once, as farangs like me pay 900 baht (like most attractions, it’s cheaper for Thais). It was okay.
But even with the discount, we just don’t seem interested in Madame Tussauds. As the aquarium will be having some penguin chicks hatching soon, we might go back there. If we could pay for the package without being shoved into the elevator for Madame Tussadus, that could work out well. We’re simply not interested in Madame Tussauds.
Meanwhile, Louis Tussauds in Pattaya last week, in a Valentine’s Day stunt, set a new world record for longest continuous kiss – 46 hours and 24 minutes. They’e still checking to make sure the winners weren’t mannequins.
Tell me, waxworks aficionados, do you think they have raised their game in recent years? I ask because my only exposure to these things is when there’s a story about how some celebrity now has a figure in Madame Tussauds. But when Cameron Diaz was added recently, I was struck from the photos how the waxwork actually is quite convincingly like her. For a moment when I saw this photo, I wasn’t sure whether they’d flown in the real Ms. Diaz for a publicity stunt. Here’s a close-up, in which the waxiness is a little more apparent, but still, it’s a damn good job.
The ones at Madame Tussauds in London have been technically impressive for years (at least since I was a kid), just not very interesting - in my opinion.
OK. I just have a vague memory of going to Mme. Tussauds on a school trip and being underwhelmed by the models. Beyond the fact that they were quite obviously made of wax and various other inanimate material, the likenesses were so bad that it became a game to guess who they were supposed to be.