Angry Birds Universe
Aug. 20-Sept. 5, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. | PNE Rollerland building
Tickets: $5 (ages 14 and older), $3.50 (ages six to 13), free for those under six years old.
Emelia Thompson yanks back on a giant slingshot, and lets loose a volleyball at a target on a far wall.
“My first couple of tries were really bad because I didn’t pull the slingshot back far enough,” said 13-year-old Emelia, among a group of kids who got a Friday-morning preview of the PNE’s latest attraction, Angry Birds Universe, which is getting its North American debut at this year’s PNE.
The new attraction is inspired by the Angry Birds smart phone app, a global-hit video game that has also spawned a board game and an animated feature film (the film created mostly in Vancouver by animators at Sony Imageworks).
Fans of the video game will recognize the exhibit’s various scenarios.
Fairgoers can ride indoor zip lines to knock over large, soft objects. They can follow Emelia to a row of large slingshots, where they can take aim with volleyballs at other large soft objects.
“Pull it back further than you think you need to,” said the Langley girl. “Once I figured that out, it got way easier.”
Accuracy is harder to pull off when lobbing a ball with a giant rubber-band slingshot: “I was trying to hit the targets; sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.”
Emelia was invited to get a sneak peak at the new exhibit as thanks for her role in another new fair attraction, the thrice-daily singing, dancing Kaleidoscope on Parade. She plays a bug alongside other dancers playing a variety of other characters in the parade.
Elsewhere in the Angry Birds exhibit, folks can build little custom roller cars and try them out on various inclined tracks to test their cornering and see how long they’ll roll.
They can attach magnetic tubes to a metal wall to make Rube Goldberg-esque ramps as up-and-down pathways for little balls.
On the practical side, they can lift each of three, 25-kilogram weights attached to various pulley set-ups, to check how the pulleys make lifting easier.
There is also a Laser Maze and a climbing wall, each themed to the game.
As well, the physics and biology of real birds and how they fly is explored in a series of displays.
