Thrill Park

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You hear that kind of bantering trash talk from the Universal and Disney camps. A Walt Disney World executive, alluding to the high-speed roller coasters at the center of I.O.A.'s promotion, calls them "theme rides without the theme." True enough for some rides. The Incredible Hulk Coaster is similar to slinky steel screamers in nearby Busch Gardens, though it has some jet-propulsive refinements. Another thrill ride, Dr. Doom's Fear Fall, is supposed to extract "raw human fear" from the brains of its strapped-in victims, but it's just a fresh version of the Big Shot, a four-G slingshot perched 1,000 ft. above Las Vegas, atop the Stratosphere Hotel. Woodbury has already fine-tuned this 40-sec. bungee blast. As he says, in flawless techno-speak, "We've upgraded the pulldown."

To compete with local water parks like Wet 'n Wild and Disney's Typhoon Lagoon, the Universal designers built a virtual water park into I.O.A.; half the rides take you to the edge of wetness and over. The Jurassic Park River Adventure plummets your boat past a snarly T rex and down a steep sluice to land with a cascading plop 80 ft. below. Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges take visitors on a whirling whitewater ride where you will get soaked. (The ride guides will tell you it's practically illegal to remove your footwear. Do it anyway and save yourself a day's walk in soggy sneakers.) You also get sprayed in the elaborate Sinbad stunt show, in the swirling vortex that leads you to the battle of the gods in Poseidon's Fury, and on the One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish kiddie ride. Some days, of course, it'll just rain.

You can dry off and go nuts on the Dueling Dragons--two inverted, high-speed coasters that run in synch and, twice during the two-minute loop-the-loop, come within 2 ft. of crashing into each other. The Ice ride nearly skirts an adjoining castle. The Fire ride is even cooler; it has a camelback dip and lots more delirious twists. As a survivor giddily noted, "it catches you right in the back of the tonsils." And stand in the separate, front-row line to get the ride's full, giddy force; if you're going to fly, you may as well go first class.

Theme parks are an eternal work in progress. On a few basic ride genres (the coaster, the stunt show, the 3-D effects extravaganza, the bumpy-ride-plus-film that began with George Lucas' Star Tours), grownup kids are always looking for inventive story lines to harness to new techniques. As Woodbury says, I.O.A. is "a lot of evolution and a lot of revolution." Disney, with the Tower of Terror ride and its own 3-D smash It's Tough to Be a Bug, will surely be part of that revolution. But for now, I.O.A. is the glorious trendsetter in the huge theme resort that is Florida. The state of the park has reached state of the art.