What’s your favorite Christmas movie? This question is asked a lot this time of year. You know what question isn’t asked? If you could walk through scenes of your favorite Christmas movie, carved from ice, would you? Now you can. The Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando has opened ICE! featuring A Christmas Story—and we were on hand to experience it!
The best way to describe this nine-degree experience is like walking through a wax museum made of ice. It’s incredibly cold (especially for hot and humid Orlando). My Florida-born kids weren’t quite ready for the onslaught of cold, but they powered through with enough layers.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:31 — 14.3MB)
Subscribe: RSS
You walk into the freezing exhibit space and walk through scenes from the movie. Every memorable moment from the classic film is depicted. A scene showing a triple dog dare? Yup. Ralphie pining over a Red Ryder Range 200 Shot BB gun? It’s there. Ralphie eating a bar of soap after saying “the queen-mother of dirty words”? Oh yeah. To give you an idea of the detail, there’s even this bit of awesome:
Note: everything is carved entirely from ice. There are no other props in the space. Just colored ice—and a lot of it. The detail going into every scene is incredible, and you can tell the artists spent thousands of hours recreating the environment.
What else do they have there? Ice slides and snow tubing. The ice slides are actually built into the ICE! featuring A Christmas Story exhibit itself. In the movie, Ralphie meets Santa atop a giant slide. Here the slide is made entirely of ice—and you get to slide down it (as often as you like). My son asked an attendant at the top to kick him down it (like Santa does to Ralphie in the movie), but, alas, safety concerns (and common sense) kicked in and he just threw himself down.
That’s not all that’s going on at the Gaylord Palms, however. There are more holiday festivities all over the resort. There is also a room where you can go snow tubing and throw snowballs. In the atrium, they also have a special Cirque Dreams Unwrapped show, Christmas tree trail, and a multi-sensory light show around their six-story Christmas tree.
Remember, if you leave us a comment on iTunes with your name, we’ll give you a special shout out on a future show. You can connect with the show on Facebook and Twitter.
