As you’ll recall, Jamie and I did a bit of incognito recon over at Universal Studios Orlando recently, mainly in order to check out the Harry Potter experience.  Being a bit of a Potter nerd myself, I decided we absolutely MUST have a wand.  So, wand shopping we went!

The nearest shop we encountered was Wands by Gregorovitch, located right in front of Diagon Alley.

They had several different wands to choose from, all replicas of the wands used by various characters in the movies. We chose Hermione’s wand, mainly because we liked the scrolling ivy decoration but all of them were amazingly detailed and beautiful.

Once you’ve chosen a style, you get to choose if you want a standard wand or an interactive one.  The standard wands are $40, however, if you spend $8 more you can get an interactive one.  We thought that sounded like a bargain so we chose the interactive one.

That was a bit of a mistake.

Let me explain how the interactive wands work.  There are several stations set up throughout Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade (you get a map with your wand so you can locate the stations) where you can use your interactive wand to make an action happen.  You need to stand on a medallion embedded in the pavement, point your wand at a certain spot and move it in a specific way (the movement is on the ground medallion).

Sounds easy and super awesome, right?  Wrong.  Some of the interactions are very difficult to get right.  In fact, they’re so difficult a Universal team member is standing by to assist and sometimes even THEY can’t make the action happen.  This is problematic because you’ve spent so much for the wand you want to make the thing work, right?  Guess what, so does everyone else.  That means that you’re standing in line for a long time behind someone who can’t make the action happen so they finally give up.  Then the next person stands there for 10 minutes trying to make something happen and they can’t either.  Then the next person stands there for 15 minutes and so on and so forth and it’s just a giant waste of time.  It was such a huge disappointment.

I love the idea of these interactive wands and they just look SO COOL, but until Universal can figure out how to make them work properly, it’s a colossal waste of your money and time.

That makes me sadder than biting into an ear wax flavored Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean.