Universal's Swamp of Dreams

A $640 million theme park is off to a shaky but promising start

Steven Spielberg wants to be Walt Disney. Jay Stein wants to get even with the Walt Disney Co. So the movie director, who in the past decade has created a boutique industry of family films in the grand old Disney tradition, and the president of MCA's recreation division, who believes his idea for a movie- studio theme park was filched by Disney Chairman Michael Eisner a decade ago, were just the fellows to devise Universal Studios Florida in Orlando, ten miles up the road from omnipotent Walt Disney World.

"If you build it, they will come." That rallying cry, from Universal's...

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