Why the ‘Waterworld’ Stunt Show Is an Action Masterpiece

The world’s longest-running play, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, has been staged over 29,000 times to date. Each week, nine more performances get added to that total. The longest-running show currently on Broadway, Chicago, has been performed more than 10,800 times since 1996.

Though it’s rarely mentioned in those terms, a live show that debuted one year earlier than Chicago is still performed in Los Angeles multiple times a day, 365 days a year. I can’t find a concrete number of performances, but a rough estimate of two showings a day — a conservative guess — for 29 years works out to 21,170 performances. (Three showings a day for 29 years would be 31,755 performances.)

Even at the low end of that range, it has to be one of the most-performed live shows of the 20th and 21st centuries. And it’s based on one of the most infamous flops in Hollywood history.

It’s Waterworld: A Live Sea Spectacular. 

READ MORE: The First Fast & Furious Roller Coaster Is Coming to Universal Studios

Somehow, despite the fact that the Waterworld movie was a notorious box-office flop (and the most expensive Hollywood production ever up to that point), the Waterworld stunt show is still thriving. It debuted at on October 21, 1995 at Universal Studios Hollywood, where it’s now the oldest attraction besides the studio backlot tour, and the only attraction in the park based on a 20th century property that never got new films or TV episodes in the 21st century.

To put the attraction’s age in context: The Waterworld stunt show has been playing for so long that its narrator has been dead for 10 years. (That would be trailer voice guy Hal Douglas, who served the same role in the Waterworld movie, and passed away in 2014.)

Besides the narrator speaking from beyond the grave, Waterworld: A Live Sea Spectacular shows remarkably few signs of its age. On a recent trip to Universal Studios Hollywood, I witnessed a packed amphitheater cheer, boo, and spontaneously applaud the 20-minute stunt showcase’s numerous highlights. Waterworld still plays like gangbusters — even in, or perhaps specifically because of, our modern era of digital effects and computers.

“The guest response has always been strong, but there is definitely a fresh, new wave of appreciation for live action stunts,” says Waterworld: A Live Sea Spectacular cast member Greg Dolph. “The audiences of today seem more impressed than ever before, especially with the number of screens in everyday life.” (Dolph would know; he’s been appearing in the Waterworld stunt show for almost 30 years.)

In fact, Waterworld: A Live Sea Spectacular remains so popular that copies of it continually get added to new Universal Studios theme parks whenever they open around the globe: Universal Japan in 2001, Universal Singapore in 2010, and Universal Beijing in 2021. In other words: there are currently four stunt shows all over the world, based on the movie where Kevin Costner played a fish man who drank his own urine.

That scene is not replicated in the stunt show. But the Waterworld stunt show does dutifully recreate the look and feel of Kevin Reynolds’ post-apocalyptic blockbuster, which followed the adventures of a nameless Mariner (Costner) in a dark future ruined by global warming. A handful of survivors like the Mariner live on floating islands of recycled junk known as atolls, subsisting on whatever can be salvaged from the ocean.

No one alive has seen actual land in centuries; most people think such a concept is a myth, at least until the arrival of a young girl (Tina Majorino) with an elaborate tattoo on her back that a group of villainous “Smokers” — led by the extra-evil Deacon (Dennis Hopper) — believe can lead to “Dryland.” The Mariner, who possesses gills that enable him to breathe underwater, reluctantly agrees to protect the girl and her guardian Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and help them find Dryland before the Deacon. The film ends (spoiler alert) with the death of the Deacon and the heroes’ successful arrival at Dryland, before the Mariner ventures back out to the open sea alone. (A dude with gills isn’t super useful on a mountain.)

The Waterworld stunt show is a sequel, of sorts, although it only vaguely lines up with the events of the movie. In the live version, Helen returns to her atoll to bring more survivors to Dryland. But then an inexplicably not-dead Deacon and his Smokers show up to threaten her once again, before the Mariner zooms in to kill the bad guys and save the day.

Thirty years after The New York Times called Waterworld “a symbol of Hollywood-style excess and ineptness,” the fact that its stunt show requires very little knowledge about the intricacies of its source material may qualify as a feature, rather than a bug. When I revisited Waterworld for its 25th anniversary a few years ago, I found it to be a mixed bag: An imaginatively designed future that was barely explored in favor of non-stop chases and stunts.

The film, I wrote, spends “very little time investigating how a world built entirely on the watery ruins of our society might operate,” possibly because there’s no plausible way such a society could operate. (The film does explain where the oil for all of Smoker’s jet skis and motorboats comes from, but not how all those vehicles continue to function so well hundreds of years after the collapse of civilization.) What you ultimately got from the film, I thought, was “like a two-hour boat race in dystopia cosplay.”

Ironically, Waterworld’s weaknesses as a film, became its strengths as a stunt show. At its best, the movie was like a stunt show with kooky production design. The actual stunt show is relentless; 20 non-stop minutes filled with every conceivable type of gag: Fights, falls, shootouts, boat chases, jet ski jumps, ziplines, rope descents, explosions, a full body burn, and even a seaplane crash, which remains a legitimately jaw-dropping moment 30 years after it debuted.

So much is constantly happening at Waterworld’s ampitheater — sometimes there are multiple fights and chases occurring in different parts of the arena simultaneously — that the viewer does not have time to contemplate such trivial matters as how a guy who got blown up in an oil tanker is back to menace the heroes a second time. If the show was any longer or any slower, guests might stop to consider where these Waterworldians keep finding dry, usable bullets and flares in the year 2500. Instead, Waterworld attendees get to sit back and appreciate the muscular efforts of the show’s cast, which through the decades has included hundreds of members of Hollywood’s stunt community.

Notable Waterworld stunt show alumni include Larry Rippenkroeger, who’s performed stunts in dozens of Hollywood productions such as Titanic, The Avengers, The Suicide Squad and the Waterworld movie; and Helena Barrett, who’s doubled Kirsten Stewart, Amy Adams and Drew Barrymore. One former Mariner, Mark Vanselow, has not only worked as Liam Neeson’s stunt double, he’s set to direct Neeson’s next thriller, Mongoose.

The version of Waterworld playing in Hollywood today is “relatively unchanged” from the one that premiered in 1995, says cast member Greg Dolph, although there have been “periodic updates” over the years, including several new dives and fight sequences.

If it had been changed, you’d never know it. Because it’s set in a distant future, in a world built out of old junk, Waterworld: A Live Sea Spectacular exists outside of time. Pictures taken in 2001 — like the one below of the most romantic couple in history making out after they took part in a mass wedding held at Waterworld on Valentine’s Day 2001 — show the exact same amphitheater, with the rusted tankers and oh-so-precarious catwalks waiting for a brave stuntman to spill over one of their railings.

Most of the visitors to Waterworld’s soggy environs these days weren’t even born yet when that couple was making out in the shadow of the Deacon’s sea plane, much less when Kevin Costner first slurped some post-apocalyptic pee. Yet, the Waterworld stunt show has endured innumerable cast changes, along with the constantly shifting tides in the movie and theme park businesses. Dolph attributes the show’s longevity to two things.

“First, the storyline is simple and easy for anyone to understand even if there are language barriers,” he explains. “This makes the show universally appealing. Second, the show delivers nonstop action. It’s filled with breathtaking live stunts performed within feet of the audience. This type of show is simply unlike anything most audiences have ever seen before. It’s unique, special, live, and unforgettable.”

He’s right about that last part. You can find recordings of Waterworld on YouTube, but they don’t do its scale justice. The show is more widescreen than the Waterworld film, with a whole array of gadgets, props, and set pieces filling your entire field of vision. When you’re there live, the Waterworld stunt show is truly is a spectacle of the sort all Hollywood blockbusters aspire to but few actually achieve — especially these days, when so many obviously artificial digital effects are deployed in the service of the presentation.

Not Waterworld. A few times every single day, Greg Dolph and his colleagues really set each other on fire, dodge seaplanes, and dangle from ledges dozens of feet above Universal Studios. By the show’s bombastic finale, you feel like you’ve visited a living museum of Hollywood stunt craft, and witnessed a first-hand demonstration of the ongoing power of practical effects. Maybe Waterworld’s ideal form was a stunt show all along. At the rate its going, it will continue to play far into the future — at least until the seas cover Dryland.

Amazing Theme Park Rides Based on Movies That Were Never Built