3 Clicks for Health

So I was going to the Yahoo! home page for kicks when I saw an article about Universal's new "Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey" theme park ride. Granted, there's nothing relevant for anyone living here (in the PH) to care about, but at least there's something to be said about devoted fans willing to exercise and eat healthy because of something that remotely even promotes these activities.

The thing about this ride is, unlike Disneyland's It's a Small World ride, Universal is enforcing some rather stringent rules regarding safety, for the sake of, you know, less money to burn due to class action suits. The thing is that in this ride, if the restraint clicks three times, a person can be deemed qualified to ride. Knowing America, there are probably a lot of people who are too plus-sized to fit these seats, and while there are those who aren't big enough fans to man up and actually lose weight (and instead resort to bitching in the Interwebs), there are still quite a few cases of people who are truly dedicated to this intellectual property and willing to eat healthy if it meant experiencing something that could potentially give him some sort of status upgrade.

While the reasons are kind of... well, creepy and cultish, Harry Potter isn't anything dangerous to latch onto if it means people getting into losing some. You could say that as the books were able to build a huge readership of young children (and plain get them into reading), the ride may or may not be a big catalyst of children living healthy.

In the end, maybe I'm making too big a deal of this.