"You Delightful Freaks!" — Why Am I So Obsessed With This BIZARRE Epic Universe Character?!

Now that you’ve seen me at Universal Orlando’s Epic Universe a lot, you probably have a good idea of what one of my favorite lands is, and, yes, you guessed right if you guessed Dark Universe.

There’s just something about the incredible theming in Dark Universe that I love, and the Monsters Unchained ride has me feeling a certain type of way about Dracula. But there’s another character in Epic Universe that I’m obsessed with, and not because of what you’re probably thinking.

That character is Ygor, and the thing I love about him is more technical than “Oh, his vibe is so crazy.” Like his vibe really is crazy, but there are just some things with this character that make him really interesting.

So Ygor is a crowd work character. He’s directly tied to the land, but when he comes out and interacts with people, he is working the crowd. He’s razzing up his audience and bringing people to him and doing little bits with them. When you get a moment with Ygor, he makes it something you’ll tell a story about later.

But he’s also family-friendly, so he never says anything that’s out of pocket. Yeah, he might say a few things that will go over kids’ heads, but kids won’t even notice. He also adjusts his humor around who he’s talking to or about. It’s not even about the Universal Team Member playing the character… it’s the design of the character itself. He’s a little off-kilter because he’s in Dark Universe.

For example, on Monsters Unchained, his character has a line, “you delightful freaks,” which is both macabre and a little suggestive, but it’s still family-friendly. And he’s always giving these little one-liners or individual moments that make him so much fun to meet.

By comparison, we love meeting Disney Princesses in Disney World, but Cinderella is probably not going to say anything to you that’s going to have that kind of impact. But Ygor? He’s going to tell the bald man that he has the most beautiful cranium, and then he may ask if he can have it. Also, kudos to those performers because they can improv so well.

A lot of it has to do with things like the bag that he carries around with a leg in it, as well as other props he can mess with and use in these interactions. Where else are you going to have someone wave a severed hand at you? That, my friends, is memorable.

I actually have one of those stories to tell. I was in a big crowd watching him one time, and I was watching him give attention to every single person. And for me, he just walked up to me, and he said, “We missed bump.” And then we bumped elbows. And that took him zero seconds while he was on the way to have a longer interaction with somebody. But he acknowledged me because I had been standing there for four minutes, and he made sure I got my moment.

Seriously, I have stories like this to tell every time I’ve interacted with him — and isn’t that what we want characters to do? We want them to give us memorable moments. Well, Ygor might just be the king of memorable moments in Epic Universe.

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