Fairly early on the morning of June 1st, 2008, a fire started at the Universal Studios backlot and burned several sets and nearly two city blocks of space. The famous Clock Tower set from Back to the Future was among the casualties, along with a King Kong exhibit and a massive archive of Universal shows and movies.

The cause of the blaze is as yet undetermined–it’s only the second fire in the last twenty-five years–but what’s especially interesting is that none of the Universal bigwigs seem too upset about it. In fact, studio bosses are on record as saying everything is replaceable and duplicates have been kept of everything. Chances are, they mean SEVERAL duplicates on every imaginable media. I’ve heard of studios using defunct salt mines to store videos–something about the air quality being electrically neutral or some such.

In fact, for a huge fire that took hours to fight and damaged an area roughly two city blocks wide, as I heard this morning on CNN Headline News, they even managed to have Universal CityWalk back up and running before lunchtime.

So maybe it was a lot of sound and fury in the end, signfying, well, nothing much in particular. I’m glad that everything that was destroyed had duplicates ready to go, and that much of Universal’s operation remains clear and in tact.

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