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Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

A fairly sunny day began with planning the afternoon event to paramount studios as you are required to book in advance for the tour around the studio lot. Booking the tour also dictated how the day would pan out, as I was informed the only available tour time was 2pm that day. This freed up the morning. So the decision was made to visit big ponds of tar directly in the centre of LA.

The La Brea Tar Pits (if I translate directly from Spanish to English The The Tar Tar Pits, Brea meaning tar in Spanish) is an area of almost downtown Los Angeles that has several open pits full of asphalt (commonly known more to mostly everyone else as tar). Buried deep in the tar preserved after a few millions of years are the remains of pre historic animals, your woolly Mammoths, Saber Tooth Cats and Sloths. If you have seen the film Ice Age this is the collection of animals we are talking about here.

The tar pits feature a park area with tar pits dotted around with a museum that is at the central plaza of the park. In the George C Page museum you can view the reconstructed fragments of all the bones and in some cases the complete skeleton of these beasts that roamed the earth millions of years ago and perhaps ask the question as to why these great creatures died out.

On a side note there are not many photos of either the pits or paramount some idiot (me) forgot to put the memory card back in the camera before heading out for the day.

Before grabbing a quick taco around the corner from the tar pits we headed for our tour appointment at Paramount. Not knowing exactly what to expect we proceeded inside the gates and passed security to the employee shop, where we met our tour guide. Two very large groups had departed before us and we were rounded up into a smaller group of just 4 people, me, my mother and two other people. This happened to work out much better than expected as a smaller group we were able to enjoy a much more personnel experience.

Enable us to go on to certain sound stages and look around the sets that were constructed for many different TV shows from shows like Hung and the Dr Phil talk show. The outside sets were very impressive panting wood in a certain style so it comes out looking like brick. Each of the outside sets could be dressed accordingly to make them look like any American city or even European city for that matter, complete with subways, trees, news stands and man hole covers. All of this looks and feels like the real thing but go inside these shops, offices and apartment blocks and all you see is a large metal framework that is holding up the painted wood in front.

A superb time was had at Paramount Studios defiantly worth a visit if you are in town, I would just like to thank our tour guide Scott who was great at giving us an in depth look into how you create movie or TV magic with in.