October over at Universal Studios Florida is full of spooky decorations and amazing haunted mazes with plenty of scare zones.  Unfortunately in 2020 with everything going on their usual Halloween Horror Nights events were not happening as usual.  But as a nice surprise, they did open two of the Mazes to regular day guests without a separate ticket required.

Throughout the month of October, I headed over to visit these mazes as often as I could and really enjoyed them.  Even though there were only two houses, no scare zones, and took place during the day.  But they still had plenty of amazing design work and scares throughout.  The first house was Revenge of the Tooth Fairy.

The second maze was The Bride of Frankenstein Lives.  One perk from this year was that the wait times were never more than 10 minutes when I visited mid-week and I was able to basically walk right into the mazes throughout the day and I loved it.

During one of these trips, I took a break from the Halloween fun and headed over to the Islands of Adventure park just to see what was going on.

After scanning my ticket and heading into the park I always cut through the Island Market & Export store just to get some cool air plus they have a couple pressed penny machines inside.  But on this trip, something about one of the machines caught my eye.

Last year you may remember I wrote about a whole bunch of machines that had stickers places on the advertising that certain penny designs were going to be retired.  Then over the next few months, the machines were updated with new designs.  One of these machines was in this store, but the strange thing was that it originally got one of those stickers.  Then after all the other machines were changed, this machine was kept the same and the retired sticker was removed.

That has finally changed.  When I walked by the machine the designs immediately stuck out to me and I was shocked to see they were new.  The cabinet of the machine is the same, and unlike the Disney machines, it still costs just 50 cents plus you can use your own penny (collectors rejoice).

Thankfully I always carry around extra pennies and quarters for just this situation.  You never know when you may come across a new machine and need to press a new set.  The designs at this machine include Kong, E.T., and a cute Hello Kitty.

I’m surprised it took this long to update, and assume that it was scheduled to change last year but maybe there was a licensing issue that delayed these from being released.  But whatever the situation was it’s done and we have a fun new set of pennies.  After collecting this set I did check on all the other machines in this park to verify if there were any other new penny designs, and it appeared this was the only new set for now.  Hopefully, we will see some more new ones in the future, but for now, it seems that Universal is done swapping out their penny designs.  Happy Collecting!