Are you ready Time Travelers?
The renowned Dr. Emmett Brown himself needs you. A cackling Biff Tannen has stolen Doc’s DeLorean time machine and zipped off across the space-time continuum.
Great Scott! You must track him down before he changes life as we know it and bring him . . . (where else?) Back to the Future.
So goes the premise of Back to the Future – The Ride, the $40 million attraction at Universal Studios Florida that opens officially Thursday.
The journey begins for the ride’s visitors at Doc Brown’s Institute of Future Technology. There, in a preshow video, the zany scientist (played by actor Christopher Lloyd, who starred in the Back to the Future movies) explains an unsettling security problem. Biff (actor Thomas F. Wilson) has stowed away on a time trip back from Hill Valley 1955 and is up to some evil mischief in the corridors of the institute.
Biff succeeds in trapping the Doc in his office and hijacks the time vehicle. You follow him in a chase scene to end all chase scenes. Don’t worry, you’ll have the company of other volunteer time travelers.
Doc delivers instructions by video in a laboratory that opens to the holding area for one of his new-model DeLorean time vehicles. It’s built for eight passengers.
Once you’re in, the DeLorean doors close down around you. The motor guns, and a cool fog envelops you. In nanoseconds, it seems, you’re flying into Hill Valley, circa 2015, and on the trail of Biff.
Your car lurches after his. It dives, it careens, it crashes through anything that stands in its way. The wind blows your hair back. Then, in a flash, Biff is gone. You see his vehicle’s fiery tracks just before you’re thrown into the Ice Age and down into a steep crevasse.
(Incidentally, if you’re not too unnerved to notice, there’s a time-and-date readout on the dash that shows where the vehicle is, where it has been, and where it is going.)
Jumpin’ Jigowatts! The dashboard video on which Doc and Biff have been relaying messages suddenly flashes “Engine Failure!” Your DeLorean is now spiraling headfirst toward an icy river. Just in the nick of time, a computer corrects the problem and you’re on your way again – this time into the Volcanic Age.
Biff leads your DeLorean again into peril. You dodge lava falls and dinosaurs – sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Eventually – we’ll just say by a stroke of luck – you do catch up with Biff and bump him Back to the Future.
This breathless journey takes all of four minutes. It’s not real, of course, but you’re guaranteed to be too preoccupied by the sensation to ponder the special effects.
Actually, the time-traveling DeLorean passengers are lifted eight feet into a domed theater where a film projected on an 80-foot-diameter Omnimax screen takes them on their adventure.
“Because of the curvature and the quality of the film images, you start to perceive that it’s 3-D,” said Terry Winnick, vice president of special projects/entertainment at Universal Studios Florida and the show’s producer.
The experience is further enhanced by the sound in the theater. More than 300 speakers are playing 11 different soundtracks simultaneously, including, for example, wind, motors and music.
There are, in fact, two theaters, each with 12 vehicles on three levels. The DeLoreans pitch and yaw and gyrate in sync with the film on a hydraulically activated platform, or “motion base.” Each is positioned somewhat differently for the best possible view of the screen, Winnick said. Each ride then is slightly different, but only the attraction’s most diehard fans will be able to tell.
(There’s already a cult following developing from nearby Dr. Phillips High School, Winnick said.)
The ride has been in so-called “technical rehearsal” for three months, having already made time travelers of more than 600,000 people.
The riders are in effect stepping into the shoes of the film trilogy’s Marty McFly (played by actor Michael J. Fox), who always has to save the Doc, battle bad-guy Biff and protect the space-time continuum. Fans of the movie will note, however, that Marty never had to travel back to prehistoric time.
“Rather than going back to the old West and encountering stuff you’d already seen, we wanted to give you some experiences that were more thrilling, more emotional,” Winnick explained. “What is more terrifying, more threatening, more exciting, than meeting a dinosaur?”
Hmmm. Not much.
Simulated though it is, you’ll be glad if you experience this trip on an empty stomach. Food and drink don’t seem to be conducive to time travel.
