An Oral History of Back to the Future: The Ride
“You are sitting in the DeLorean (from) Marty McFly’s point-of-view,” explained Steven Spielberg in a promotional video that described the experience of Back to the Future: The Ride. “Doc Brown is guiding you right through the experience, and you are really in Back to the Future. It’s almost like Back to the Future Part IV.”
Debuting at Universal Studios Florida in 1991, Back to the Future: The Ride was a groundbreaking attraction that involved some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Along with Spielberg, who birthed the idea and oversaw the ride’s development as a consultant for Universal Studios, visionary filmmaker Douglas Trumbull was hired to direct the footage that accompanied the ride. Trumbull had made a name for himself creating the visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, and his Back to the Future adventure took riders to Future Hill Valley, the ice age and Cretaceous period — all from an enormous, domed OMNIMAX screen while a convoy of eight-passenger DeLoreans simulated the experience.
The story setting up the adventure — known as the “preshow” — was that Biff Tannen had broken into Doc Brown’s newly constructed Institute of Future Technology and stolen a DeLorean. With Doc’s guidance via a small dashboard screen, riders had to stop Biff from causing trouble. This part of the story was co-written by Ant-Man director Peyton Reed, with an overall guiding hand from Back to the Future co-creator, co-writer and co-producer Bob Gale.
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While Back to the Future: The Ride was built to directly compete with Disney’s Star Tours ride, it provided a completely unique experience. It ran a total of four-and-a-half minutes and cost $40 million to build. One of its producers even says, “Per minute of film, Back to the Future: The Ride is probably the highest costing movie ever made.”
Universal got its money’s worth, however, as the ride was a major attraction at three of its parks — beginning in Orlando in 1991, then in Hollywood in 1993 and finally in Osaka in 2001. It officially closed in the U.S. in 2007 and in Japan in 2016, but it very much lives on in the hearts of Back to the Future fans who were lucky enough to experience it.
We, of course, didn’t have the luxury of a flux capacitor, but we were able to travel back in time with all the major players — sans Trumbull, who died in 2022 — to chronicle the highly complex, somewhat contentious and occasionally contradictory story of how Back to the Future: The Ride charted a new frontier in theme-park attractions.
Peter N. Alexander, former vice president and executive producer at Universal Studios, creator of Back to the Future: The Ride: When Back to the Future: The Ride got started, there was no Florida project for Universal Studios — the ride is what led to Universal Studios Florida getting built.
In 1986, I was Director of Shows and Special Effects for Universal Studios Hollywood. One day, (producer) Craig Barr and I were programming the King Kong audio animatronic figure that was going to open in California. King Kong was the first really big, new, Disney-style attraction that we’d done, and it had all kinds of bells and whistles.
All of a sudden, a guy who had been my college roommate, Steven Spielberg, shows up in a golf cart. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years, so we got to talking, and he told me, “I’m here because George Lucas said that I was an idiot for continuing to work for Universal, and I should give all my theme park rides to Disney because they’re the only ones that can do anything with it. But (Universal executives) Sidney Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman told me to come down here and watch what was happening on the King Kong set.”
After a while of me explaining the King Kong ride, Spielberg said, “Here’s the deal. Lucas took me on Star Tours, and it was really good. So what I’d like you to do is, take Back to the Future and see what you can do with it. But I want something better than Star Tours.”
Bob Gale, co-creator, co-writer and co-producer of the Back to the Future trilogy: When Universal decided they wanted to do the ride, they went to Steven because Steven was a consultant with Universal Studios. At the time, (Back to the Future director Robert) Zemeckis and I were knee-deep in Back to the Future Part III, so we didn’t have any time to think about it or deal with it. We definitely thought it was cool, though. It was like the pinnacle of success to have a ride out of your movie.
Alexander: We got Kong open, and it was a big hit; attendance on the tour almost doubled. I was the golden boy all of a sudden, and I began working on the wide idea for the Back to the Future ride. My initial idea was something like what The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man is today, where it’s a ride and there were moments when you’d go into a 3D theater, but then it had some fast sections and a fast coaster ending.
But my boss Barry Upson took a look at what I was working on one day and said, “Jesus, this is gonna cost 50 million bucks!” I said, “At least, but Star Tours had to cost at least 50” — I found out later it cost $75 million. “If Spielberg wants it to be better than Star Tours, this is what it’s going to be.” Barry was adamant, though. He told me, “We’re never going to build anything like this. You have to cut it down or change your ideas.”
That’s when I started thinking of other things — something that was stationary. I got to thinking about where I worked in the 1970s at Hughes Aerospace in Culver City. They had a Singer Simulator for the F-111B, and I thought, “What if somebody makes a dome screen that’s bigger, for 100 people at a time?”
I called up Greg MacGillivray, who was a big IMAX guy, and he told me about this thing called OMNIMAX, which was a big domed screen. He said, “I don’t use that format very often. It’s hard to shoot because it wraps around you.” I said, “Well, that’s exactly what I want. You think you could shoot something like that, and we could superimpose special effects into it and make it look like you’re in the future or in the past? Because this is Back to the Future, and it has to be like that.” He said, “I can certainly try.”
As for the simulator and the special effects, I immediately thought of Doug Trumbull.
I presented the basic idea to Jay Stein, my boss’ boss, but Jay immediately said, “A: That will never work. And B: If it would have, somebody would have already come up with it. It’s too simple. It’s too obvious. Either way, you’re going to have to show me.”
So, we rented the OMNIMAX dome in Caesar’s Palace for a day, and these guys mocked up car bodies out of posterboard, which sat on a platform above the seats. I got some point-of-view IMAX shots from Greg, and we strung those together. Then, they turn the film on, and we’re in the cardboard car and we’re flying. That convinced Jay.
I went to Spielberg and described my idea for Back to the Future, and he said “That sounds great!” Then I mentioned Trumbull, and he said, “Absolutely not. Find somebody else. Not that guy. He really screwed me over. I gave him all the special effects on Close Encounters, and he was taking forever and he wouldn’t show us anything. He bushwhacked me. I will never hire that guy again. Never.”
Instead, we found Richard Edlund, who’d won an Academy Award for Special Effects. He was going to do the effects, and Greg was basically going to shoot the background.
Greg got this helicopter pilot to shoot these passes of this tower in Downtown L.A., and we were going to mock up Future Hill Valley from these shots. But Greg told me after-the-fact that he doesn’t fly, and so, he didn’t go up in the helicopter. Which is why, when we got the footage back, the background was all jittery. I told Greg, “We just wasted all this film.” Edlund thought the same thing. “This is junk,” he told me. “I can’t work with it.” Then he mentioned that he’d already done this effect and that effect. I said, “Wait, that’s not in the script.” To which he responded, “We didn’t like your script so we threw it out.”
The whole thing was out-of-control. I went to Sid, Lew and Jay and told them, “We’ve got real problems here. This thing isn’t working at all.” Jay took a look at the dailies and just left the room. Later on, he called me and started screaming at me about what an idiot I am. Finally, I go, “You know what? I deserve it. You’re right. You want me to quit?” He said, “No. We’re going to find somebody else to do the film.”
Eventually, though, they came back to me and said, “What do we do next?” I said, “We probably should have just gone with Doug Trumbull.” So I went back to Steve and said, “What if you don’t have to talk to Douglas?” He said, “If I don’t have to see this guy, and you want to talk to him, go for it.”
Sherry McKenna, show producer on Back to the Future: The Ride: That didn’t happen at all. I brought in Doug Trumbull. I got hired to produce the film and the motion base, and when I came on, what they had already was horrible. It was like a boring travelog. I told them, “This won’t work. It’s terrible.” I explained to them that you must have a motion base in sync with the picture, but nobody understood that until I finally convinced Sidney Sheinberg.
Then I fired the previous director, and I went to Douglas Trumbull and hired him because he and I went way back. Next, I went to Jay Stein and told him I hired Douglas Trumbull to do the film and the motion base. He said, “You did what?!?!?! You can’t hire Douglas. Steven and he don’t get along!” I told him, “Steven isn’t going to care. I’ll go to Peter so he can run it by Steven.” But Peter said, “I’m not going to do that.” So I went to Steven myself, and he was fine with it. It was no big deal.
With everyone else, though, it was a fight every step of the way. It was always about the money with them, but for me, it’s all about the fans. You give them the best attraction you can, then the money will come.
Phil Hettema, show producer on Back to the Future: The Ride: Sherry McKenna was critically important because she was responsible for getting Doug Trumbull onto the project. That was a huge, incredibly significant turning point. I can absolutely say that the attraction wouldn’t have been anything like it was without Doug Trumbull.
I took over as producer on the ride just before Peter Alexander left the company. The ride went through major changes after that. When I came on, the original concept was that it was going to be shot live action, with inserted models and miniatures. There wasn’t a defined story yet either.
Alexander: Doug had his own story that wasn’t bad at all. He made this great presentation to Sid and Lew, but Sid and Lew went back and forth on it. They asked me what I thought. I liked it, but I thought he went on a little tangent in one place. I said, “There’s one section in there that’s not what Steve wants, so why don’t we go back to what I had, which is going back to the Dinosaur Age?” I knew Steve liked dinosaurs.
Hettema: All the details of the motion base hadn't been worked out yet either, so one of the first things I did was go out and have a lot of reference imagery made — computer-generated wireframes of streets and alleys, things like that. We rented an OMNIMAX dome in Vancouver from a science museum, and we took some seats of the theater out and put in a platform. We set up a dummy motion base that we could sit in and joystick the motion from. We could run this footage and figure out what worked with the vehicle, because nobody really knew. We spent a lot of time in that motion base. To this day, I still get green when I get into a simulator for too long.
Now, this was all pre-digital media production. I’d had those wireframes made, but that was all in its infancy. It never would have passed for final production. So Doug made the decision that we were going to make this entire four-and-a-half minute film with models and miniatures and motion-control model-making. But because of the resolution size for an OMNIMAX frame, the models required were some of the biggest models that have ever been produced in the history of the motion-picture industry. Right after that, digital production took enough of a leap where nobody would ever do that again.
Arish Fyzee, former media producer and project manager for Douglas Trumbull: The Back to the Future ride was the first time I worked for Douglas. In early 1989, I was doing camera work in New York City, and I met him and we hit it off. He told me he was setting up this effects studio in an old textile mill in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, and he invited me to take a look. I did that, and a couple of weeks later, he called me saying, “I have something. I don’t know what it is, but it could be interesting. I’m going to do a one-week workshop on it.”
I went up, and we had a freewheeling brainstorm with a few other people. About a month later, Doug called and said, “It looks like we’re getting this project. Do you want to move up here? It’s probably going to be about two years.”
At that time, nobody had done visual effects for fish-eye lenses for a dome. And none of the existing visual effects equipment could be used because the camera and the motion control had to be built in such a way that it wouldn’t see itself. With existing cameras, the special effects equipment would be caught in the frame of an OMNIMAX camera. To fix this, we had to make cameras and motion-control heads that didn’t exist.
Also, Douglas knew from the beginning that the only way to do this right was to have our own theater with one of the ride vehicles at our facility along with a quarter-scale dome and an OMNIMAX projector. This freaked out all the execs. In a meeting with Sidney Sheinberg, Lew Wasserman and Steven Spielberg, the execs were like, “You’re asking for all these things. How do you know they’ll work?” And Spielberg said, “If there’s one person on the planet who I trust to do stuff that we don’t know how to do, It’s Doug.” That’s really how we got everything signed off on.
Yes, Doug and Steven had had some run-ins on Close Encounters, but the meetings for Back to the Future were always cordial.
When we got started on the film, we pulled from Doug’s rolodex. We carved out a four-minute story and built miniature foam-core models of the scenes. Then we made the actual models, which were like 20 feet by 40 feet, and sometimes even bigger.
Future Hill Valley was all miniatures. To make the city look like it had scale, we had to get a lot of little lights into a lot of places. The camera was on a motion-controlled boom that extended straight out into the set. It extended from a track behind it. When it crashes into the signs, that’s where the cuts were. And yes, as you might see online, there is a coffee cup in the Hill Valley set. Somebody just forgot it there.
The ice age set was one of the bigger ones. We used fiberglass so that we could get that internal glow that ice has. The crevasse was built through two or three levels of the studio. We broke open holes in the floors to get the proper depth. The lava from the volcanoes was made from methyl cellulose, which is a food ingredient. Because it was under all these lights, it would go rancid, and the whole place would stink.
The two dinosaurs were animatronic figures with highly repeatable controlled animation moving super, super slow to stay in-sync with the motion control, which was recording at maybe two frames a second.
The last shot in miniature was a miniature set of the Institute of Future Technology, which matched the building the ride was going into. The final shot with Biff and the other people was a live set. Tom Wilson (the actor who played Biff) came up, and we shot that in an afternoon.
After each shot, even when we’d do a rough pass, we’d go into the quarter-scale dome theater with the DeLorean and adjust and program the motion base. Then we’d go back to the set. It was a really iterative process. And when the programming is rough and it’s not yet synced perfectly, you get motion sickness easily. It’s something you have to do before lunch.
McKenna: Programming a ride like that is a bitch, but they did such good work. I test-drove it a lot in the Berkshires because I’m a fanatic and because I get motion sick. They always like me to be the test case on these kinds of things because I always get nauseous.
Fyzee: A key aspect to the ride was the model of the DeLorean Biff is driving, the one that you’re following during the ride. It was an intricate model that was about 18 inches long. It was on a wire rig that was very stable. That car was important because the audience’s attention is on it, which makes it easier on the rider physiologically. Without that, people would get motion sick much more quickly.
Altogether, after six months of initial development and hiring 200 people, the filming process itself took nearly two years to get just that four-and-a-half minutes right.
Hettema: I was heavily involved with the architecture of the building the ride would go in because nobody had figured out how to take 24 different groups of people onto three levels of a building every six minutes. I spent a lot of time with the architect, figuring out the hallway configuration and how to get people in and out of the preshow rooms. I also worked on the size of the domes and figuring out the chassis of the DeLoreans and how many we would need.
Everything in the theme-park business lives and dies on capacity. For a major theme-park ride, you need to do 2,000 people an hour, just as a rule of thumb. You work backwards from that. How long is the experience going to be? Well, the tolerance level for a simulation like that is right at the four- to four-and-a-half minute level. You go beyond that, people start to get green really quickly. But if it’s less than four minutes, you have people going, “I waited in line for two hours for just two minutes?”
So you’ve got four-and-a-half minutes, and you’ve got to load and unload. That’s a six-minute show cycle — every six minutes, the show cycles through. You do the math and divide that up and figure out how many people per vehicle and how many vehicles. We ended up with a DeLorean that would handle eight people, then you figure out you need 24 vehicles. But you can’t fit 24 vehicles in one dome, so you need two domes. We had 12 DeLoreans on each screen. There were three DeLoreans on the bottom level, five in the middle level and four on the top level.
Gale: Peyton Reed came up with all the preshow stuff. Peyton had covered the behind-the-scenes for us on Back to the Future and the sequels. He and his writing partner, Mark Cowen, were around a lot, so they knew us and they knew the characters.
Peyton Reed, co-writer of Back to the Future: The Ride pre-show: I did the making-of documentaries for the second and third Back to the Future movies. I was an assistant cameraman for the second movie’s making-of material, and I directed the making-of material for Back to the Future III. Because of that, for a couple of years, I became the Back to the Future go-to guy with Mark Cowen.
Mark and I had two tasks. One was to write about 45 minutes of preshow material, which is what the audience sees when they’re waiting in line. It explains what the ride is and what’s going to happen. It explains the idea of the Institute of Future Technology and Doc Brown’s place in this whole thing. It also sets up that Biff breaks in and is trying to steal the DeLorean. The other key thing we wrote was the material on the ride while you’re watching the Trumbull film — all the stuff with Biff and Doc on the little dashboard screen.
Speaking of which, when I came onboard, the idea was that the antagonist wasn’t going to be Biff, it was going to be Doc Brown’s evil twin brother. I don’t know who’s idea that was, but Mark and I both thought it was terrible.
Gale: Peyton was there protecting the canon of the franchise. I’m sure he said, “Everybody knows Doc Brown doesn’t have an evil twin brother. They would have put him in the movie if he did. Everybody wants to see Biff!”
Reed: We said, “You have a great antagonist already: Biff. Plus, Tom Wilson is a great guy, and we really want to have him in this. He’s always in a great mood and always up for anything. It’s hard to imagine that ride without his energy.”
Meanwhile, Christopher Lloyd was, of course, crucial to the whole thing, and man, his performance is great. This wasn’t a guy who was going through the motions and taking the money because it was just some ride. Chris was all-in. It was so fun to be able to write in Doc Brown’s voice and see Chris deliver the goods in his very particular way.
At some point, we asked, “Can we get Michael J. Fox?” But he had a hugely successful film career at that point and wasn’t available.
First Flight of the DeLoreans
Gale: They opened Back to the Future: The Ride in Florida first, in 1991.
Alexander: I was working for Six Flags at the time, but I came back for the opening. I saw Spielberg’s wife there, and I introduced myself. I said, “I’m an old friend of Steve, and this is my ride.” She told me, “Steven brought George Lucas here just to shove it down his throat how much better this is than Star Tours, so I sure hope you did a good job.” Later on, I spotted George Lucas and Steve coming down the exit ramp, and George Lucas was mad as hell while Steve was grinning ear-to-ear.
Hettema: It was so well-received. That first moment, when you lift up into the dome and the smoke clears, it’s one of the all-time great theme-park moments. Then you’re flying.
Fyzee: The lasting memory for me at the opening was watching people exiting with smiles on their faces. It was touching and, at times, overwhelming.
Doc Goes Hollywood
Gale: When they started building the ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, that’s when I started hanging around. Steve Marble was the guy wearing the hard hat and telling me where everything would go. David de Vos was around at that time as well.
David de Vos, coordinator for Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, producer and director for additional Hollywood preshow footage: The original plan was just to take the same ride from Florida and replicate it in Hollywood. But at some point, Universal realized that the Hollywood attraction was going to be a much bigger draw than they’d expected, which meant they had to expand the queue lines because waits were going to be longer. And so, we needed additional preshow footage.
I was given a budget of $50,000 to produce this additional footage. Early on, I was talking with Bob Gale about footage of another scientist at the Institute of Future Technology, but that got scrapped. We ended up adding a lot of the making-of footage from the trilogy, as well as footage from “Doc’s Hovercam,” some of which was filmed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doubling for the Institute of Future Technology, while the rest featured some very rudimentary CG of the hovercam flying around the building.
For the CG portion, I had some friends at USC who helped me. One of them was Rob Letterman, who later directed Shark Tale and Detective Pikachu. For the sound effects, Rob called one of his friends, J.J. Abrams, who did the sound-effects work in his basement.
Second Flight of the DeLoreans
de Vos: It took us two years to build Back to the Future: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. We opened on June 12, 1993. I remember the grand opening because everybody was there — Mary Steenburgen, Michael J. Fox. I was Tom Wilson’s concierge for the day.
Gale: I was making the movie Trespass at the time, so I invited Ice T to come to the opening with me. It was a great ride. I still remember the first time I went on it, I thought it put Star Tours in the dust.
Once the ride was up and running, when I still had an office at Universal, sometimes at lunch, I’d say to my assistant, “Let’s skip lunch and go on the ride.” We’d walk to the backlot and walk over to the ride, and they’d say, “Hey Bob, how ya doing?” Then they’d cut me into the front of the line, and I’d go on it.
OUTATIME
Gale: It’s a crime that Back to the Future: The Ride isn’t there anymore. I was devastated when I heard they were closing it. I was even there for the last day. They had a countdown going tracking how many days it was until they shut down the ride. It was gut-wrenching.
The original idea was, every five to seven years, they were going to refresh the ride with a different experience, while having it still be Back to the Future, like Star Tours has done. But the Universal guys were cheap. They wouldn’t spend the money on that, but they would dismantle the whole thing and spend the money to make it into The Simpsons ride instead.
de Vos: Every time I walk into the park now and I see The Simpsons spread all over our baby, I have to contain myself.
Hettema: I’ve been in this business for 50 years, and that’s just the nature of it. Things go on. It’s always evolving and moving on. You’re lucky to have a handful of really seminal experiences, and I absolutely think that was true for Back to the Future: The Ride. That ride helped put Universal on the map, and it foreshadowed what we would do with Islands of Adventure, which really elevated Universal’s profile to a close to Disney-level experience.
Reed: In 2007, I remember they announced “one month left” before the attraction closed. My niece was visiting L.A. from out-of-town, and she wanted to go to Universal. We got passes, and I told her, “We’ve got to go on the Back to the Future ride. I wrote this ride years ago and it’s going to close soon.”
I was so excited, but as we were going through the halls, I remember feeling like, “Oh, this is kind of dated.” Then I remember going on the ride, not having been on it for many years, and seeing that the film was kind of faded and scratched. Afterward, I asked my niece, “That was cool, right?” She was like “Yeah… We should go get a pretzel.”
I kind of wish I had not gone on it that last time. But in its heyday, man, it was really something.
