Trivia / Back to the Future: The Ride

• Blooper: You'll spot a misplaced styrofoam cup on right side of the Clock Tower just before you crash into it. Most of the scenes were filmed within miniature set pieces roughly a meter (or 3 to 4 feet) tall.
• Deleted Scene: Early rough draft footage of the ride included a slightly different ending, in which Biff once again gets covered in manure.
• Descended Creator: Ride film director Douglas Trumbull and pre-show director David de Vos play the IFT scientists that were tied up by Biff Tannen.
• Inspiration for the Work: Steven Spielberg, who had a huge hand in designing the ride, was partially inspired to make it when his buddy George Lucas bragged to him over how fantastic of a job Disneyland had done with Star Tours, boasting no one could do a simulator ride better than Disney. He took that as a challenge.
• Prop Recycling:
  • After the closure of the ride, some of its props found usage in Halloween Horror Nights; one example being several of Doc's wall clocks appearing in the Dead Silence house from 2007.
  • Some of the ride's graphical widgets, such as the "camera-vision" crosshairs and the "technical-difficulties" slide with Doc wearing an Indian headdress (as seen in the queue videos), were later reused in the live-action segments on the Back to the Future cartoon show.
• Release Date Change:
  • The ride was originally meant to open with Universal Studios Florida in June of 1990 coinciding with the release of Back to the Future Part III, but due to technical issues it had to be pushed back a year.
  • The ride at Hollywood was also supposed to be released the same time as Florida's new date, but construction issues with the foundation due to the wrong amount of concrete being poured coupled with technical difficulties pushed the release back 2 years to 1993.
• Sending Stuff to Save the Show: When the impending closure of the ride was made official, many fans attempted to organize petitions and letters together to make Universal reconsider, but they ultimately proved ineffective.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Initial proposals for the ride's set-up had it being a "simulator theater", with a whole fleet of DeLoreans in a single room. This set-up ended up being used for The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera and its successors.
  • The original concept consisted of nothing more than Doc Brown flying guests through different time periods. BTTF creators Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale found this too insubstantial a concept for a ride inspired by the movies.
  • Universal considered having Doc Brown's Evil Twin brother, also portrayed by Christopher Lloyd, as the antagonist. When they brought Peyton Reed^* Later known as the director of Bring It On and Ant-Man, among others and Mark Cowen to help rewrite the script, the duo suggested that bringing back Biff as an antagonist would strengthen the connection to the movies.
  • An earlier draft of the attraction had the 2015 sequence being set in the air-highways; as well as an 1885 scene that would've included a bit where the riders just barely avoid getting hit by a train.
• You Look Familiar: Darlene Vogel, the actress that portrayed Heather the IFT receptionist/hostess, also played Leslie "Spike" O'Malley, a member of Griff's 2015 gang in Back to the Future Part II.

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