UNIVERSAL STUDIOS FLORIDA
BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE RIDE
1991–2007
WELCOME TO THE INSTITUTE OF FUTURE TECHNOLOGY!
Back to the Future: The Ride was one of the rides that defined early Universal Studios Florida.
It opened May 2, 1991, almost a year after the park. You went into Doc Brown’s Institute of Future Technology, got into an eight-passenger DeLorean, and chased Biff through time.
The story picked up after Part III. Doc had built the Institute. Biff stole a DeLorean and escaped through time. You were sent after him.
AT A GLANCE
OPENED
May 2, 1991
CLOSED
March 30, 2007
PARK
Universal Studios Florida
AREA
World Expo
ATTRACTION TYPE
OMNIMAX motion simulator
REPLACED BY
The Simpsons Ride – May 15, 2008
FROM THE BACK TO THE FUTURE ARCHIVE
Videos, photographs and stories preserved from across the space-time continuum.
The Queue
The Institute was the start of the ride, not a holding pen.
Lab, museum, Doc’s inventions on display, monitors filling in the plot. It felt like you were wandering through Doc Brown’s actual workplace while everything around you slowly went wrong.
Christopher Lloyd came back as Doc. Thomas F. Wilson came back as Biff.
Biff had broken in, taken a time machine, and Doc needed the other cars to go after him.
The Ride
Eight to a DeLorean.
The car lifted, the walls dropped away, and the dome took over.
Biff ran. Doc talked to you from the screen in the dash.
Hill Valley in 2015. An ice age. A volcano. Then prehistoric times.
A dinosaur.
Lava.
Biff again.
The car moved under you the whole time.
There were two domes, with twelve DeLoreans in each, all pointed at the same ride film. From your seat, you mostly forgot the other cars were there.
Why It Closed
By the mid-2000s, the attraction was no longer drawing the crowds it once had, and Universal was already replacing more of the park’s original lineup with newer properties.
The building itself was still useful. The simulator system was still useful.
The theme wasn’t.
Universal reused the existing structure and much of the simulator infrastructure for The Simpsons Ride, which opened on May 15, 2008. The timing also made sense: The Simpsons was still a major active franchise, with The Simpsons Movie arriving in 2007.
Back to the Future: The Ride wasn’t removed because the building had become useless. Universal had a newer property that could be built around an attraction system it already owned.
What’s Left
The building is still in World Expo.
So is the dome.
So is the simulator system.
The Simpsons Ride runs on the machinery that once sent guests through time with Doc Brown.
A DeLorean and the train are still on display at Universal Studios Florida, though both have since moved from their original locations. Doc Brown has also continued to appear in the park.
The ride film survived too, which matters for a simulator attraction because so much of the experience lived on that screen.
The strange part is that the franchise has only grown more nostalgic since the ride closed. Today, plenty of fans know Back to the Future: The Ride only through old footage and stories, and many wish they’d had the chance to ride it themselves.
