Back From the Future by Brad Gilmore

Author:Brad Gilmore [Gilmore, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642502060
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2020-02-16T13:20:38+00:00

Chapter 6

The Institute of Future Technology

For as long as I can remember, I have loved theme parks. To this day, I find myself listening to podcasts such as Podcast: The Ride, watching YouTube channels including “Defunctland” and “Theme Park History,” and being awe-inspired by documentaries such as the docuseries The Imagineering Story by Leslie Iwerks on Disney+. It all really started for me when I was very young. My father worked for a telecommunications company who had Buena Vista (a subsidy of the Walt Disney Company at the time) as a client. This allowed many perks for my family, including three trips to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, in a single year. The VIP experience at Disney World is too much for any child to handle. I rode Pirates, The Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain and others seemingly dozens of times prior to my tenth birthday, and the house that Mickey built really was ingrained in my DNA from that age on.

Even though my mouse ears were seemingly sewed onto my head never come off, I did have my eye on one attraction outside of a Disney park. Universal Studios had the one ride I wanted to experience more than any other. In 2004, I graduated from elementary school and was onto junior high, and during that summer I had one goal in mind: ride the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios before the beginning of the sixth grade. When I floated this potential travel plan to my parents, they were not particularly warm to the idea of going on a summer vacation just because I felt accomplished for completing the fifth grade.

After failing in my attempt to go to Orlando that summer, I hatched my own plan. I went to my sister Brittney, who is almost seven years older than me, and asked her (if I had saved enough money) whether she would take me to Universal upon my eighth grade graduation. After she kind of shrugged it off as a future favor too far in advance to really even consider, she agreed. I began to save my money over the next three years, and I think the box of change that I accrued would have been juuuust enough to finally achieve the goal of riding what many people considered the fourth installment of the franchise.

When I walked across the stage at Sydney Lanier Middle School I went to my sister to see if our plans were still intact. After my inquiry, she seemed to not remember what I was talking about at all. Right around the time of my graduation, she was working full time at a brand-new job and was newly pregnant, so she may have been a tad busy to take her little brother nearly one thousand miles to go to a theme park. I gave up on my goal for the time being and thought I might go on my own after I turned eighteen. Well, just four months later, Back to the Future: The Ride closed in Orlando for good.

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