Arizona is getting a holiday gift early this year after being chosen as the first stop for the colossal The Marvel Experience Tour. The one-of-a-kind, fully immersive experience sounds like it will blow the minds of all valley nerds by recruiting you as an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and setting you off into an adventure that spans seven state of the art domes, and brings in a large roster of Marvel superheroes and villains. The Marvel Experience Tour producer Rick Licht was kind enough to go in-depth with us about every aspect of what sounds like an event Arizona Marvel fans can not miss.
[After you read the interview you’re going to want to go over to our giveaway for your chance to win passes to The Marvel Experience Tour]
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We’re extremely excited here in Arizona to be The Marvel Experience Tour’s first stop!
Rick Licht: You should be!
Winter and early spring are the best times of the year to be in Arizona.
Rick Licht: Spring Training is one of the reasons we felt Phoenix was one of the absolute best places to bring this. Doug [Schaer, co-producer] and I have represented athletes for many years. We’re in Phoenix and Scottsdale and Mesa and Tempe and Tucson every year for longer than I care to admit, and always felt that the crowds that you guys get out at the ballpark and the surrounding restaurants in the areas are just very family oriented. Everybody is very friendly. Great energy, good people and that’s exactly what we were looking for in The Marvel Experience. We’re happy to be spending the holidays in Phoenix.
Can you tell me a bit about your backgrounds and how you got involved in The Marvel Experience Tour?
Rick Licht: We’re the founding partners and it started this with a blank sheet of paper just over five years ago. I mentioned that Doug and I represented athletes for many years. We would always go to the events surrounding the Super Bowl, The Jam Session at the NBA All-Star game, The MLB FanFest, and I was out there in Arizona a couple of years ago for that when you guys hosted the game.
The Super Bowl is also actually here again this year, too.
Rick Licht: Yes it is! And you’ll see The NFL Experience out at the Super Bowl. You’ll see we’ve taken that in an entirely different, bigger, better, more dynamic direction. With the [MLB] FanFest it’s $30-$35, they get between 120-140,000 people regardless of the market. Phoenix will do the same numbers as New York or L.A.
It’s a nice show. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as it could be. Which is why we always wanted to create something that would be bigger and better. That’s where the idea came from: “Well, what if we have these giant domes? What if we were able to buy out the footprint the way Cirque du Soleil does? Or better yet, the way P.T. Barnum did 150 years ago?” If we were able to control all of the revenue streams then we’d be able to spend a lot of money on the production, but we’d be able to keep all the revenue so we could keep the cost down. Have you seen the pricing on The Marvel Experience?
Yes, around $35. It’s extremely affordable.
Rick Licht: Yes! Extremely affordable. I think that’s your headline. We wanted to make sure this was going to be family friendly and all of the partners that we have, whether it’s Michael Cole who has done The Rolling Stones, U2, Pink Floyd, and Barbara Streisand or the WWE that does 300 live events a year or even Ticketmaster, our partner with the ticketing, have all said the ticket price should be quite a bit higher. Double or triple what we’re charging. But it was important for me and Doug that we make this affordable for families and for working people. We’ve been able to achieve that.
So in looking to do things bigger and better, it’s one of those things where you sit there with a piece of paper and say “What if we did this? What if we did that?” And it becomes a bit of a dream, a bit of a wishlist, and then five years later you wake up and say “Holy cow! We actually did so many of these things that we put on that list years ago.” Very excited to have this 4-D traveling motion ride with the movable chairs. It’s an incredible experience. If you’ve ever been on Back to the Future or Despicable Me at Universal Studios or Star Tours at Disney. Have you been on any of those? It’s very much like Star Tours and obviously it’s not the same price as a theme park ticket. You’re not spending $100 to get in. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done with that.
There’s quite a few elements here that are first of their kind. The 360-degree stereoscopic 3-D dome is something that would be the centerpiece of our marketing if we could figure out a way to say it in one sentence. You’ve been to 3-D movies, right? It feels like things are coming off the screen at you. Well imagine that you’re in a dome and things are coming at you from above and behind and the right and the left and you’re in almost an Occulus Rift-type experience, except you’re not wearing the goggles. You’re in the middle of this hologram with 140 other people and you’re not all facing the same way, because someone’s watching Wolverine in front and someone is watching Captain America off to the side and there’s someone else watching The Vision or Black Widow off to the left.
You mentioned the chairs are movable. So do you swivel on them?
Rick Licht: No, this is separate from the 4-D motion ride. In the 4-D motion ride it’s very similar to Star Tours, but when I say the chairs move -frequently they say things are a motion ride, and it just has a spritz of water or you get poked in the back. Ours are the seats you get at Star Tours where they move a few inches in each directions to enhance the feeling of movement. It’s virtual augmented reality movement.
What are some of the difficulties of putting on a production like this? It seems like an enormous task to set up this huge theme-park like event, and then pack it up and move it to Dallas or San Diego or wherever you’re going next.
Rick Licht: You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never moved 37 forty-foot trucks from one city to another have you?
Moving an apartment or house is hard enough.
Rick Licht: I’m going to be using that line in my next interview. I couldn’t get someone to help me move a mile and half. Now I’ve got 100 people helping me move 300 miles. [laughs] It’s a little crazy. There are so many key learnings that came into play here. We work with a group called PRG, Production Resource Group. Their founding president Jere Harris is one of our partners, and their team has been absolutely instrumental in figuring out how to move hundreds of miles of cable and the lighting and the projection and the sound and the flooring, to get it all packed up and move it from one city to another. The sequencing pages, if you saw them Kyle, just hundreds of pages long, explaining how to break down every single aspect and in what order. And then how to set it up again. So there’s a very detailed, complex method to how we break this down and how we set it up.
The press materials for the event mention that there will be a full sized Quinjet. Was it built specifically for this event?
Rick Licht: We built it in Doug’s garage. Just on the weekends. No, we hired a group called Lexington Fabrication and they did the giant Optimus Prime out at Universal Studios. They’ve worked with every major studio building set pieces and we spent an awful lot of time with them and with Marvel to commission a Quinjet that holds 75 people. You will go inside the Quinjet.
That was going to be my follow-up. That is awesome.
Rick Licht: You’ll go inside the Quinjet. It’s similar to the one you see in The Avengers film and perhaps on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as well. Very excited about that, and it’s actually two-thirds the size of the Endeavour space shuttle, if you saw them move that recently. So it’s not small. Doug and I were amazed when they built it because all we kept saying was “How are we going to move this? How are you going to break it down?” We actually allocated 20 hours to set it up. They did it in 16 and that included a lunch break and a dinner break. We came in four hours below the allotted time, so we were very pleased. It easily could have taken three weeks.
But these guys are professionals and that’s one of things that we are most proud of: the team we’ve built. Whether it’s Prana Rhythm and Hues doing the animation, The Third Floor did our pre-viz before we got Prana, Lexington I’ve already mentioned building our Quinjet and all of our set pieces, and it’s just been extraordinary watching everybody come together. Everybody loving Marvel and these magnificent characters. Everybody working through the night. If I showed you my emails, there’s not one night where I don’t get at least a dozen emails between 2 and 3am because people are working everywhere, people are doing everything and it’s really just spectacular.
The Marvel Experience Tour’s character designs show a yellow-suited Wolverine from the comics, a Thor similar to the movies and sets like on Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. Was the idea to make your characters a mash-up of all different versions of the characters from their various incarnations?
Rick Licht: The sets from Agents of S.H.I.E.LD., those are similar to the ones in The Avengers films so that’s all related, we wanted to go with more of the classic look, which is why Wolverine is in his yellow suit from the comic books. When we were looking at Thor, personally when I was in third grade I had a Thor binder that had his origin story with Dr. Don Blake – I could probably do the whole thing here some 30 years later from memory, because I was bored in class and read the comic book every single day. I love the old look of Thor, but people are very familiar with him from the films, from The Avengers and his own two films – soon to be three. Such a popular character, so we slanted a little more towards the feature film version.
The same thing with Nick Fury and a few other characters. But The Vision still looks the way that he first did when he joined the Avengers some thirty something years ago, great to have a cool character like that in there. Black Panther, She-Hulk looks like She-Hulk. Certainly Spider-Man and Captain America, those are timeless outfits.
You guys were ahead of the game with your roster selection since the experience was first announced. Iron Fist, Black Panther and The Vision are all getting brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe now. She-Hulk being the only one not in the works anywhere.
Rick Licht: I’ve gotta tell you, it’s exciting on one level when we chose these characters, and we did it more than a year ago, we wanted to have characters that were not being focused on in any of the high-profile initiatives. We wanted them to be ours. We wanted to be the ones to kind of make them more popular and bring them to the masses.
It started with Vision last Christmas, we got a call from our friend at Marvel that said “Hey, you guys are ahead of the curve. We just added The Vision to the next Avengers film and congratulations.” And we thought “Well, that’s nice. But we wanted him all to ourselves.” We love The Vision. He fits so perfectly in our story and he’s such a dynamic looking character. The artwork on Vision is brilliant. If you see a close up of his real face, I defy you to tell me he’s not a real person. It looks amazing and you’ll see that when you get out there in a couple of weeks.
We did choose Iron Fist, because we knew the Netflix series was coming up and we wanted to have somebody from the Netflix series and he was a good fit for what we were doing. She-Hulk, as you mentioned, doesn’t have the big event coming up. Black Panther was another character that we liked and featured in our story, now he’s got his feature film slated to come out in a couple of years. So yeah, we were a little ahead of curve. Thank you for noticing. I appreciate your diligence, Kyle.
On the villains side of things you’ve got a little more room to play around with untapped characters. You’ve got M.O.D.O.K. You’ve got the Adaptoids. and then Red Skull, whom audiences are a bit more familiar with due to the films.
Rick Licht: That’s exactly right, and that’s how we broke it down. We wanted to have an ace. We wanted to have a main villain that everybody or most everybody would know. It really came down to Red Skull and Green Goblin being the two most popular villains, and we decided to go with Red Skull simply because when we saw the artwork, and when you see his face in our artwork you’re going to go nuts. It looks spectacular. Again, he looks so real, they’ve done an amazing job with him.
M.O.D.O.K. was one – we were looking for someone a little bit freaky, a little weird, a little crazy. He was also popular on the kids animated show [Marvel’s Avengers Assemble] so even though this story is geared towards the Marvel movie audience, we were looking at people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. People that kind of grew up with the characters. Marvel let us know that 60-something-percent of the Marvel movie audience is over the age of 25. So we geared our story for grown-ups, people that are college or above. Certainly kids will enjoy it, but we were looking for the older audience. We have an incredible actor playing M.O.D.O.K., who you know very well, I’m sure and that will be announced very shortly. If you can keep a secret I’ll tell you, but if not I’ll have to…
Oh, I can keep a secret. It’ll be off the record.
Rick Licht: [Interviewers note: Rick named the actor playing M.O.D.O.K. and it’s a really fun and exciting choice for the nerd community. We’ll make this section of the interview uncensored when the name is officially announced] …and he is awesome. He’s scary. He’s freaky. Honestly, I’m so excited about it, I want to tell everyone everything.
Will there be big names for the other characters or more traditional voice actors?
Rick Licht: We do have a few other “names” that will be released. But that wasn’t the focus of what we were doing. It’s not like one of those big animated films where they sell based on who is playing the voice. We’re selling this based on the domes, based on the technology, based on this tremendous adventure that we’ve created that you’re going to be in for two hours or more, and of course the Marvel characters. Which is the core of everything we’re doing.
Talk a little bit more about the animation. Is it stylized? Is it CG Pixar style? Is it cell animated?
Rick Licht: You will think they are real people. The highest end video game level, so it’s not photo real, it’s not Chris Evans. But if you didn’t know what Chris Evans looks like, you’d think that’s Chris Evans. So it looks very cool. I mentioned The Vision and Red Skull. When I look at the close-ups of the face, I bet my life that it’s a real person.
Will we get a trailer or some other way to get an idea of what this all will look like before the event opens? Or is the only way to find out to attend The Marvel Experience Tour?
Rick Licht: There will be a trailer coming out. I think we’re calling it a teaser. But you can call it whatever you want. We will have something coming up very soon before we get to Phoenix. So you’ll have that to look forward to and we’ll make sure you get a copy.
Another aspect mentioned on The Marvel Experience Tour website is multi-person gaming. How does that fit into the experience?
Rick Licht: We did a bunch of things that have never been done before. One of them is we’ve created what is essentially a 24-person shooting gallery. Because you have an RFID wrist-band, your face and your name will appear up on the screen alongside 23 other people, 24 total, and Spider-Man will instruct you how to use your S.H.I.E.L.D. weapon to catch pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin. You’ll be competing against everyone else in this training mission in 3-D and there’s nothing like it out there, because with Kinect and Xbox you really can’t have more than 6 people. So we spent a lot more money than we should have to build a system that would hold 24 people, keep score, keep your name and your face up there and allow you to have this fabulous adventure.
Are 3-D glasses required for all of the domes?
Rick Licht: There are glasses in the dome I just mentioned, and the 360-degree stereoscopic 3-D dome where basically you’re in a hologram – there’ll be glasses for that as well. So twice where you’ll be wearing glasses. At other times you’re seated, you’re standing, you’re active, you’re climbing a wall, you’re doing things. It’s as much as you want.
Thanks so much for your time. The Marvel Experience Tour sounds right up my alley, and I can’t wait to get down there and check it all out. I’m especially excited to hear that it’s not just for kids.
Rick Licht: I’ve gotta tell you, honestly when [the actor playing M.O.D.O.K.] saw everything he said “I would have loved this when I was 10. But I love it even more now, because I’ve been reading these characters my whole life. I’m a fan now. When you see stuff for kids, you know it’s for kids.” This is not necessarily just for kids. This is something for people in their 20s and 30s and 40s to go out and enjoy. This is for people who go out to the Marvel movies and can’t wait to see The Avengers sequel on May 1st or Ant-Man next summer and it was designed with that in mind. We made something that I would love.
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The Marvel Experience Tour comes to Arizona Dec 12th through Jan 3rd at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. Tickets are on sale here via Ticketmaster.