Precursors to modern 4D cinema are almost as old as film itself. In 1905, Hale’s Tours placed viewers inside a fake train that could rattle and bump like the real thing. Aroma-Rama in 1959 and Smell-o-Vision a year later were short-lived, poorly functioning novelties. In the 1970s, Sensurround, which shook seats with low-frequency sound waves, could mimic the feeling of being in an earthquake.
A decade later, Disney executives brought together George Lucas, Michael Jackson and Francis Ford Coppola to make the immersive 17-minute space adventure “Captain EO.” Rusty Lemorande, who wrote that screenplay, came to be known as the father of 4D when he persuaded Lucas to add smoke, lasers and lights and got the set designer John Napier to build out his vision.
“I’ll call it 4D, but back then it was just ‘in-theater effects,’” Lemorande said in an interview. Lucas suggested they make a miniature version of the theater, Lemorande explained. After Napier built it, he took a drag from a cigarette, blew smoke into the diorama and lit a flashlight. “It was magical,” Lemorande recalled.
A few months after “Captain EO” premiered in 1986, another Lucas venture, Star Tours, a “Star Wars”-themed motion simulator, opened in Disneyland. According to the media scholars Angela Ndalianis and Jessica Balanzategui, a slew of 4D motion simulators began to crop up, especially in the 1990s, when media consolidation drove an interest in movie-themed rides.
UNSURPRISINGLY, SOME DIRECTORS, like Martin Scorsese, are not fans of modern 4D. If a film “needs chairs that bounce around or certain scents that are used in the theater, or more technical elements besides the image on the screen, would it still be a film?” he asked the BBC recently. Nor is Lemorande. A few years ago, he went to Paris Disneyland and saw a new iteration of “Captain EO” in which motorized chairs moved along with the music. He hated it, he said: “It breaks the suspension of disbelief.”
Read More: Was Your 4D Screening of ‘Twisters’ a Blast? Thank These Effects Wizards.
