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player ready...Hundreds of Stevenson High School students may have arrived in class a little behind schedule on “Back to the Future Day” — Oct. 21, 2015, the day depicted as “the future” in the 1989 film “Back to the Future Part II.”
They spent a gloriously warm fall morning engrossed in a special visit — Vernon Hills business owner Mike Schrimmer and his Doc Brown-style DeLorean “time machine.”
“I’m amazed how the young kids are so into it,” Schrimmer said at about 11 a.m., while a consistent crowd of about 100 students filtered in and out of the school’s circular front drive. “I’m happy for all the people involved in the movie. It’s obviously a classic.”
Schrimmer owns a 1981 DeLorean Motor Company DMC-12, outfitted with a flux capacitor, Mr. Fusion reactor and a whole lot more of the details that director Robert Zemeckis and his crew fastened onto the now-iconic vehicle that transported Marty McFly through time. Schrimmer’s DeLorean is not “the DeLorean,” but a replica constructed by Bob’s Prop Shop in Dallas. He said he bought it in 2011 for around $60,000.
All of the students there were born years after the movies left the box office.
Alexa Chmieleski, a senior from Buffalo Grove, said she loved the franchise as a young girl, but made a decision when she was in sixth grade: She would not watch Part II again until Oct. 20, 2015, the night before Michael J. Fox’s famous character leapt into a future that, when the movie came out, was decades away.
“I promised myself that I would wait,” and Chmieleski said the payoff came Tuesday night, when her family stayed up to watch it for the first time in years.
But the vehicle beneath the “time machine” veneer carries an unmistakably 1980s style.
Jake Davis, a junior from Buffalo Grove, said it felt odd to be up close to something that is now from the distant past.
“If it didn’t have a meaning behind it, you’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s an old car,'” Davis said.
The trip from his business, Windy City Novelties, down Milwaukee Avenue to Stevenson was the first time Schrimmer ever brought his machine out of the warehouse he keeps it in. He received a police escort for the drive, but then stepped away and watched with a near-constant smile as throngs of teenagers jumped in and out of the two seats, posed on its hood and gawked all around it.
Schrimmer said he brought his machine out for one reason: His nephew, Ryan Aronoff, teaches communication arts at Stevenson. Usually, its odometer simply holds steady at around 17,000 miles.
The DeLorean was the creation of John Z. DeLorean, who left General Motors to start his own automaker. From 1981 to 1982, the DeLorean Motor Company made approximately 9,200 cars at a factory near Belfast in Northern Ireland. They were all sold with a stainless steel exterior and no paint.
Schrimmer’s replica is accurate down to the fine details: the colors of the buttons inside, and the number of vents in the smoke-blowers attached to the back. The speedometer tops out at 85, as required by federal law at the time, but the car is perfectly capable of going the 88 mph Marty and Doc Brown required to travel through time, Schrimmer said. Its license plate reads “BTTF,” or “Back to the Future” — a relevant abbrevation, considering #BTTF2015 was trending on Twitter for much of the day Wednesday.
When he jumped inside, though, junior Larry Patlakh from Buffalo Grove did not care. What caught his attention was the size of the interior.
“It’s kind of cramped in there,” he said after letting the next student inside.
Emily Krolak, a sophomore from Buffalo Grove, simply marveled at the arrival of “Back to the Future Day.” The film’s predictions of Skype, Google Glass, a populace with a penchant for healthy foods and more have come eerily close to the real 2015, she said.
“We didn’t know what the future would be like, and it used to be so cool to imagine the future,” Krolak said.
But as Schrimmer drove his time machine away that afternoon, the future slipped into the past. Chicagoland may not get to see his DeLorean again: He promised that the trip to Stevenson would be its only public appearance.
“This is it,” Schrimmer said.
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