An iconic scene from Back to the Future has been recreated in the city that built the famous DeLorean cars immortalised by the 1980s films.
Doc Brown’s legendary zip line ride from the clock tower of the fictional town Hill Valley was staged in Belfast to mark Back to the Future Day yesterday.
October 21, 2015, is the date Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) travelled forward to in the second instalment of the movie trilogy. They arrived to a futuristic world of flying cars and hoverboards.
While the film’s vision of the future has not wholly materialised, fans of the movies marked the day in style.
In Belfast, where the silver gull-wing DeLorean cars were manufactured, two local actors reimagined the zip line scene, with a comic twist, at the clock tower in the Gasworks area of the city centre.
Gerard McCabe took on the role of the Doc, with his character whizzing from the Gasworks clock tower down to Belfast’s own Marty McFly Dan Gordon waiting in the DeLorean below.
At the start of the 1980s, controversial US industrialist John DeLorean brought his car manufacturing plant to Dunmurry in west Belfast with the lure of significant government financial support.
Although the factory initially injected some much needed optimism in Troubles-era Northern Ireland, its stay was short-lived and ultimately ended in failure.
When the first Back to the Future film was released in 1985, the DeLorean plant had already been closed for three years. Fewer than 9,000 cars had rolled off the production line at the Dunmurry plant.
The film stunt was created by Northern Ireland lager brand Harp.
Lisa Ronayne from Harp said it was a tribute to the enduring characters of Marty and Doc.
“In 1985, two of the most celebrated characters in film history took to the skies in a Northern Ireland-built time machine and travelled 30 years into the future, eventually arriving today: October 21, 2015,” she said.
She added: “We wanted to thank them for their outstanding contributions to science fiction and thought the best way of doing this was by paying homage to their original time-travelling journey which took place at the Hill Valley clock tower in 1955.”