Marvel Experience swings into San Diego

Alex Owens | Contributor

Waiting 51 weeks each year for Comic-Con can make a San Diego comic geek suffer withdrawal symptoms.

This year, there is help in the form of The Marvel Experience, a state-of-the-art touring show that will be at the Del Mar Fairgrounds starting Feb. 7.

The Marvel Experience is a walk-through exhibit that features a thrilling motion ride, the world’s only 360-degree Stereoscopic 3D Dome, and a wide range of technologically advanced interactive and immersive elements, all centered around popular Marvel Comics heroes like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk.

The show’s concept is that all attendees are attempting to become Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the intelligence agency in the backdrop of Marvel Comics series like The Avengers and Captain America.

The training includes a chance swing with Spider-Man, smashing things with the Hulk, and flying with Iron Man in preparation for an epic battle against an army of evil adaptoids with your favorite superheroes.

The Marvel Experience is the brainchild of Rick Licht, a former sports agent and lifelong comic geek, who said this project has been 20 years in the making.

“I saw the Fan Fest at the Baseball All-Star game, where 130,000 people attended in a weekend at $30 a pop, and also the NFL Experience before the Super Bowl,” he said. “They both attracted the same amount of people no matter where they were, so I decided to take the idea from sports and adapt to entertainment.”

Marvel Comics has been on a roll in the last three years thanks to the success of the “Iron Man” trilogy, “The Avengers” film, and the “Thor” and “Captain America” series, but Licht says the project was in the works before those films hit it big.

“We were slightly ahead of the Marvel curve,” Licht said. “We got permission to use the characters about nine or 10 months before ‘The Avengers’ came out. But these characters have all been around since 1960 so they are familiar to generations.

“To be honest, we didn’t build it for kids,” he said. “We wanted a storyline that would resonate with people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s — people who know who Lou Ferrigno is.”

San Diego marks the third city of The Marvel Experience tour, but Licht feels the city’s Comic-Con makes it an important one.

“People in San Diego understand the relevance of this, plus the city is headquarters to a lot of comic book companies,” Licht said. “We purposely didn’t want to set up during Comic-Con because we didn’t want take away the attention from the Con.”

Licht has personal affection for the city as well, since one of his clients was former Padre great Ken Caminiti, who led the Padres to two playoff appearances before dying tragically in 2004.

Licht expects word-of-mouth will attract a lot of business after The Marvel Experience opens.

“People will tell their friends about how they participated in a 3D shooting gallery with 24 other people or how they were battling and they saw Wolverine to their left, Black Widow to their right with Captain America behind him — in 3D without glasses!” he said. “Most of the world hasn’t seen this technology.”

Licht believes The Marvel Experience could be the future of entertainment.

“The interactivity makes it a natural progression from Broadway, circuses or ice shows,” he said. “We want it to be a spectacle.”

Licht said he and his partners could have filled the seven massive domes that make up the show with a bunch of elements that weren’t really connected, but he chose to follow the advice from Stan Lee, the man who created many of the great Marvel characters.

“We tell a story with ups and downs and drama,” he said. “Hopefully, the good guys save the day.”

Take a date and save the world this Valentine’s Day. For more information on The Marvel Experience, visit themarvelexperience.com. 

—Alex Owens is a San Diego-based freelance writer. He can be reached at [email protected].