As I grew up, I started seeing/hearing about IMAX movies, and didn't realize they were different until I went to one in another part of the country. I was very excited to go, as it had been a long time since I had been to an Omnimax.
I was pretty confused and disappointed, which is a weird reaction to have the first time in an IMAX theater. "It's just a big screen... Where's the dome?"
"Who put the bomp in the bomp sha bomp!"
I too had a similar reaction the first time I saw an imax.
I read your response and was like, "Huh?", then it hit me. That's easily a 30 year old memory sitting in deep storage. I haven't been there, or thought about it since college. The human brain is amazing.
And since we live in the future, I can easily find a clip of it online:
That seems consistent with this announcement from 2017 that the theater was going to close (citing a quarter century): https://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/rangos-omnimax-theater-to...
I couldn't find any press covering it from 1978, although this directory of IMAX/Omnimax theaters from 1992 matches my recollection of it opening in ~1991.
The same illustration appeared with announcements of some other Omnimax theaters, but I suspect it had just been copied from the Minnesota design without paying much attention. The captions never mention the STS.
However, the side control booth located about halfway up the house, which is present in all of the Omnimax theaters where I've been able to check, is labeled as the "Planetarium console." This could explain the curiosity of the '90s Omnimax theaters having two different control booths. It seems odd to keep that feature without the planetarium projector.
Thank you to the shout out to my father, Preston Fleet, for his work on developing Omnimax and everything is the article is factually correct. He died young after also building Fotomat and WD40 (and funding the Cabaret movie, for which he shared an Oscar). He shied away from the spotlight and named everything after his contributors because he was kind. And a totally shock the author knew about his presidency at the American Theatre Organ Society, which my mother followed after his death. Unfortunate selfish to say in a public forum, but really just want to thank the article's author in some way
This paragraph is bizarre to me, framed from a presumably extremely niche "Sphere-as-dome-theater" perspective. I would think that, for most people, the Sphere is the exterior part and it delivers and is every bit as innovative as anyone who has seen a picture of it would say. I don't understand the effort to downplay that and say "oh forget that part it's actually just a not-even-spherical dome theater."
I’m also slightly embarrassed to just now learn that the opening sequence where the speakers and backing structure for the screen are shown looked so real because…it was. They weren’t projecting an image, just turning on lights so you could see back through the perforated metal screen!
vFunct•6h ago