Happy Back to the Future day! It’s finally (or already) here!
Back to the Future Part II is one of the first films I remember seeing at the cinema (along with Tim Burton’s Batman the same year), I was 10 years old. My elder brother Björn took me to see it in Paris, and just that was already special given we lived in the far suburbs. I remember to have been really impressed with the future it imagined. I can’t believe that day is already now.
I had fun watching this video of teens reacting to the movie. I thought it’s really interesting that Back to the Future features as an important movie reference for teenagers today, to the point where at least one says he can cite all the dialogue. Another insight in there is whatever the level of the technology we use every day, because it’s every day it immediately looses the appeal of something from the future. We take thing for granted very fast, and the teens in the video are growing with devices that were impossible not so long ago, like thirty years ago actually.
It would be easy to focus on our lack of flying cars and hoverboards, but we have a lot of the things in that future, the fashion is just a little different. Video conferencing, pocket digital devices, etc. No holograms at the cinema but 3D movies have made a come back. Voice activated commands aren’t ubiquitous but they exist. It’s funny how technology is evolving fast yet at the level of a short human life it seems like ages. We don’t have tiny pizzas growing into a huge one in a microwave but that’s probably a good thing. We do have retro-style arcade games bars, but no robot waiters just yet and they hadn’t planned for the hipster beard fashion.
I think smart clothes are an experimental thing though, I think they exist in a certain way. It’s easy with hindsight to say they were pretty optimistic about the technology advances for the movie, and so they should have anyways given it makes for more interesting TV, and they wanted to keep the story within the time of the characters lives, just one generation behind and in this case another ahead.
Of course everyone myself included is writing about Back to the Future Day, and why not. That said, and while I understand some would mention it because it’s of course a big pop culture memorabilia event today, of course brands are jumping on board with ridiculous statements in social media:
The Power of Frozen, seriously..? Please abstain. It’s unnecessary. You’re just asking for people to make fun of you Iceland Foods.
Gregg’s is a chain of baked goods in the UK in case you haven’t heard of it. This is one is even better, so you’re basically saying that your food is garbage to fuel the DeLorean from BTTF?
A few brands participated in the movie back then and might have a claim on some marketing activities, but for this kind of message I’d recommend abstaining from saying anything.
There are many more bad examples I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface, I just came across these thanks to Chris via Twitter.
I enjoyed what Christopher Lloyd has to say about it as Doc Brown and I’ll finish with it, a simple message:
“The future has finally arrived. Yes, it’s different from we all thought, but don’t worry. It just means your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever what you make it, so make it a good one.”
