by Curt Kovener
If you are a fan of the “Back to the Future” movies, then you already know last Wednesday was a big day.
Oct. 21, 2015 was very significant when the film originally hit the big screens back in the 1980s.
In Back to the Future Part II, the characters Dr. Emmett Brown, Marty McFly and Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, leave their home in the year 1985 and travel into the future all the way to Oct. 21, 2015.
They travel to that particular day because Marty and Jennifer’s future kids end up getting in trouble with the law, so they travel to the future in hopes of stopping the crimes from happening.
So Back to the Future fans celebrated this past Wednesday because we finally made it to the “future” in the movies.
A big theme of that movie though is how much things had changed and how much technology had advanced from 1985 to 2015.
In addition to cars that drive on roads, they also had flying cars in the movie version of 2015. Instead of the skateboards that Marty rode in 1985, they had hover boards in the future. If you happen to get rained on, they had clothes that dried off in an instant with the pull of a switch. And instead of having to deal with the hassles of lacing up shoes, the movie version of 2015 had shoes that laced themselves.
There were also some pop culture references in the movie when they traveled to 2015.
The movie “Jaws 19” had just been released in theaters, and the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series.
Of course we don’t have flying cars or hover boards but are working on self-driving cars. We still have to dry our clothes in a dryer, and we still have to lace our own shoes. The Jaws movies ended with Part 3. And to beat it all, the real-life Cubs actually got eliminated from the playoffs on the day they won the World Series in the movie.
But there are a couple of similarities between our 2015 and the movie’s.
We can make video phone calls with our smart phones, or through computer programs like Skype. And finger print technology is being used more and more by businesses and consumers.
So we’ve finally made it to the future according to the movies, but it isn’t exactly how we envisioned it. There are no hover boards yet.
(Our thanks to our colleague columnist Brad Hall for his research on the BTTF movie series history.)
