Thinking about Back to the Future (as I just found it, flipping channels), it seems to me that 1985 was the perfect year to set the “present” for that movie. I base that on the “30 Year in the Past / 30 Years in the Future” formula of the first two films.
We start off post-sixties but 30 years past takes us pre-sixites, which I think is so important to the way the story plays out. The country did a lot of growing up between 1955 and 1985. The world in which Marty’s parents were in highschool was very different from the world in which Marty was in highschool. The fifties segments definitely had a period piece feel about them. Whether fair or not (I wasn’t around in the fifites), fifties nostalgia allows the audience to impose a naïveté upon the mindset of the characters that we wouldn’t accept from characters in a more cynical post-Vietnam, post-Watergate culture.
Also, with the looking forward angle, by 1985 advancements in technology were moving swiftly. We had come beyond 1984 and there was a sense we we already living “in the future” (I felt that way in 1985, and I was only 10 years old). We genuinely expected 30 years in the future to be a huge leap forward technologically, we had (what we considered to be) realistic ideas of where technology would take us in 30 years rather than a feeling that it was all sci-fi nonsense. Yes, the 2015 of the film was stylized in a way that we realized it was a playful presentation meant to entertain. I don’t think hover-boards struck us as realistic. Still, I think we, as an audience, did expect that 30 years would take us to a very “futury” future- and I think we were right. Imagine the reaction your 1985 self would have had to an iPhone.
Contrast this with an imaginary 2010 remake of Back to the Future.
30 years in the past is 1980. Doesn’t work nearly as well as 1955. We’ve got post-Watergate cynicism combined with growing eighties materialism. The “feel” of the time was wrong, but add to that: I don’t think a 2010 highschooler would have the culture shock that Marty McFly had.
Highschool kids today have so much exposure through the internet of what eighties culture was, that they don’t find it to be that foreign. Eighties pop culture stars have careers enduring to this day, careers that continue to earn them teen fans. Pop culture stars of the fifties, in contrast, were stars of a by-gone era to teens of the eighties.
30 years in the future? I don’t know quite how to articulate this, but as silly as the 2015 segments of the original films were (but we did recognize that it was intentionally silly with the purpose of entertaining), I feel like in 1985 we had a pretty grounded idea of what the future would hold 30 years down the road- because there was plenty that we didn’t have that we were able to imagine having. Nowadays, we have so much “future” stuff already, I think it’s hard for any of us to imagine future “future” stuff without getting completely fantastical about it. Any truly realistic visions of the future, I think would be too boring to pitch for a big budget hollywood summer movie.
A ninties remake of Back to the Future? Maybe would have given us a good 30 years in the future section, but I think 1965 would have been too complex a past.
Back to the Future had it been made in the seventies? 1945 would have given us a good past section, contrasting with 1975, but I think the seventies view of “The Future” would have set the bar too low (and also would have been too dismal).
So, was there any year that would have given us a better Back to the Future than 1985? Or was 1985 the very best year for the “Present” of this particular story?