The courts ruled in Rowling’s favor and fined the other author for bad conduct: Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series - Wikipedia
McFly probably believes that Lucas once encountered the same alien visitor that he did. Maybe Gene Roddenberry too. Heck, maybe even Eddie Van Halen. Whenever he sees Lucas at the BiMonSciFiCon he gives him a knowing, conspiratorial wink. Lucas has no idea what this wink means and is a little creeped out by it, which is why the two Georges have never actually met to discuss the matter.
Of course, if George believed he had been visited by Darth Vader then upon seeing Star Wars he may have deduced that Lucas also had been visited by Darth Vader. McFly may have watched Star Wars thinking, “Damn! He actually wrote Darth Vader’s name into his movie!? This guy’s got some balls. If Darth Vader ever finds out, this Lucas guy is screwed!”
He may have even thought at first that Darth Vader only visited guys named George …until he heard Van Halen’s first album and noticed evidence that Eddie had also been visited by Darth Vader.
Han Solo was using the word as a measure of distance.
When in a race in which all of the ships travel at light speed, you don’t win by being the fastest ship. You win by mapping out the shortest route- your ship has to have the most sophisticated navicomputer. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but you don’t get to travel in a straight line because you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?
ETA: near simulpost with irritant (I was still typing about parsecs).
Retcon.
I thought it was fanwank.
Marty also looks like George’s grandfather, and a bit like George too (since Marty actually is George’s son), so I doubt George worries about it much. Anyway, George knew Marty for only a few days, and they were days when George was worried about more important things (like a visitation from an alien!). By the way, did George every realize that Lorraine had a crush on Marty - George saw Biff as his real rival, didn’t he?
In the real world, when an adult looks like another, unrelated adult, the person’s parents can’t “see” it, because they saw the child grow up, and they saw him as a baby, and and going through all the developmental changes. On the other hand, parents can recognize a picture of their child as a baby, even one they have not seen since it was taken, and will still say their adult children look like they did as children, when people who did not meet them until adulthood can’t see it. I know people with identical twins who can tell apart their twins in old childhood photographs.
Given that, if someone else who remembered “Calvin” were to say to Marty’s parents, say, on being shown a picture of their teenage son at a high school reunion “He looks like that weird kid who was hanging around for a few days, and played great guitar, but was really odd. Maybe it was that head injury,” Marty’s parents would be likely to brush it off. Yes, I know that Marty actually is Calvin, but it won’t be the first time someone says “Hey, you daughter looks like this actress I saw on a late night rerun,” or “Your older son looks like my uncle,” and clearly they are not the same person, it’s just the kind of small talk people make.
Not to mention, the amount of time that passes between “Calvin,” and Marty being old enough to look like Calvin is pretty long-- something like 30 years. It’s not like Marty would be born looking like George’s memory of Calvin, or that even at that point George’s memory wouldn’t have faded. I’m 47, so 30 years ago, I was about the age that Marty’s parents were in the “past” part of the film. If I try to recall someone I knew for just a couple of days, but had reason to make an impression on me, I can get a picture, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how accurate it is. I’m not even sure about other people I knew better-- like a student teacher I saw every day for about a month. He looked a lot like the actor who played Andy on WKRP in Cincinnati, and that’s who I keep picturing, not the teacher. Since “Calvin” looked like pictures of George’s grandfather, maybe George would assume his memory is faulty, and he’s remembering Calvin as something more familiar-- like a picture he saw every day his whole childhood.
Exactly 30 years. 1955, 1985, 2015, all 30 years apart. And 1885 is 100 years before 1985. A deliberate choice.
Well said.
Exactly 30 years pass between the movie timelines, but the exact moment that Marty would be recognizable as Calvin is more nebulous. For George, it might have been six months earlier. For Marty’s mother, 13 months. Maybe for Marty’s grandmother and uncle, four months, or more than a year. Maybe he had long hair up until a year earlier, and when he got his current haircut, that’s when some people might have thought “Huh, he kinda looks like that Calvin guy. But Calvin looked like Grandpa, so I guess that makes sense.”
I don’t think anyone else has addressed this point, so I wanted to mention that names are not protected by copyright; “Even if a name, title, or short phrase is novel or distinctive or lends itself to a play on words, it cannot be protected by copyright. The Copyright Office cannot register claims to exclusive rights in brief combinations of words”.
In some circumstances it is possible to register a name as a trademark, but I’m pretty sure just having a character by that name in a single novel wouldn’t qualify. In real life I assume “Darth Vader” actually is trademarked, but the Star Wars character isn’t just a character in a movie. There’s a large market for merchandise bearing his name and likeness.
I would say whichever George’s work was published first would be the prevailing one. The other would be told “oh that’s in use”, and come up with a different name. I don’t think they’d make that much of it either, people come up with random names all the time, and it’s not unheard of for two people to come up with the same random name.
As for Lorraine and George not noticing Marty’s resemblance to Calvin, I tried to think back to people I’ve known only briefly 30 years ago, and I can only recall fleeting impressions of what they looked like or how they dressed. I can totally see Marty’s folks not remembering “Calvin” well enough to see a connection. Memories fade quickly and at most they would think, hey he even looks a little like Calvin.
As an invented name, Lucas has a better case, though (or McFly, if his book came out first). If the character was named Dirk Vardar, it would be less defensible. Sdaarbt Ffoedyr, even more defensible. Even though it’s true that names are not copyrightable, there are still laws regarding theft of intellectual property. IIRC, if the work that used the name first is registered, or optioned by a published, but not yet published, or made otherwise public, like by being a film in production, the author has a better case for direct plagiarism, as opposed to parody, homage, backstory where the second character is actually named for the first, or any of the other legitimate ways of ripping off an original name like “Darth Vader.”
Actually, I always thought the point of including two older children who weren’t really necessary to the plot was to head off this kind of thinking. Marty was born at a minimum, six years into the marriage, and probably more. If his mother was going to have a love child by Calvin, it would be her first child. So really, Marty was probably born eight to ten years after anyone had seen “Calvin.” Or is Marty’s exact age given? We don’t even have to guess how long he was born after Calvin vanished if we know Marty’s exact age-- I haven’t seen the film since I saw it in the theater when it came out, except about 20 minutes when I was looking for scenes with Frances McCain for something.
Besides, when George tells Marty who came and visited him the next morning, Marty tells him to uhh… Just keep that between the two of them.
Even if he remembers the names, George is nothing if not a man of his word.
Though, once Star Trek and Star Wars came out, you’ve got to wonder if George’s skin crawled.
Not Star Trek, as has been mentioned upthread, Vulcan was a theoretical planet in our own solar system for a while. And he may have thought that Darth Vader visited Lucas as well. Or even that it was a common name on the planet Vulcan, y’know, like George is common on earth, at least in Europe and the Americas.
In 1985 George was a very successful science fiction writer. In the 60s and 70s he honed his craft while working as a script writer for Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. They were impressed by his ability to come up with names for planets, species, and specific aliens. Artoo Detoo was a weird sound George made when he tried to sing like Calvin did at the dance, it was an inside joke between Lorraine and George for years. Lucas didn’t listen to McFly when he said Darth should be an alien in a big yellow suit. The two fought over this issue, leading McFly to tell Lucas he could take his job and give it to another deserving young author. Lucas told McFly to get lost and take his yellow suited alien with him, but he kept the name Darth Vader. One year after Star Wars premiered George McFly had his first book published about time travel and aliens in yellow suits. He won a Hugo Award for Best Novel that year.
I think many authors are laughing their asses off. Especially about making tons of money writing short stories in 1985.
To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there is no law that would cover “theft” of a character name that was not protected by trademark. Even if I’m wrong about that, since “vader” is Dutch for “father” and very similar to the German “vater”, I think it would be pretty difficult to make a compelling argument that one of the Georges must have stolen the name from the other.
I thought “Vulcan” was the name of a planet between Jupiter and Mars that broke up and became the asteroid belt. 