In the original, there seemed to be such a wide gap between 1985 and 1950(ish?). It left me wondering: What if the creators had just come up with this idea today? A teenaged kid goes 30 years back into the past. Would there be enough of a contrast to make the story interesting?
This has been discussed here extensively in the recentish past. My answer is no: there would not be nearly enough contrast to make much of it. Any other 30 year period within the last 140 years or so would be a way better candidate.
If you ask me, one of the plot holes of Back to the Future, was the it seemed to neglect that someone Marty’s age in 1985 remembered the early 1970s. Marty acted as though he’d been born in 1985, and had no memory for anything that happened before then. So, for example, even when he already realizes what’s happened to him, he still orders a soda that he must remember coming onto the market, and is constantly doing things that he knows must mark him as “strange” or “outsider.” Most sensible people would be trying to avoid standing out.
in 1991… Email? What’s that? Internet?
You have a tiny device you can carry in your hand, that’s a phone that lets you talk to anyone anywhere in the world… and make video calls… and a camera without film… and a calculator… and a voice recorder… and a music player… and a book reader… and you can film and watch videos… and instantly look up any information you want… and play games?
If you wanted to get into the mindset of a 15 year old of today, they would definitely struggle with the primitive times of 1991 when they’ve grown up with smartphones and the internet and widescreen TVs. But you’d have to craft a really good story, different to the original BTTF, to make that interesting to watch. A new time-travel movie could be done, but you’d never succeed with a one-to-one story beat copy of BTTF.
I have no contribution to the thread topic at the moment, but just wanted to thank the OP for using the subjunctive (were) in the title.
“Gimme a Coke Zero.”
“What the hell did you just call me?”
BTTF patted 1985 on the back with respect to enlightened attitudes about electing a black mayor; it’s easy to think of prejudices that would shock a 2021 Marty on arrival in 1991, race still among them. The “background radiation” levels of sexism and homophobia were also off the charts compared to today but that’s just scratching the surface: “bisexuality” would be an alarming concept in 1991 and concepts such as “pansexuality” or “non-binary” wouldn’t so much cause offence as just deep confusion by introducing concepts that were simply alien to large chunks of the population.
A non-binary teen who went back to ensure not that their parents got together but in fact that their mum avoided marriage to an unsuitable man and raised her children as a single mother would have plenty of contrast with 1991.
In 1991 you could watch Bill Cosby’s TV show and follow it up watching OJ Simpson in Naked Gun 2. Those guys could do no wrong!
Phone books to find a business’s phone number or address, going to the library if you want to “google” something, going to a bookstore to buy books, going to the store and buying what they happen to have in stock, credit card machines that make a carbon copy of your card, most fast food places not taking credit cards, phones attached to the wall or even if cordless with limited range, actually using phones to call people, only being able to call people if they are home, the existence of payphones, the concept of a “long distance” call, TV that only shows you what is being broadcast right now, Nintendo’s SNES being the zenith of computer gaming, renting VHS tapes to watch movies, maps in order to find your way around.
Plenty of technological progress that a teen of the 2020’s would take for granted and be in for a bit of culture shock with their absence, even if they had heard the tales from the boomers about “the old days.”
Culturally, if they are anything other than a straight white male, they will likely encounter attitudes towards them that would be unacceptable in public today. Even if they are a straight white male, they may notice those attitudes towards others.
Huey Freakin Lewis is doing your theme song. Huey Lewis.
Gas averaged $1.07/ gallon in LA in '91. If you fudged a little you could do the '92 riots. Dial up AOL for internet at 28k, limited cell phones, pay phones were still common.
It would be very easy to do BTTF set today. In another 10 years it may be more difficult.
Yeah, but none of that would make for a fun movie in the least bit, and would probably come across as rather preachy and obnoxious. Even the first movie only very tangentially hit on 1950s race issues, and only a tiny bit. Maybe you could use it as background weirdness that the Marty character observes, or maybe as a way to enhance the dickishness of the Biff character, but that’s about as far as you could go without it being sanctimonious.
I do think right now (2021) is about the point in recent history where there would be the most contrast, as 1991 was very close to the point when things started to change w.r.t. Internet, computing, etc… Sort of the last hurrah of the mode of daily life started in the 1950s where people had appliances, televisions, radios, telephones, cars, etc… but not pervasive computing in the form of phones, tablets, smart TVs, streaming, Internet access, and so on. People had computers, but they were limited in that you had to literally go hunt down physical media in order to put apps (“programs” at the time) on them, and they didn’t usually connect to anything else- save maybe the few people that had modems and logged into BBS systems.
I think for a 17 year old kid in 2021 (born in 2004), the hardest things to adjust to in 1991 would be:
- Lack of being “in contact” with everyone; you had to go find a phone and call someone, and hope they were there, or you had to leave a message on the machine or with someone.
- Lack of ease in looking things up- you couldn’t just Google stuff at that time. You had to go to the library if you wanted to know something specific. Or a phone book/directory assistance.
- No “push” anything- you had to somehow keep your appointments and commitments straight- some people lugged around those godawful Franklin-Covey day planners, others kept it in their heads. Either way, it took a non-trivial amount of mental effort.
- FOMO wasn’t a thing- you generally had to commit to what you were doing when you were going to go out and socialize; it wasn’t nearly as ad-hoc as modern communications let it be.
- Along the line of the above, schedules and time were less flexible- since there wasn’t any sort of pervasive communication, there wasn’t much changing plans on-the-fly, and when there was, it was more along the lines of showing up when you said you would, then changing the plans from there.
- Same sort of thing for TV/movies- they came on when they came on, and if you missed it the first time around, it came out on VHS months if not years later, or in re-runs six months later.
- Renting movies and returning them. Maybe not quite so foreign relative to renting a movie from a streaming service, except for the rewinding and returning part.
- Phones were generally fixed to physical locations- IIRC, the wireless portable phones weren’t a thing for another few years- answering machines were kind of the latest thing in home telephony in 1991.
- Where the internet DID exist, it was Gopher sites, and some other sort of site/search that I can’t remember the name of right now. All text, and mostly only accessible in academic or military environments.
- Music was pretty much physical media centric, or else was played on the radio. So you had to either listen to the radio, or lug around CDs/tapes and a Walkman/Discman to listen to music on the go.
- Credit cards were not a thing back then like they are now. There was a certain strata of restaurant that would take cards, and it was generally the sit-down places and nicer. Everywhere else was cash-only.
That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.
- Checkbooks and cashing checks was a real thing- while ATMs existed, they weren’t nearly as widespread as they are now, and back then there were competing ATM networks that would either just not work with competitors’ networks, or would charge you significant fees to do so.
In the movie Marty seemed to understand what it was like in the 50s. He said “Dad” by mistake and switched it to “daddy-o”. Most of the jokes I remember was him saying something from modern times that people misinterpreted.
There could be jokes about cloud, amazon and tweet.
Instead of Calvin Klein on the underwear it could be a sweatshirt that had “Pink” on it.
Marty could use literally to mean figuratively (if that wasn’t a thing back then).
Another ten years would 2031 and thirty years before that would be 2001 —which would set the past scenes either directly before or after the 9/11 terror attacks.
IMHO, There would be no way to make a film in that scenario because I can’t think of a way to mentioning the attacks without offending someone. And ignoring the attacks just leaves an unmentioned elephant in the room that still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I agree. I think this would be a far bigger cultural change than going from 1985 to 1955. Kids today can connect with anyone they need instantly and find any information they might need in the same time. They use social media to connect and to develop culture. This has rewired us all as people but even more so for kids who have never lived any differently.
I agree. Maybe there will be some big cultural shift in the next ten years that rivals omnipresent internet and social media but I ain’t seen it yet.
Or that we just don’t recognize.
The very first response in this thread posited that kids today wouldn’t see much of a difference between now and the world of 1991, and that was very obviously wrong.
Who knows? Maybe the kids expect full autonomous vehicles and have no ideas how to deal with an automatic transmission, much less a manual. Especially cars with separate door and ignition keys rather than keyfobs. Or omnipresent AI assistants that are constantly connected to the internet.
One major change between 2031 and 2001 - cameras that require actual film, which are very niche, at best, even today. And smoking sections in restaurants.
We’re just not going to be able to tell what represents a significant change until we’ve lived those 10 extra years. And it’ll be the kids who can tell, not us old fogies.
It’s worth noting that there are current TV shows and movies set in the 90s with a heavy nostalgic bent - like “can you believe it was like this in the 90s?”. But it’s 20-somethings and 30-somethings making them. So there’s also clearly a generation gap at play.
This. 
I’m still trying to figure out why the diner guy didn’t get pissed when Marty ripped one of the pages out of his phone book.