“But Marty, what happened to the sides? Why is this shot in a tall and thin frame? Did something happen to the concept of horizontal vision in the future?”
“Woke. You keep using that word. Did something happen to mankind’s circadian rhythm in the future?”
“Paper or plastic” would actually still be relevant.
“Marty, quick! Get in the car; we have to go back for some reason! There’s no time to lose! We’ll have to take your girlfriend with us!”
What’s the hurry, when you have a time machine? Never could figure that one out.
Casual misogyny is no longer tolerated as it was in the 1990s.
You could call the The Phone Company and have another phone book delivered. In fact, you could ask for two or three of them. We live in a house with three phones (not three lines, just three phones) and The Phone Company regularly delivered three phone books to us.
I like the idea, but I think “greengrocers” is more likely to come out of the mouth of a teenager from 1921 than 2021.
Yeah, greengrocers is right up there with “dry goods”.
If I were pitching a reboot of BTTF now, I wouldn’t stick to 30 years. The mid-80’s would be perfect, so 35 years. Why? In 1985, the 50’s had been extensively stereotyped in movies and television. The filmmakers could count on reactions to jukeboxes, hot rods, etc. Now, we’ve been exposed to a lot of television and movies (particularly comedies) creating an expected 80’s look and feel that can be easily communicated.
It’s not about nuanced exposition on the differences between 1991 and 2021, it’s about broad takes.
How about this?
Kurt! Kurt, it’s Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Cobain. You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!
Doc knew Marty was due to injure his hand the next day, so he wanted an uninjured Marty to accompany him.
So go back in time a couple of days and get an uninjured Marty.
Marty back in time a couple of days hadn’t gone on the whole trip back to 1955 in the first movie.
Or maybe Goatse guy.
Just no respect for my culture at all
As I mentioned in the other thread, there already is something like this. Secrets of Sulphur Springs. Involves modern kids going back in time 30 years.
I think I saw the pilot. The kids, when asked who they are, give the names Harry and Hermione, right?
There’s more to mine from the time difference than we think, likely because most of the people in this thread lived thru the period. There are numerous videos of young kids befuddled by 80s/90s tech and culture.
The major mistake of this thread and others I’ve seen here on the topic is to think that the contrast in BTTF was based on technology. That’s not right.
OK, it was maybe 10% technology, 90% social and aesthetic change.
How many people here long for 1991 and think it was some sort of Eden to return to? Probably not a lot. The difference is that my parents’ generation (I was born in 1971 and my parents were born in the early 1940s) did long for the 1950s. They felt that the world had vastly changed–in many ways for the better, true, but it had lost its innocent fun and just a certain something.
But how about me, as a 14-year-old when the movie came out? Surely I didn’t get the nostalgia. Hell no, I did! We all did. There was a big nostalgia wave in the 1970s–I was into 50s rock when I was not even 10 years old. We understood what was amazing about that time.
That’s why having the protagonist go back to 1991 just wouldn’t mean much. Yeah yeah, smart phones and the internet, I get it, but to me, 1991 feels like the modern world. It really takes going back into the 1970s or so to get to a world that was truly based on a different aesthetic and way of doing things.
In terms of the technology as well, I think people are forgetting how recent some of the changes were. Most people didn’t have smart phones with GPS until 2010 or so. Social media wasn’t getting started until around that time too. The whole streaming thing is pretty recent as well. (OTOH, my dad was going online with Prodigy in 1987, and my mom had a car phone at the same time.)
The idea that you would encounter a lot of racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc., in 1991 is false as well, I think. There was a feeling at that time, I would say from the late 1970s until recent days, that we had largely beaten prejudice and the future would be about solidifying those gains. Racism and sexism were largely seen as bad and relics of the past. The whole right-wing, Trumpian backlash was not yet imagined. Of course, there were shitty individuals back then, as there are now, but it wasn’t everywhere. If anything, people were less tribal then and more likely to adhere to a kind of generic politeness and vision of the politically “normal.”
All told, aside from the beginnings of Grunge (or rather, its popularity) and “real” 90s music and Operation Desert Storm (which is largely forgotten now–we were WINNERS in the Middle East!), 1991 was a pretty damn boring year. I think very few people look back on it with a feeling of nostalgia or longing or excitement, aside from the things that might have been going on in their own lives.
I was thinking about something similar. The only “interesting” times that I could think of are:
The 1920s - The roaring 20s
The 1950s
Late 1960s - “hippies”
Late 1970s - disco
1980s
I was amused watching WarGames the other week at not only the ‘quaint’ acoustic modems, but Matthew Broderick looking up information on Dr. Falken… by going to the library and finding articles on microfilm.
Big changes in the last 20-25 years…
Pandemic, stimulus checks, masks and vaccination controversies, conspiracy theories etc. (driven by innumerable unvetted “news” sources)
Civil unrest: BLM riots, storming capitol
LGBTQ (Wow, that woman looks like Bruce Jenner in drag!)
Enron
Subprime Lending Crisis
Gulf Wars
Rise of social media
Rise of smart phones
Y2K scare
9/11
Cambridge Analytica etc.
Bush v. Gore
Inconvenient Truth
Cosby takes a fall
US Mail, stamps…Amazon has a fleet
Buying, banking, corresponding, etc. on line; even working from home
Decline of landlines in the home
Purchase of digital information (e.g. streaming movies) rather than physical DVDs
Apps
Cryptocurrencies
You could have a scene contrasting the size of hard drives then and now. I recall a buddy buying a 20 Megabyte hard drive in 1991, and thinking, “Who needs that much space?” These days, 20 meg is nothing.
So, have a laptop as a part of the time machine, but the laptop gets broken. “No problem Doc, we can just buy a new computer and copy the operating system over, a 2 terabyte drive should be enough.” “Two what? Terabytes? Do you have any idea how much information that is? Maybe the CIA has that much storage, but an 8086 from Radio Shack sure won’t!”