Actually having to talk to girls face-to-face, or at least speaking to them directly on the telephone, back in 1991 if you wanted to ask them out instead of doing it via text. Driving isn’t as important to younger people today like it was when I turned 16 back in 1992. You could send a modern teenager back to 1991 and he might not know how to drive.
Checking your e-mail on [Ricochet, packet radio, SMS, whatever, so not all available in 1991], or even just having, a mobile phone or beeper marked you as a yuppie and/or nerd (and pretty spoiled for a kid to have it), so Marty wouldn’t want to be seen doing that. Which leads to the question, what makes teenagers “cool” in the eyes of other teens, let’s say in California? And how does this “coolness” vary over time? Someone like Tom Sawyer has a timeless charm.
Sure, the technology has advanced a lot, but the cultural changes have not been nearly as large as they were in previous decades. Watching an episode of Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, or Married With Children doesn’t produce in me a sense of those shows being part of a culture that time has passed by. In contrast, when I was a kid in the 80s, watching Leave it to Beaver or The Andy Griffith show did produce a sense that this was some older culture which time had passed by.
In other words, people of 2021 are still the same as Chandler Bing, Jerry Seinfeld, Frasier Crane, or Al Bundy, we just have iPhones now. People in 1985, however, were of a different culture than Barney Fife or Ward Cleaver. At least that’s how it seemed to me at the time and still seems to me now.
I think you’d have to push it back into the 1980s. The Reagan era with the Soviet Union and the Cold War still a thing. It would also push us back before the World Wide Web. Sure, digital realms existed but it wasn’t on most peoples’ radar or was the stuff of movies. By 1991 the Internet was getting press hype.
I don’t know how you’d go about using and depicting it, but the demographics of the veteran population has changed in that time. Back then, WWII vets were grandparents numbering in the millions, but now there’s just a few hundred thousand left. Vietnam vets are now roughly the age WWII vets were in the 80s, but back then it was very much a fresh wound.
A plot element could be trying to communicate with lots of people. It could be sending word out to everyone or casting a wide net to find a particular person. A teenager from today wouldn’t know a world without YouTube and Facebook and their successors. What would they have to learn and do just to reach just the local town’s population?
Positive movement on gay rights could be contracted with the steps back on racism. I’m sure there a gag about the other letters in LGBTQ to be had.
Seriously?
Ask a 17 year kid to do the same and whether or not our culture has moved on.
In BttF, Marty is likewise familiar with the Honeymooners (and much like today, his parents still watch an old TV show) but wouldn’t consider that a contemporary show.
ETA: Maybe it’s not clear, but when we watched BttF originally, we were closer to Marty’s age, so of course we identify with him more. But now, we’re closer in age to Doc Brown and seeing things from the perspective of somebody who lived through the intervening years and don’t recognize how different things would actually be for a younger generation.
Yeah, I agree. @FlikTheBlue, if I may ask, how old are you? The shows you mentioned seem incredibly dated to me. Which is fine! They’re ~30 years old!
I agree. If I saw a current iPhone (or competitor) in 1991 my mind would be fucking blown. Come on. “That’s cool … I guess?” I remember us GenXers were a cynical bunch, but not that cynical. Show me a phone with a Commodore 64 emulator and literally every single game ever made for it on it (would take up less than a gig compressed – peanuts) and holy shit. Then show me the modern games, and I’d join your cult.
It would be absolutely, jaw-droppingly staggering to see a modern phone in 1991. And the photo/video capabilities wouldn’t be “oh cool.” The performance of a modern phone camera compared to anything a camcorder back then could do is orders of magnitude better. As for stills, way better color rendition, low light performance (by far) – you have instant feedback to what your photo looks like – you have a device you can put into your pocket where you can show off all your photos and videos without lugging a bunch of shit around.
And then – hey – see that shitty walkman you got there? Check this out and my collection of several hundred albums here in my pocket with audio quality that will blow your socks off.
“Cool … I guess?”
Come on.
Here is a thread that is tangential related to time traveling back to 1991:
“How do I read this squiggly writing? It just looks like a bunch of loops.”
And two other tangential threads about time traveling to the 80s with a modern cellphone:
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-the-1980s-reverse-engineer-a-modern-iphone/775816
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-could-a-time-traveler-pawn-his-cell-phone-off-too/427879
I’m 44. And I agree they seem dated in the sense that the characters on those shows don’t have iPhones, texting, TikTok, Facebook, etc. But the characters themselves don’t seem old fashioned to me in the same way that characters from I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, or The Andy Griffith show seem old fashioned, even compared to the 1990s.
So, in 1985, you were 8 years old? Or 14 in 1991 I suppose.
Ask an 8 year old (or 14 year old) vs a 50 year old if any of those shows seems old-fashioned or how culturally out of date they are and you’ll get very different responses.
I agree with Great_Antibob; I’m your age and I see things the same way as you, but Seinfeld and Friends were on during our formative years. ISTM the relevant opinion today would be not ours, but that of a 21 year old who lives his life on TikTok and Instagram. Kids today have entire vocabularies of recent slang and modes of behavior we’re completely unfamiliar with. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Friends looks to them as Andy Griffith does to us.
My kids, aged 12 and 15, watch Friends reruns on occasion. I’ll have to ask them how they feel about this. To me, Friends is almost like today, but I don’t use a smartphone, I still read physical books, my headphones are from around 2000 etc. etc.
With Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, Married With Children, the all white, hetero cast would be a good starting point for arguing nothing has changed.
With the exception of Lorraine, I never got the impression that anyone else thought he was particularly “cool”- George was such a sad-sack that anyone else was cool, and Lorraine had a crush on him. Biff and his buddies certainly were not impressed by Marty.
The story to me was always less of a “Fish out of Water” story, and more of a “How will Marty solve his problems while being constrained/unaware of 1950s stuff?” Those problems being namely how to power the time machine DeLorean in the absence of plutonium, and how to re-attach his parents, after his mother developed a crush on him.
That could be done easily enough in 1991; I think that the real comedy in a remake would be having Marty NOT be able to rely on his 2021 technology- his phone would not be connected to anything, and the charge would be running out.
Maybe make that part of the plot- he has to do something before his phone runs out of juice or something like that, because the car/time machine needs the phone. He’d have to go to a library, use a landline phone, not be able to be in touch and just have faith that people would meet you at the agreed upon time. And probably some cheap gags having to do with the state of technology at the time- like have him use a Gopher site or Usenet or something, could be thrown in.
Well, there’s the whole “Marty invents rock and roll” bit.
Animal House did that so much better with Otis Day and the Knights. Lord, if there is anything that dates this movie to 1985, it’s that Michael J. Fox is going to invent rock and roll. Michael J. Freaking Fox. He could have worn sunglasses, at least. Sunglasses always make puny white kids from the suburbs the coolest people of all time. At least they did in the 1980s. OMG, that whole Tom Cruise/Ferris Bueller/Michael J. Fox trope.
No movie today is going to have a white guy, playing a teenager, teach a black adult rock and roll. Never mind that the roots for that music were actually known by many musicians in 1955. Blech.
In a couple of the other BTTF threads, it was mentioned that very little, if any, music from today would shock teenagers in the early 90s, the way “Johnny B. Goode” did teenagers in the mid-50s.
So instead of playing an iconic paradigm-shifting tune, the gag could be that Marty plays some cheesy one-hit wonder.
“Hey Rob, this is you cousin Marvin, Marvin Van Winkle. You know that derivative Bowie-esque sound you’ve been looking to rip off. Well take a listen to this!”
Marty travels back in time to 1990, experiences a “microagression” and his head explodes.
In the first Jumani reboot, one of the girls is talking to Nick Jonas’s character who was trapped in the game since the 90s. She goes on and on about her “phone” and his character is like "“phone’ obviously means something very different in the future”.
Wait, really? A skate-boarding rockstar is honestly a little on the nose for “cool kid” in the 1980s. The fundamental story of Back to the Future is “cool kid has loser parents, goes back in time to teach them how to be cool like him.” Yes, he has many problems to solve that are not directly related to that, but if you think about what has changed from the beginning of the movie to the end, most movies are about an arc in the main character. The main character has flaws and learns to overcome them through the trials of the plot. But Marty has no flaws. He is awesome at the beginning and awesome at the end! The changes wrought by the action of the movie are that his parents are now awesome too. They are rich, fit, accomplished.
Perhaps “cool” is not quite the right word, because Marty is also a bit of a weirdo and is off-balance for lost of the movie. But I think it’s pretty close.
A reference that literally dozens of us audience members would get! 