You know, Clark could just check Wally World’s website to see if the park was open, rather than driving cross-country…
People still write down phone numbers – it’s quicker than adding them to your phone address book.
Happened when ATMs started getting popular, too; every sitcom had an episode where they went to the ATM, it went crazy and started spitting out money, and then the police came around asking questions.
Cell phones have changed horror movies forever. Now, every horror movie has to have a “Dammit, no signal!” scene to justify why the victim can’t just call for help.
I remember those. I also remember when microwaves, answering machines and car phones were new, and there are several shows that have very dated episodes where someone uses a microwave to cook a turkey (which is possible, but there’s a reason it never caught on), gets really angry at repeatedly getting an answering machine, or has some kind of misunderstanding over a car phone after which hilarity ensues-- or uses a phony bad connection to get out of something, because they were so common when the technology was new.
There’s also a Bob Newhart Show episode where Bob gets a pager (y’know, cause he’s a doctor), and expects that he’ll be getting paged all the time, because he’s so important, but he never gets a page. Everyone else he knows seems to be getting pages, including clients, who get them during sessions, and one bum on the street gets one (IIRC, Bob is waiting in line at the time to see Star Wars with Howard and his son). Generally, the Bob Newhart Show holds up pretty well, but that one is going to have anyone in college now scratching their heads. I realize they will know what pagers are, but the idea of one being a status symbol will probably go over their heads. Young people mostly associate them with drug dealers.
Or, “The battery is down, and I forgot my car charger!” Pretty soon, writers are going to give up, and just set all horror films before 1990.
3.1 or 95?
I love Wait Until Dark, but it’s dated in another, non-technological way: all this elaborate kerfuffle is over a quantity of heroin that any pusher on the street corner is carrying in his pockets. We’ve gotten used to plots revolving around shiploads of contraband; a few ounces seems pathetic.
It also depends on how the local area boundaries are drawn. I lived in the southern part of a large area, but the “free area” is apparently determined in terms of how far away it is from the center of that area, as people who lived five miles away from me were in the “toll area”.
Another anachronism: they have to go to Naval Air Station Alameda to find a nuclear powered ship, and it turns out to be the Enterprise. USS Enterprise left Alameda by 1990 (replaced by USS Carl Vinson, and while that ship was being overhauled, by USS Abraham Lincoln on its way to its permanent base at Pearl Harbor), and NAS Alameda itself was decommissioned as part of the national Base Realignment And Closure scheme about 10 years ago. (If you do a Google Earth view of the area, you can barely make out the area where the base’s runways were located.)
This is probably why so many crucial scenes take place in parking garages. Everyone knows that it’s often hard to get a cellphone signal inside a parking garage, so the writers don’t need to go to any great lengths to explain why their character spends 10 minutes running around like an idiot instead of just calling 911.
Given my experiences with them, the movie-makers should just show that the protagonists use Sprint as their carrier - that alone would explain why calls can’t be connected.
That dropped call tone could be the new scary noise, replacing the Psycho shower scene musical sting
Yeah, but none of those plot points are obsolete in a movie that requires you to accept time travel as a basic premise 
Which raises the question; just how *would *a theme park in 1983 have about informing the public a planned 2 week closure for maintenance? 
Would they just schedule it far enough in advance that they print the closure dates in the upcoming year’s brochures and promotional material? Also weren’t the Griswold’s traveling sure the summer; :dubious: you’d think if the park had to be shut down for planned maintenance they’d wait until the off-season.
I remember seeing ads in rags like Thrifty Nickle for unexpected park closures or concert cancellations or what not. Regular schedules of openings, closing, events, etc… were often found in flyers at the local 7/11.
Yeah, I kind of found it hard to believe even back when the movie came out that the park would close for maintenance during the busiest time of the year.
Or drinking bottled water is immediately recognized as evidence of gayness.
FYI those cop databases are for official use only. Using them for non law enforcement purposes can get you fired or jailed. The ones in this state are monitored and there are periodic audits. No way am I risking a 5 year Official Misconduct charge to find out someone’s age.
I think Lamia’s point was that Marty McFly would call his girlfriend’s cellphone.
I’m pretty sure Marty would have already had his girlfriend’s number in his phone.
Yeah, but it wasn’t bottled water it was “MINERAL WATER!”
There’s the “No Signal” montage, where people in one horror movie or thriller after another can’t get a signal, have dead batteries and no way to recharge, lose their phones, drop their phones into the water, or have their phones smashed or burned by someone else.
The obsolete part isn’t the pen and paper, it’s the fact that Marty needed the grandmother’s landline number in the first place. If Jennifer had a cellphone he could just call her at the same number he usually called her at even when she was at her grandmother’s house.