The appeal of the original BTTF is how quaint life was compared to 1985. It really wasn’t about tech at all. You didn’t have Marty going “Hey doc, how do you use this rotary phone?” or anything like that. In “1985” they had the tech to build a time-travelling delorean that ran on plutonium, which obviously wasn’t even real. So a reboot focusing on technical differences between '90 and now would be quite tedious I think. In some ways I think race-relations are WORSE now than they were in 1990, so… awkward! Yeah, there’s plenty of room for gay jokes, Trump jokes, etc. but I think that would wear thin quickly. 1990 didn’t have a bunch of people with their faces in a phone calling eachother all sorts of nasty names. An improvement, really. But it wasn’t “quaint.”
he wasn’t shocked by the concept of a camera, but he was shocked by how small and portable it was (no wonder your President has to be an actor: he’s gotta look good on television!)
BTTF2 was laughably “off” in many of it’s predictions, so it really doesn’t matter what they do. I don’t think dystopia (horror dystopia, not Idiocracy) would play well with a sci-fi comedy. I would think they’d be smart enough to realize flying cars running on garbage probably aren’t going to be a thing for regular folks anytime soon. I am cautiously optimistic we will have level 5 autonomous cars 30 years from now, but not flying ones.
While SNL has been running longer, I think I’d be more surprised that The Simpsons was still running in 2020.
Family watches TV around the dinner table
Marty: “I remember this episode. We binge watched it on-demand after a meme about the ending went viral.”
His ‘uncle’ as a kid: “What’s on-demand?”
…
Marty enters the coffee shop
Marty (to the man behind the counter) “I’ll take a bottle of water, please.”
The employee: “Look, I’ll give you water if you don’t want to pay for a drink, but it’s going to come in a cup like all of our beverages.”
…
Marty does the Floss dance; the entire auditorium stops and stares
Marty: “I know it’s stupid, but your kids are going to love it.”
I was thinking more in terms of how much the movie would have to at least show some of the downsides, and how much it could get away with ignoring before all the critics called it out for a ridiculously Pollyana-ish view of the future.
It seems clear that unless you get a really clever screenwriter, a remake/reboot of the movie would be a mistake. Although Hot Tub Time Machine was sort of a remake of the movie.
What am I missing? They had bottled water since way before 1990.
What bottled water existed in 1990 was fancy imported stuff like Perrier and the like. I don’t believe bottle water as a product that ordinary people routinely drank was really popularized until maybe the mid to late 1990s. If anything someone who insisted on bottled water and refused to drink tap water in 1990 probably would have been viewed as a bit of a snob.
ETA: Or to put it another way, while maybe bottled water existed, it’s not likely something a coffee shop would have kept stocked in the cooler in 1990.
That was in Heathers:
but even at the time we knew it was a satire.
If an 80’s person went back to the 50’s, they would stand because the culture, clothing styles, manner of interactions, etc. was so different. If a 2020’s person went back to the 90’s, I doubt anyone would really notice all that much.
Even if they brought their phone with them to the 90’s, I don’t know that it would be in that “scifi” level of technology difference. In the 90’s there were laptops, hand-held TV’s, palm pilots, VCRs, wrist calculators, etc. A smartphone would be a big jump forward, but it wouldn’t be inconceivable in the same way that 80’s tech back in the 50’s would be.
I think it would be funny if a teen from today watched MTV in 1990:
Today’s teen: “What’s with all the music videos? Don’t they have any reality shows to watch?”
1990 teen: “What the hell is a reality show?”
I’m not sure that bottled water as something you’d expect to find in a convenience store was that weird in 1990 - I remember buying bottled water when I was out riding my bike or stopping off from a camping trip in that time frame, but I could be misremembering. I know it wasn’t until the mid-late 90s that bottled water was seen as a common thing to get, but I’m not sure that in 1990 it would actually be that odd to look for bottled water. The Heathers reference mentioned above was a joke about high end mineral water, and was clearly exaggerated.
Going to a coffee shop for water would be weird, even to me today; usually there’s going to be a convenience store more conveniently located if you’re trying to get a drink even now, much less in 1990. If they included this scene I’d probably find it off for that reason, 2020 Marty going to a coffee shop instead of a convenience store for bottled water would just seem odd. Casually finding a coffee shop would also be a bit odd, in 1992 when Starbucks had their IPO they only had 140 locations nationwide, two orders of magnitude less than the 14000 they have today.
I found the Radio Shack ad someone referenced in regards to what a smartphone has replaced. Here is an article about it:
I think the average 1990 person would shocked how widespread cellphone use is in 2020 and how much technology has been converged into one device.
I would be freakin amazed at a smartphone in 1990.
I remember watching a TV show (Time Trax, 1993) about a time-travelling cop who had a computer with AI disguised as a credit card that could do all sorts of crazy stuff. I remember at the time thinking that was utterly ridiculous, even though the “future” it came from was set in 2193. Honestly that seems quite believable now. You c`
But just because I’d be amazed by a smartphone, doesn’t mean it’s gonna make for a lot of good material for a movie.
By “coffee shop” I didn’t mean a place like Starbucks. I had always understood that term to be more or less synonymous with “diner” or “cafe”.
See the Wikipedia page on the place where Seinfeld and the gang hung out on the show for an example of the usage:
I missed the edit window, but since you brought it up, maybe Marty trying to order a fancy latte in 1990 would make a better joke than him trying to buy bottled water.
I wouldn’t expect a diner to have bottled water either, and again going in to order bottled water would just seem strange and make it look like 2020 Marty is just not that bright instead of registering as something about changing times. Do diners where you are have bottled drinks? That’s something I associate with fast food and fast casual places, not somewhere with table service.
Also, if 2020 Marty called a diner a ‘coffee shop’ I’d think he was just being dumb or making some kind of regional joke, not making a ‘my things have changed’ joke, I’ve never heard ‘coffee shop’ used as a synonym for ‘diner’ and would just find it odd.
shrug I’m not the one who first suggested Marty would walk into a coffee shop (or diner or whatever you want to call the place) and order a bottle of water. That was Moriarty in post #46. I assume he made that the setting to mirror the scene in the original BTTF where Marty enters such an establishment and tries to order a Pepsi Free. (“If you want a Pepsi you’re gonna have to pay for it!”)
No one said Marty called it that. It’s just the phrase we were using to describe the setting.
I’m from the Midwest and learned about Trump from MAD magazine, probably somewhere around 1990ish.
10 gigabits per second! Great Scott!
The biggest reality star of all time is Ozzy Osbourne. Donny T is probably number 2. Most people don’t get to be reality stars without being famous first. I mean, maybe a couple American Idols count? What other reality TV stars are there that didn’t have name recognition before they ended up on reality TV?
And opera hasn’t changed much in a century, either.
You’re considering the wrong pop culture. Send back some absurd, super ironic shitpost meme with nine levels of contrivance that references a decade’s worth of previous memes and see what the mullet heads in 1990 think of that. Or hell, just try to explain “loss” to them.
For that matter, try showing one of them Fortnite or GTA V.
Going from memory I’d agree with you but I rewatched Cheers recently and all through the 80s Sam Malone is drinking bottled water behind the bar because he’s a former alcoholic. So it must have been more common than I remember.