Picture from Moviestore/Rex Shutterstock
According to the idiots who post bullshit memes and make their own urban myths, it has been Back to the Future day pretty much every year since the turn of the millennium. The problem isn't so much the people posting total bollocks, it's the people who fan the flames by spreading it; to quote James Hetfield from the popular beat combo Metallica 'you lie so much you believe yourself'. As anyone who actually pays attention will tell you, (and you only had to do a little research by getting the DVD out and looking for yourself), today is the actual day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travelled to in Back to the Future Two, and as every keyboard tapping pointer-outer of the bleeding obvious has pointed out in the last week, this film is now set entirely in the past.
Time travel is difficult to get right when writing about the future, for example Space:1999 predicted that we would all look as though we were living in 1974. It's easy to make films or write books based in the past because we know what it looks like, setting something in the future relies on guesswork and inevitably there have been a lot of reports about what a film made in 1989 actually got right. Thumbprint recognition, video conference calls, intelligent glasses (ironically named because you look anything but while wearing them), 3D movies, and thanks to the ghastly Reflex chain of bars, even the 1980s nostalgia cafe all seem to have come true. McFly signed a petition to save the clock on what looks suspiciously like an iPad, and although we were told otherwise in the past we do still have printed newspapers. Nobody in 1989 could have predicted that we would all have mobile phones, and the fax machine never really caught on in the home but apart from that they did a pretty decent job of it.
It was his frustration at the inconsistencies in BttF that prompted my brother Jack to write Whatever Happened to Nathan McKenzie? His theory was based on the fact that Marty McFly would not have been able to slot back into the point where he left off because he would have been a week older when he returned. He has a point but what we all need to remember is that time travel has no rules for the simple reason that time travel doesn't exist. Picking holes in time travel takes away your enjoyment of the entertainment on offer. Biff would not have returned to 2015 having stolen the DeLorean to give his 1955 self the book of sport results because in doing so he created an alternate timeline. I am convinced that when McFly went back to 1885 to rescue Doc he could have been there and back in minutes because Doc hid the DeLorean in a cave so when he arrived and ripped the fuel tank all he had to do was find the one that had been hidden for him to discover and drive that off rather than piss about trying to get horses to run at 88 miles an hour. Based on the film Somewhere in Time, my mum used to say that if you had travelled in time then you would already have been there, such as in the film when Richard Collier finds his name in a hotel register so knows he was there in 1912. My response was that he wouldn't have been there because it might not have occurred to him to attempt to travel in time, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, it's all shite and should be taken at face value as the rules can technically be whatever you decide. Back to the Future Two got self tying shoelaces, automatically drying clothes, magic pizzas, hover-boards and flying cars wrong but there was one rather sad prophecy that nobody else seems to have picked up on; Michael J Fox would be unable to play the guitar in 2015.
The Sunday Alternative Podcast #60 is available from here
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