On the 21st of this month, the whole most of the world Internet will be celebrating “Back to the Future Day”—that is, the date on which Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown zoom off thirty years ahead from present time in Back to the Future Part II.* The Robert Zemeckis-helmed and Steven Spielberg-produced time travel trilogy also officially turned 30 years old last July.
Needless to say, the Back to the Future franchise remains a fan-favorite to this day. The memes, the pop culture references, and the retrospective reviews all make for fond nostalgia for one of the all-time greats in sci-fi cinema and time travel fiction as a whole.
That said, how has the movie’s fictional foresight fared? Not too accurately, we’re afraid. Still, it’s become a fun exercise to check in on how science, technology, and society measure up against Back to the Future’s inspired world-building. Cases in point? Read on, buttheads.
“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads…”
One of the biggest “promises” that the Back to the Future future set a 2015 deadline for is the, eherm, rise to prominence of flying cars. “This is heavy,” indeed. Unfortunately, we do have a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull—as far as levitating vehicles are concerned. Unless some sort of combined technological and economic miracle happens between the time of this writing and the time this magazine reaches your hands, it’s safe to say that we won’t be seeing cars ruling the skies anytime within the next decade—which is so unfortunate given the state of Metro Manila roads these days. (There may be at least one or two as early as 2017, though, courtesy of Slovakian company AeroMobil and, a bit later, US-based Terrafugia.)
Another fan-favorite, yet-to-be-realized bit of the “future” is the hoverboard, featured in that Back to the Future Part II chase scene that’s easily one of the most memorable sequences from the entire trilogy. We’re getting pretty close though: companies like Hendo and carmaker Lexus have been showing off their respective magnet-levitated boards in impressive, yet still very limited video demos. It may only be a matter of time before Mattel packages these babies for mass release in your suking toy store.
But hey, at least we’re getting these sweet kicks!
Since we apparently still need actual solid surfaces to get around in real life in 2015, it’s good to know that Nike has promised to release Marty’s shoes, now dubbed the Nike MAG, commercially. Granted, this isn’t the first time we’re seeing these replica sneakers. In 2011, the sportswear brand auctioned off 1,500 limited edition pairs on eBay. All proceeds from the auction went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for research on Parkinson’s disease, with which the Back to the Future lead was diagnosed in 1991. What’s even more exciting is that the 2015 Nike MAG is coming with a very important feature that wasn’t on the 2011 version: real, working Power Laces! While information on this year’s release date is very scarce at the time of writing, our money’s on Nike having started to make more noise about it as this month’s “Back to the Future Day” approaches.
Meanwhile, no self-drying jackets just yet, but more importantly, we’re seeing no signs of double-tie fashion gaining traction… yet.
To be fair, Back to the Future Part II did hit the mark on a number of other, more practical (but now somehow less cool?) innovations. Thanks to the fast pace of today’s technological evolution, stuff like video calling, biometric security/access measures, real-time “changing” news headlines (albeit viewed on tablet and mobile phone screens, instead of digitized newspapers), virtual reality headsets, and large flat screen digital TVs with split display capabilities that wowed movie-goers in the late ‘80s are now ubiquitous and nearly fixtures in every home.
Oh, and prepubescent Elijah Wood’s reaction to video games where players “use [their] hands” would be something straight out of a Kids React YouTube clip today.
Hit-or-miss as it might have been with its vision of “future 2015,” the Back to the Future franchise (okay, just Part II) did give us lots to look forward to in “real-life 2015.” If its unrealized predictions mean anything, it’s that there’s still a lot of “future” to look forward to. This ought to make everyone gasp with a spirited, “Great Scott!”
*For realsies this time, as the made-up day of commemoration had been falsely spread and made viral online several times in the past few years thanks to some nifty Photoshop skills and a good old sense of Internet hoaxery.
