Back to the Future

I'm confused already. It's easy to think of the third one as just the Wild West, but there's quite a bit in the other periods too. Is it II or III that has Biff running the casino and ruining the town?

The second one is the most all over the place, conceptually.

I don't know anymore. That 'Biff running the town' thing really upset me but I guess it is the better film.

why is the love interest a bad idea N?

They don't make 'em like this anymore.

If there were a way for Doc and Marty to have gotten to this alternate 1985, there would be nothing to prevent them from going back to 1955.  They embark on a fool's errand:  they seek to change the present by changing the past and, as we discussed with Terminator, there are only three possible outcomes of this:  first, you can fail to make the necessary change, so that the past is intact and you still desire to change it, causing an N-jump; second, you can make the change, eliminating your reason for doing so, and so undoing the change, creating an infinity loop; third--the almost impossible result--you can make the change and create a different reason for yourself to know to come back in time to make the change, creating a sawtooth snap which will hopefully terminate in an N-jump (but might still result in an infinity loop).  Marty and Doc return to 1955 with the intent to alter history; furthermore, they are basing their efforts once again on information which they are about attempt to erase.  A disaster stands before us.

You've got to love this guy

this proves he is great, u r all gay (except N)

Here's 288 pages worth of great scott: https://www.amazon.com/We-Dont-Need-Roads-Trilogy/dp/0142181536

https://i.imgflip.com/13118b.jpg

Are there any good longreads about the Back To The Future trilogy? Making of, insider gossip, etc. The kind of thing Rolling Stone would do well. Had a brief google but nothing came up.

― NI, Tuesday, September 6, 2016 8:27 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Tom Shone's book BLOCKBUSTER only has one chapter about BttF, but it's a good one, and it's an excellent book overall

bumping this to get a bunch of "B" threads at the top of sna

ah fuck nevermind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ

this jam

I do think the ending to the first one - and the whole plot of Marty having to get his dad not to be a wimp - is sort of a misstep, or maybe I just don't quite agree with its values. Would prefer a version where Marty discovers his dad wasn't a wimp, and it makes him reconsider the reductive, teenaged kind of way he's judged his parents. Maybe Dad actually used to be a hot-rodding cool kid, kinda like Marty, and Marty witnesses (but doesn't influence) him choosing to give that up for whatever good reason, and that's why his dad is the boring uncool dad he's got now. Because basically his goal in the past, plot-wise, should be undoing the damage he did by arriving there, to restore the status quo - and the thematic match for that is for him to realize that the status quo isn't so bad, that his parents are good people, etc.

just a thought, i don't know how it works out, i haven't seen this in years.

… that would treat the trip to the past as a means of gaining access to knowledge that is impossible for marty without the time-travel premise, but that sort of transformation of sympathies would make sense in other, less science-fictional plots where the lesson reality ends up teaching a protagonist is that they've imagined too little, been out of touch with realities because of their constrained sympathies and limited awareness of others.

what the time-travel premise adds is the possibility of acting, of exercising influence over a person in ways one believes are precluded by the defining relationship one has with that person. that's a fantasy; so i would guess that the movie's values have to be reckoned in terms of what showing us marty having his fantasy fulfilled in that way does for the audience's fantasies. in the circumstances where he does get to act, he is exposed unexpectedly to desire (mom) that threatens to undo, in a more profound way, the fulfillment of his fantasy (annulling him i.e. making good on the type of fear that keeps people fixed and satisfying their desires with fantasy rather than reality, because the change they envision is one that comes at the cost of giving up who they currently are), and forces him into having to establish the preconditions for the creation of the (father-son) relationship he sought to escape.

That's really interesting and you're making me change my mind. Maybe it just bothers me that it all comes down to a really reductive "dad throws a punch at the key moment" thing and then we end up with this awful yuppie family at the end, all about the fancy material things they now have as a result. I guess I just feel like there was room in there for Marty himself to do a little more growing or coming to realizations or something. I'm not looking for something as obvious in its character arc as, say, Doc Hollywood (to stick with MJF), but I feel like he's mostly the same kinda unappreciative and superficial dumbass at the end as he is at the beginning. But if you actually put it in front of me, Fox's tremendous charm goes a long way towards massaging that out while the movie's on.

It's a hell of a well-constructed movie and it hits every beat perfectly, but maybe it falls just a little short of doing everything it could with its premise... I dunno.

Oddly enough, "The Power of Love" was playing the other night; someone related that apparently Huey Lewis thought the movie sounded like crap but went along with it anyway. Someone else said that the original script is indeed very different and much crappier (the time machine is a refrigerator, not a DeLorean??) and I wonder, if you saw the basic pitch for Back to the Future in 1984, and maybe it didn't put the "teen confronted with his parents as teenagers" thing front and center... would you think it sounded like a good movie? Or would you just think "ugh, this is some dopey gimmick movie they're shoveling out for the kids," something that would be in the claustrophobic poster thread maybe?

an 80s movie produced by Steven Speilberg was probably a safe bet to make, plot be damned.

In the "making of" documentary on the Bluray, Zemeckis and Gale say that the "teen confronted with his parents as teenagers" was always the main pitch of the movie, and that was why they had such a hard time selling it. Some studios, like Disney, thought the plot was too incesty for them, and some others thought the time-travel gimmick should've been emphazised more instead of the family story. They wrote the script a few years before BttF was greenlighted, and (according to them) it was mostly Zemeckis' success with Romancing the Stone and Spielberg's backing that finally allowed them to make it.

That's helpful, thanks!

Saw this on the big screen tonight

Realised that it is about perfect, far better than I'd ever realised from catching it from time to time on TV/video

Glover is extraordinary across each iteration of George.

The first live action movie I ever saw in theatres (and I'm pretty sure I saw it twice).

If I ever tried to rank my favourite comic performances of all time, Glover's might take the top spot.

Lou.

Give me a milk.

Chocolate.

I must've watched this 20 times and seen a dozen "things you didn't know about" BTTF lists but just now noticed it's Phil Hartman voicing Goldie Wilson's loudspeaker on the campaign van

Wow

A Back to the Future mind blowing revelation... pic.twitter.com/TuQRp2GFjl

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) January 17, 2021

I literally figured that out when I was 7.

impressive!

I peaked early in life.

Well I figured it out when I was 33, as we can see if we go back in time to 2006....

so i watched the first one yet again yesterday and noticed this cool time travelling little detail

The mall at the beginning of the movie in 1984 is called 'Twin Pines'. The doc tells Marty about an old man Peabody who used to own this land and had a 'crazy idea of breeding pine trees'.
When Marty goes back to 1955 he runs over and kills one of Peabody's pine trees.
Marty then returns at the end of the film to 1984, but now the mall is called 'Lone Pine'.

Ha, i thought that was brilliant. and couldn't believe I'd never noticed it before.

― Ste (Fuzzy), Monday, 19 June 2006 09:43 (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lucky MArty didn't run over both pine trees otherwise they'd have had to have called it No Pines Mall...

Or plant a lot of trees.

I also saw that on first viewing and thought it was a plain part of the text, not a secret trick to figure out

also fuck Rex Chapman on principle until someone can explain his grift to me, at which point fuck him for the grift

I don't know who he is, I don't think.

I assume he is a full time Back to the Future scholar.

If you want to subscribe to the parallel streams of time (I don't), don't imagine Marty-A as Marty-A. That's just the first Marty we see in the movie. For all we know, there have already been hundreds of Back to the Futures before the movie even started. Maybe the mall used to be called "Pine Grove Mall" and Marty has steadily been whittling down the number...

― pplains, Wednesday, May 8, 2013 8:55 AM

Where ya been, Josh, 1955?

90s nba player who fell on hard times after retirement. Developed large Twitter following, mainly due to posting videos with a "block or charge?" caption even tho they had nothing to do with basketball offensive vs defensive foul calls, which is where "block or charge?" originates.

Lol I have seen Rex tweeting, had no idea it was THAT Rex!

I assume he is a full time Back to the Future scholar.

you'd think he'd be able to present his own research instead of stealing other folks', then

Lol I have seen Rex tweeting, had no idea it was THAT Rex!

― Looking for Cape Penis house (Neanderthal), Sunday, January 17, 2021 4:16 PM

Wait, do people not know that part of the “act” for the entire trilogy is seeing how little changes in the past alter the future?

wait BTTF has TIME-TRAVELING in it?

every movie has time traveling in it imo

we’re traveling through time right now

Well, we were, but now we're in the future.

i love how he points out that the replacement of one sign with a completely different sign they built for the movie is "not a mistake". do people think that they film movies entirely in sequence, striking each set after every scene and the rebuilding it again when there's a later scene in the same location?

i think some people think the film is being acted out live every time the dvd is put on

ME AND BTTF2:
"Oh man, Biff is so evil...can you imagine if the world was really like that? It would be hell...I can't believe Biff took over the world...it's so scary....Biff is so evil..."

― Abbott, Monday, September 15, 2008

Yes I can definitely imagine that.

But why is 2015 Biff such a crusty asshole? He came from the timeline where Biff is a happy, meek friend of the family.

biff is never happy and meek, only cowed in the presence of big george who terrorises him relentlessly

Yeah they don't show it but I always imagined Biff seething after George goes back inside the house after the "Don't con me!" scene. Biff would be even more miserable in that timeline

he came from an alternate timeline where only one-play was available

*one-ply

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQ6whOG-Pg

MJF is fucking hilarious in this…favorite part is the slow stare at dad coming into frame in the coffee shop

What a perfect movie. And it would have been perfect even without the "Johnny B. Goode" scene -- I mean, it adds nothing to the plot -- it's just a moment of pure elation. It rockets the film into the statosphere.

Tom Wilson (Biff) was asked the same questions by BACK TO THE FUTURE fans so often, he wrote a song answering them. This is great. pic.twitter.com/OTXN6UdwOI

— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) September 10, 2022

I've often kinda wondered what happened to the other Marty seen at the end of the first movie, who seemingly is sent back to the 1955 of his timeline, which is the 1955 where the protagonist Marty changed the past. So I came up with silly fan theory...

This has bugged me for a long time, but my "fan theory" is that Doc Brown knew he couldn't send that Marty back to 1955 ('cuz he'd crash right into Marty-Prime arriving at that same spot); so instead he set the dial for 1055 or something. Sent that fool back to the Dark Ages, where he figured he couldn't cause any trouble and would die quickly. BUT! -- somehow Nu-Marty survives, claws his way back to the present (or, let's say, 2025 – for purposes of developing this into a new movie), and he's hella pissed... now he's a bad guy, coming for revenge! Watch Peacock for BTTF 4, coming in two years...

So he's basically Khan? Sounds great/terrible.

Yeah, or Superboy-Prime from the DC Universe