This is heavy, doc. It’s 2015, and to film geeks that means one thing: it’s the year that Marty McFly traveled to in Back to the Future Part II.
The sequel to Back to the Future was released on November 22nd, 1989, four years after the original. Despite now working pretty well as a trilogy, the first Back to the Future didn’t really call for a sequel. Sure it had a potential sequel hook ending, but this always seemed more like a fun way to imply Doc and Marty will go on more adventures after the credits roll than an actual setup for a sequel.
Back to the Future was basically a story about a kid learning more about his parents and about making us imagine what our parents were like when they were our age. It had time travel, but it was relatively light on science fiction compared to the sequel.
Back to the Future Part II took Marty into the future and is a pretty ridiculously fun sequel. We get to see this crazy vision of the future and see Marty hop back and forth between different time periods and different alternate timelines in a movie that is still just as fun today.
A lot has been made of how ridiculous the movie’s vision of the future is compared to where we are now. We don’t have hover boards, flying cars, or micro-food that heats up in seconds. We don’t dress in those ridiculous futuristic outfits, and there never was a Jaws 5, let alone Jaws 15.
But how different is the real 2015 from the movie’s version, really? Some of the movie’s predictions were actually pretty spot on or pretty close to where we are now in a way that makes a few scenes pretty hilarious in retrospect. Here are the top 10 ways Back to the Future II got it right.
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10. You have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!
In this great scene in the movie, Marty plays a vintage game from the 1980s involving the use of a gun controller, like one of those classic arcade games or like Duck Hunt on the NES. He’s showing off how good he is at it, only for two 21st century kids to say “You have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!” In 2015, the idea of using a physical controller to play a video game is riciculous.
We’re not quite fully there yet, and controllers are still widely used. But we’re now living in a world where Kinect and Wii motion controls dominate a lot of video games, with the Xbox One allowing players to control the system just with hand motions and without a controller. We’ve also seen the rise of the Oculus Rift recently, a full virtual reality system. At some point very soon, using an actual controller for a video game might be seen as a baby’s toy. So while the movie may have jumped the gun on this prediction, the idea of video games progressing towards a method of play that doesn’t involve controllers was completely accurate.
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9. Wall mounted TVs
In this scene, we see a future Marty video conferencing with his boss, something which must have seemed pretty crazy at the time. He has what in 1989 must have been seen as an insanely large television mounted on the wall, but today this just comes across as a regular TV a lot of people would probably have in their living rooms. In an age where TVs were relatively small devices, the idea that by 2015 they would get so large as to be mounted on the wall like a movie theater was also completely true.
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8. Alternative fuel sources
In the opening scene of the film, Doc Brown says his car needs fuel and proceeds to toss banana peels, eggshells and beer into his “Mr. Fusion” generator. Though we obviously aren’t anywhere near this, the rise of cars that run on compost fuel makes this prediction not too ridiculous anymore.
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7. Video Conferences
In the same scene from earlier, Marty has a video conference with his boss. At the time, the idea of being able to communicate with someone through video on a big screen must have seemed like a crazy, futuristic world. But watching this scene now it’s almost hard to imagine that it was supposed to be a vision of the future at the time, because a character talking to his boss on a large TV seems pretty normal now. With the advent of things like Skype and Facetime, anyone with a computer and a TV can replicate this scene. In fact, video conferencing technology is maybe even a little better today than it is in this scene. The picture quality of the conference isn’t the best, about on par with a VHS tape, but today we can video conference in beautiful, HD quality. On this front, the movie was totally right, and we may actually be a little more advanced now than it predicted.
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6. Jaws 19
Okay, so we only got four Jaws movies in the end, not 19. But this scene parodying Hollywood’s eventual obsession with movie sequels and 3D technology feels very reminiscent of where we actually are with movies today. We don’t have that giant hologram, but we’re living in a world where there are soon going to be 10 Fast and Furious movies, and where just about every single movie that comes out is in 3D. That’s often a huge part of the marketing, too, with so many movies having “3D” as part of their title. As far as sequels go, we’re living in a world where six of the highest grossing movies of 2014 were sequels. While sequels were obviously big in 1989 too, the concept of Hollywood’s obsession with 3D technology and sequels growing larger and larger is pretty in line with what we’re experiencing now.
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5. Google Glass
There’s actually a few things not far off about this scene, the main one being the headset Marty’s son is wearing. I mean really, isn’t that basically a Google Glass? The vision of a headset/visor with a virtual display was a common prediction in a lot of sci-fi movies, and we’ve officially gotten there with Google Glass. The scene also feels almost like a modern parody of how obsessed with and distracted by technology we would become, to the point where all these flashing gadgets are completely distracting from the family’s dinner and conversation. Of course, a lot of the gadgets in this scene are far off from what we really have, again the spirit of the prediction is pretty true.
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4. Miami Marlins
In this scene, Marty finds out that the Cubs beat Miami in the World Series, which is surprising considering in 1989 Miami didn’t actually have a team. Now in 2015 we have the Miami Marlins, who began playing in 1993. It still seems like a huge missed opportunity for the team not to have taken the alligator mascot like in the movie.
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3. Hoverboards / Power Laces
Two of the main pieces of technology from the movie were hoverboards and self-lacing shoes, and we may almost be at that point. Okay, this one is kind of cheating, because both are in direct response to the movie, but earlier this year, Tony Hawk showed off an actual, working hoverboard, for real this time. Sure, it’s not as exciting in that it can only hover like an inch above the ground, but hey, it’s technically a hoverboard! Nike also announced last year that in 2015, they would be unveiling self-tying shoes like Marty has in the movie. It remains to be seen if they’ll meet that goal, but if so, we will technically have hoverboards and power laces by 2015, even if they aren’t nearly as cool as in the movie.
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2. Flying cameras
When Biff and his friends crash at the end of the Hover Board chase, we see the news hitting the scene with flying cameras to capture the footage. We’re now living in a future where journalists can use drones to take pictures and videos, and in a way maybe even more advanced than what we see in the movie. They aren’t being so widely used that a crime scene is immediately filled with cameras on drones, but the technology really is there.
1. Fingerprints
As Marty arrives in the future, a man approaches him raising money for the clock tower and asking for donations. He pulls out a little device which scans your fingerprint and you can use that to pay. Now, the iPhone actually can scan your fingerprint, and with the ability to make mobile payments it seems we aren’t really too far behind this. This is another one where the technology isn’t quite where it is in the movie yet, but the idea of some sort of device being able to scan your fingerprint to identify you has happened, and we’re slowly working towards what we see in the movie.