The Back to the Future movies was released during my school days and had captured my imagination ever since. This July (2015), marks the 30th Anniversary of one of the most successful Hollywood sci-fi trilogies,  as a way of celebrating I wanted to watch the three films back to back this weekend. I was doubly happy, for first, the movies turned out to be as enjoyable as I remembered it, the second I watched it with my 12-year-old son next to me. Before the first part began, my son dismissed it will be boring and will sport childish animations (his words, not mine), but once the first part ended he couldn’t wait for the next two parts. He was excited watching it, couldn’t stop talking about it.  I could see the happiness in his face and imagined what my “Dad” would have seen in my face in 1985 had he sat next to me then. My Dad has little interest in movies and rarely accompanied us when we went to films, but to be fair to him he had to work long hours to take good care of me and my siblings in those decades.

I have asked my son that this should be a tradition we have started here, he should watch the movies in the summer of 2045 along with his children and invite me to join them. I have promised I will keep the DVDs (and digital versions) safe till then. 

Back-to-the-Future

Coming back to the films, “Back to the Future I” the first of the trilogy was released in July 1985 and became an instant hit. Recently I had bought the films on DVD as a way of tribute to some wonderful story telling. Though it’s claimed to be a science fiction due to the time machine that was shown, the films involve very little of science, it was all about humour and good old family drama that led to their phenomenal success. They were so successful that the franchise was not limited to films but to animation series, theme parks and video games generating over $1 Billion in revenue and growing. The characters of Marty McFly played by Michael J. Fox and Dr Emmett “Doc” Brown by Christopher Lloyd became the standard for portraying any young assistant character or scientist character by Hollywood for next three decades. The franchise overall and even the car (Delorean) shown in the movie are still remembered in the popular imagination, see this article that appeared two days back in Popular Mechanics titled “Sorry Marty, But the DeLorean Couldn’t Have Reached 88 Mph“.

There are many memorable items in the films, my picks will be the concept of Time-Travel (Temporal) Paradox which is an intriguing idea just like Parallel Universe proposed by modern science, to think about the fourth dimension, using trash as fuel and the courier (after possessing it for over 70 years) delivered by the Western Union at the end of Part 2 and the scenes where the dialogue “I hate Manure” is uttered!

 

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