Back to the Future? Back from the Future? Funny how it turned out.

I am back. It is the first post of the new year and new decade. For what that is worth. Happy new year to one and all, I wish you all the best of health and prosperity in 2011. Now if we could only get the leadership of a number of countries to fall off the planet we may be safer, or at least safer for another bunch of whack jobs.



Funny, but Dr. Strangelove seems to be more pertinent to me today than it was 30 years ago. Of course, then, as I had said, we had mutually assured destruction. It is rather humourous how comforting that notion is right now.



Enough about that, though. You did not come here to read me wax poetic about death and mortality. In fact, I have a family who can hear all about it, if I felt the need to drop the melancholy blanket over them. I do not. I do not know when the "time" is up, so might as well have a good time, make it a good time, while I/we have it. Let's party like it was 1999.



Which brings me to the real humour. AMC just ran the Back to the Future trilogy. I was struck by many things. I recall the original being released in 1985 and going back to 1955 was funny. The whole scene when 1955 Dr. Brown questions Marty McFly about some events in the "present" (to Marty) and the joke about Ronald Reagan as president worked. The third movie also went back deeper into the past, so I really have nothing to laugh about there. It was the second movie that interested me. Marty goes 30 years into the future, which would take us to 2015, which is not so far off.

It was another way to see how the future was viewed back in 1985 and what would be. I noticed a lot of things that made me laugh. I cannot go into how I had suspend my disbelief about the future of Hill Valley. A cookie cutter suburb/development of 1985, somehow things in town did not drastically change, just cosmetic changes, in 2015,

I was into the product placement. The best one was Texaco. Who? Where are they now? By the later '80s, they had lost a HUGE breach of contract type of lawsuit in Texas against Pennzoil. The settlement they had to pay was exorbitant and bankrupted the company. Up here in Canada, Texaco's operation were bought, cheaply, by Imperial Oil (Esso, an Exxon subsidiary). I think, I guess I could have done the research (this where you realize that you get what you pay for), in the US, Texaco or its assets were bought by Chevron. In any event, not sure how the company exists in 2015 when it is nowhere in 2011.

There was a Pepsi placement. Not sure how big it was thought they would be in 2015. Think about it but they have grown and in ways I do not think were contemplated in 1985. Pepsi owns Tropicana, Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats, including Gatorade. That is big. I am also not sure if they still own their stake in Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut), which was used to sell fountain drinks (Pepsi products to counter Coca Cola's McDonald's connection).

The strangest thing that struck me was this. If you recall, at the end of the first movie, Doc Brown comes back from the future to tell Marty in the present that there is a problem with his child. Now, the time machine does not need plutonium to create the 1.21 Gigajoules the flux capacitor needed. The vehicles ran on waste or garbage, which looked organic. If the hover cars ran on organic waste, then why was a large, integrated oil company advertising? We would need the Texacos of the world to create garbage for us? What the fuck?

I do not want to go into the fashion styles or the fact that these hover vehicles and hoverboards will not be existing, especially in commercial production in the "real" 2015. Let alone the automated, Max Headroom, like waitstaff at the 50s themed restaurant in Hill Valley.

I then got annoyed with the whole thing and turned away. Damn, ADD, and I did not think I could sit and critique the thing just for the sake of doing it.

Like most of my posts that could go on and on, I am ending it here. I just want to move on to something else for the day. Enjoy the Sunday post. Ciao!