Back to the Future
“Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?”
Every teenager knows that his or her parents must have been geeks when they were seventeen, but Back to the Future gave one teen a chance to see for himself. Directed and co-written by Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump),
this mid-80’s time-traveling romp became the highest-grossing movie of
the year, and it helped turn Michael J. Fox, then best known as Family Ties’ orthodox conservative Alex P. Keaton, into a genuine movie star.
At the start of the film, Marty McFly (Fox) lives at home in 1985
with his pantywaist father George, alcoholic shut-in mother Lorraine
and siblings Dave and Linda. George is such a wimp that high school
thug Biff Tannen, now George’s supervisor, still bullies him around on
a daily basis. Marty’s only escape is the home/lab of the eccentric Doc
Brown, inventor of various gadgets and doo-dads.
After a routine day of disappointment at school and at home, Marty
meets up with Doc at the local mall, where the white-haired genius
unveils his latest and greatest creation: a time-traveling DeLorean.
The first test, with Doc’s dog Einstein in the driver’s seat, is a
success, but before Doc himself can take a whirl, a group of Libyan
terrorists (from whom Doc stole the plutonium to power his time
machine) peel into the parking lot for a drive-by shooting. Doc is
gunned down, but Marty escapes in the DeLorean, which sends him thirty
years into the past.
Landing in 1955, Marty finds that the DeLorean is out of
radioactive fuel and can’t make the jump back. When Marty goes to find
the 1955 Doc for a way back, he accidentally interferes with his own
past. A teenage George (as dorky as ever) misses his chance to meet the
teenage Lorraine (a bit of a scamp in her younger years), who instead
falls for the cute new kid in town… Marty. Marty eventually does find
Doc and convince him his story isn’t a crock, but if Marty can’t put
George and Lorraine back together, he won’t even have a future to come
home to.
The twisty, turny plot of Back to the Future thrived on
little cross-time touches—like Marty’s being mistaken for “Calvin
Klein,” since that’s the name sewn on his underwear. That type of
creativity and the script’s manic energy helped earn Zemeckis and
co-writer Bob Gale an Academy Award nomination, and the film itself
became one of the biggest hits of the decade. Two feature sequels
followed, as did a successful cartoon series and a motion ride at the
Universal Studios theme parks in California and Florida.
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