Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Forget the Hoverboards – I want Mr. Fusion

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 21, 2015

Back_to_the_FutureOkay, it’s kind of a dumb meme going around, but I’ll bite. After all, it’s a one-time event for those of us who are children of the 80s. Today was the day in the future that Marty McFly traveled to from 1985 in Back to the Future II (released in 1989).

The vision of 2015 from 1989 was comical and… in my view… pretty annoying. But they had the anti-grav thing going for it, which was pretty major. And Mr. Fusion. Everyone talks about the hoverboards… where are our hoverboards?

(Well, we kind of have them, but they have to be used on a special surface. We are no closer to anti-gravity now than we were in the 1980s).

Personally, I’d rather have the flying cars. And more particularly, Mr. Fusion. I want to turn my organic garbage into 1.21 gigawatts of power, dang it! You pull that off, and have that much power at your disposal, and maybe everything else becomes a solvable problem.

The films under-estimated technology’s advancement a bit, too, still using pay phones and fax machines. But they weren’t trying to accurately predict the future… they were just trying to have fun. And the most fun thing about them is the comic representation of the same phenomenon written about in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” – how seemingly insignificant actions taken by time travelers in the past could all kinds of ripples and ramifications back in their own present time. The films played with all kinds of weird causality – starting with Marty’s own disrupting of his own parent’s relationship, causing him to slowly paradox his family and himself out of existence. Wild stuff to think about, made into a fun comedy for mass consumption.

It’s also pretty funny having such a window on mid 1980s America – deliberately shown in sharp relief against other eras – to look back on now.

So, hey, we get to give an old series which is definitely out of its own time one last great send-off today.

 

BTTF_Time


Filed Under: Movies - Comments: Read the First Comment



  • Andy_Panthro said,

    The current research into fusion power is really quite exciting, and it does feel tantalisingly close. It might not be exactly “Mr. Fusion”, but the dream of super cheap , super clean energy is certainly one worth striving for. I can’t even imagine all of the possible benefits for the world.

    Film futures are always quite amusing though, since there’s no easy way to predict how things will be any significant time in the future. My personal favourite (aside from BTTF of course) is Total Recall (1990). A colony on Mars, wall-sized televisions, holographic tennis coaching, self-driving cars and body scanners all predicted and a lot seems very attainable (at the very least, we’re almost there with the TVs and Jonny Cabs).

top