I wasn’t going to let this awesome replay anniversary slide away although the event we went to took place about four weeks ago. Universal has also announced they’re having the movie hit theaters for a limited time to celebrate. Alamo as always made this special in a few ways.
First I want to go back 30 years because the movie has a couple special places in my heart and memory. While Mom, Brian and I were contemplating our “relocation” to Tampa, we visited Grandma Maggi in Minooka during the holiday weekend. Somehow Cousin Leesa and I managed to escape to have some older teen…no, let’s go with young adult…time away from our younger siblings and the parents. I defer to YA due to Leesa being in college. I readily admit YA was a stretch for me. How Leesa pulled this off was beyond me. She was often harangued to be the adult in charge whenever our parents took off to see Grandma in hospice or whatever. I think she was also experiencing the bullshit I received a couple years later; you can’t leave the house, you need to be working, how else are you going to pay for college, etc. Throw in that Leesa is female, I figured there’d be an additional variable over pregnancy. Now add our family’s paranoid mindset, pregnancy is an airborne virus so we had to be extra careful in public settings!
Either way, I was appreciative of Leesa letting me tag along. She met up with a couple friends from high school (I think). We played mini-golf, hit the arcade to try out an electronic Trivial Pursuit machine and saw this new movie starring TV actor Michael J. Fox with Huey Lewis and the News providing the soundtrack.
The movie remains great. The memory of Leesa treating me as an intelligent peer at a time when my parents thought I was an idiot, Larry Flynt, budding junkie-drunk and/or all of the above, has always been what I associated with Back. I wasn’t a burden or an obligation to entertain. I felt genuinely welcome, had a great time and developed a better relationship with a cousin who I used to think of as a snotty, know-it-all. With the latter, remember, this was an inaccurate impression from grade school. I’m confident Leesa can paint an equally or nastier picture of me as a child; I deserve it.
After I was exiled back to North Dakota, I did have the jump on my classmates about the hit movie of the Summer. It eventually came to Hazen in September and ran there for a month. Let me give you an idea of what rarities got the first-run treatment in the far reaches of ND: Rambo 2, Rocky IV and Youngblood. Everything else you heard about through ads on TV/radio appeared four-to-six weeks after their initial release. You could drive to Bismarck or Minot though, they were on the same circuit as everybody else.
Reminiscing is over.
My shirt to celebrate. I love the Drew Struzan style.
I hadn’t seen Back in a couple decades. I honestly can’t remember really. Maybe once on cable in college, that’s it. I did see Back 2 on cable or something in the last 10. I’ve never bothered with Back 3. Personally, the movie is perfectly fine without sequels yet it wasn’t ruined by them like The Matrix or every other comedy destroyed by continuation.
Does it hold up? Absolutely. Great timing and acting overcome the dated clothing, technologies and slang from 1985 (really 1984). It remains funny too. Those lines such as “You are my density!” and Dr. Brown’s speculation on the near future regarding limited nuclear war, gravity and human progress. I hope they never, ever make a sequel. Besides, the window for today’s Reagan-is-prez joke has passed.
1985 Dr. Brown: If you’re from the future. Who’s president?
2015 Marty: Barack Obama.
1985 Dr. Brown: An Arab?
2015 Marty: No, the first Black president.
1985 Dr. Brown: A Black president? Ha! Who’s his vice president? Bill Cosby?
The biggest universal laughs beyond the differences between 1955 and 1985 are getting to meet your parents as Marty did. His father George was always a wimpy, peeping-tom doofus, dad’s bully Biff hasn’t changed beyond getting fat and discovering his mother Lorraine is a hypocrite; when she was a teen, she was boy crazy, now she’s a suspicious drunk. The latter one does sound sad. I suspect I would find something similar with my mother had I got the chance to travel back to 1966-67.
I also want to throw in how I feel my enjoyment of the movie is now tainted by a book I read a few years ago. Anyone under 35 may not recall but during the height of Reagan’s Reign of Error, there was this myth perpetuated about how perfect and idyllic the Fifties were. It didn’t necessarily begin with Reagan’s coronation in 1981, I would blame people getting nostalgic after seeing American Graffiti which oddly is set in the early Sixties. Either way, Gary Marshall’s Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley had already gotten the ball rolling on incorrectly remembering the past to white-out the more recent past called the Sixties and Seventies. Sure Marty visits his hometown in 1955 which is pre-Elvis, Sputnik and the start of Ike’s second term which is practically the waning Forties and pre-Fifties, but downtown remains clean, occupied by small businesses and his suburb has just broken ground. It’s a stark contrast to what he is familiar with in 1985: downtown is dirty, rundown, abandoned and there’s visible vandalism at the entry way of his suburb.
Below are all the cool things they handed out for us audience members…
Icons would appear for when to scratch these.
It was surprisingly filling despite how small this appears to be.
Everyone “flaps” this whenever the clock tower is mentioned.
I forgot to bring along the other props but they’ve been used before in other movies. A little skateboard keychain (McFly’s Tony Hawkish skills!) and an inflatable guitar to jam out a couple times; you know the scenes.
The show’s special drink, the Flux Capacitor!
After the movie, there was a party at the newer, smaller Highball. The band was dressed in Fifties gear while performing Eighties tunes. How fitting. I drank both servings of the spiked punch.
He probably saw this for the first time on a big screen.
Thanks Alamo! You made a pleasant memory of 1985 good again. It helped that the movie still holds up after our hoverboards never appeared. Anyone have a special memory?
Alamo Extras (Pre-Show): Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure trailer; “Movies in Real Life” skits; the Huey Lewis and the News video for “The Power of Love”; Plug for the Back to the Future ride at Universal (it’s gone now); trailer for Back to the Future 2.