Back To The Future

Today, the 21st October 2015, is the day that Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) travelled to in the second instalment of Back To The Future. Let's see what they got right.

Flying cars

Fail. Hasn't happened yet. "Where's my flying car?"

According to the cast and crew, the flying cars were a bit of an in-joke. Nobody seriously expected flying cars by 2015, did they?

Especially as the flying cars in the film appeared to use some kind of anti-gravity repulsorlift mechanism. No doubt powered by pure unobtainium.

Hoverboards

Also fail. Presumably these used the same anti-gravity mechanism as the flying cars

Jaws 19 - in 3D

Almost. Not Jaws, sure, but there were something like 8 Police Academy films made. And a fourth Indiana Jones film (which was unbelievable rubbish). And a fourth Lethal Weapon (which was actually quite a good comedy if nothing else). And how many Fast & Furious films?

3D? Well, there's been a spate of 3D films made at the cinema. 3D in the home has (yet again) been a failure. Blu-Ray supports 3D. I actually own a 3D-capable TV. I've never watched any more than a 3D demo on it. I think I own two 3D Blu-Ray discs, of which one is a free demonstration.

As I've said before, it's no good making the image 3D if the acting is one-dimensional!

Multi-channel TV

Yup, got that one right. Not quite as shown in the film where it's depicted as a projection screen. In the 1980s it was thought that projection systems were the way to obtain large screen images. Then along came plasma, LCD and more recently OLED screens.

The idea of watching a dozen channels at once never caught on either. Some late 1980s-early 1990s TVs had "picture in picture", but this was pretty much a gimmick that never became popular. Instead, the rise of the PVR happened, meaning that viewers can record programmes to watch at leisure. Kind of like with a VCR, but a. without the reduction in picture quality that you had with both VHS and Betamax, and b. with complete random access.

The film also failed to predict on-demand streaming video such as iPlayer. Remember that the film was released the same year that the World Wide Web was invented - and the Web didn't become popular until several years later.

Video calling

Almost got that right. Everyone uses Skype now, right? Free IP-based video calling. Presumably the video phones portrayed in the film used old-style circuit switched connections, rather than packet switched as is the case now.

It's been pointed out elsewhere that the film totally failed to predict the rise of the mobile phone. A couple of times in the future, our hero can be seen using a public payphone rather than a mobile.

Biometrics

At a couple of points, characters can be seen paying for items using fingerprint scanners. Whilst this payment method has not caught on, fingerprint recognition has been used to replace or supplement password protection for logins.

So yes, the film got some stuff right. It got other stuff wrong. As is always the case. It's still an entertaining watch though, even 26 years on. I shall no doubt watch it later just as a point of principle.