Back to the Future Day -- What Back to the Future Part II Got Right and Wrong

Great Scott! It’s the future!

We’ve been here before—or have we?

In 1989, the hit movie  zoomed to a world filled with flying cars and hoverboards, a time of drones and video phones.

The date: Oct. 21, 2015. (At precisely 4:29 p.m.)

Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) set the  time machine to the future, so he and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) could travel into the future and straighten out a few McFly family issues.

Part of the fun of watching  now is checking out the “future” world of 2015 that the filmmakers imagined, from dog-walking robots to the “Jaws 19” hologram billboard to the colorful and strange clothing. Clearly, the film got some things wrong (Jaws only had three sequels), but it actually got some things right.

To celebrate “Back to the Future Day,” let’s look back at five things  got right, and five things it got wrong, about Oct. 21, 2015.

Five things the film got right:

1. Florida has a professional baseball team.

In Back to the Future Part II, Miami is home to a Major League baseball team, something Florida lacked in 1989 when the movie was produced. The , which changed their name to the Miami Marlins in 2011, didn’t exist until 1993. In the film, Miami falls to the  in the World Series, which could prove semi-prophetic because the long-suffering Cubbies are still alive in the playoffs (Miami failed to make the post-season).

2. Video games as antiques.

In 1989, video games from previous console generations were essentially worthless, and very few people thought of them as special from a collectible or antiquarian viewpoint. However, in the film you can see boxed copies of  (1987) and  (1987) for the Nintendo NES displayed prominently in the window of an antique store. Today, retro game collecting is huge (certain rare cartridges command thousands of dollars), and there’s even a National Videogame Museum coming to Frisco in December.

3. Flat-screen televisions.

During the 1980s, tube TVs were still the norm, and most of the bigger ones were only 25 inches or so in size. (35-inch TVs were a niche market, and you can forget the 35-inch projection TVs—those things were terrible). However, Back to the Future Part II screenwriter Bob Gale, no doubt influenced by such futurists as George Orwell and Arthur C. Clarke, envisioned a future world where huge flat screen television sets were everywhere, in public and in homes. He also predicted multi-screen viewing.

4. Wearable technology.

In the film, numerous characters are shown wearing ugly, technology-enhanced glasses (techno-specs?), which work as cameras, magnifiers and real-time information retrieval devices. (Nowhere to be found are iPads, iPods or iPhones, though.) Ho-hum. You can’t shake a fist without knocking into someone wearing an Apple Watch or a Fitbit, or who has tried , Sony SmartEyeglasses or Recon Jets (which are designed for cyclists)—or made fun of people who do.

5. Video phone calls.

Do you miss seeing your nephew who moved to Japan or your oldest child who recently went off to college? Simply chat them up via FaceTime on your computer, tablet or smart phone. The movie more or less nailed this aspect of modern society, such as when Marty McFly gets a video business call from Douglas J. Needles (played by Flea), whose personal data runs across the bottom of the screen (an interesting, social media-esque variant on the technology).

Five things the film got wrong:

1.  Flying cars.

Ever since  began airing on television during the early 1960s, mainstream America has longed for the flying car, a mode of transportation that is still only in the development stages (by a company called Terrafugia, which is derived from the Latin for “Escape the Earth”). In Back to the Future Part II, flying cars zip and zoom all over, which is probably the movie’s biggest misfire when it comes to predicting the future.

2. Hoverboards.

Though it scores comedy points for Marty repeating his skateboarding act from the original Back to the Future (1985), but this time with a hoverboard, Back to the Future Part II is overly optimistic when it comes to the admittedly fun-looking technology. Like the flying car, the hoverboard is still in the developmental phase. According to the website for Hendo, the company promising a retail-level hoverboard in the near future, “Our hoverboards are working in almost every way we could have imagined. We look forward to sharing them as they become a reality.”

3. A female president of the United States.

If you pause the scene where Marty is looking at a copy of USA Today from 2015, you can see that the paper refers to the president of the United States as a “she.” We’re not there yet in the real world, but we might be close. If either Democrat  or Republican Carly Fiorina can stave off their many, many male opponents in the 2016 election, the filmmakers will be able to say they almost got it right. Sadly, the newspaper in the film also refers to a “Queen Diana,” but  died in a car crash in 1997.

4. Self-tying shoes.

Shortly after landing in 2015, Marty dons self-tying Nike high-tops. While  has marketed a similar looking shoe (2011’s Nike Air Mag), and while the company has promised the technology in the not too distant future, we poor, overworked humans still have to lace up our sneakers ourselves (or at least fasten the elastic straps or attach the Velcro). Clothing designers have also failed to develop a self-drying, size-adjustable jacket like the one Marty wears. On a more positive note, at least we don’t wear double neckties or our pants inside out.

5. Dust-repellent paper.

When Marty goes to the aforementioned antique store and buys a copy of Grays Sports Almanac, one of the key elements of the film, the sales lady explains that, “This has an interesting feature. It has a dust jacket. Books had these to protect the covers. That was before dust-repellent paper.” Dust-repellent paper has yet to be invented, and it likely never will. Not only is our culture relying less on paper and more on electronics these days, it’s hard to imagine anyone spending too much money on dust-repellent paper technology. Or, as the kids might say, “Is that even a thing?”

Dracula in Popular Culture

Although he’s been shot, impaled, burned, beheaded and otherwise killed off many times, the daylight-dreading  remains alive and well, thanks to our morbid obsession with things that go bite in the night. Before little bloodsuckers start ringing your doorbell on Halloween, begging for candy, brush up on your knowledge of the undead Prince of Darkness, one of the most famous fictional characters in the history of popular culture.

Just be sure to have some garlic and a few crosses handy in case you feel a nibbling at your neck.

Dracula in print

Irish author Bram Stoker unleashed his fang-tastic creation on an unsuspecting world in 1897 with the release of , a book that has never been out of print and has inspired more film and stage adaptations than any other novel.

Drawing inspiration from the centuries-old vampire myth, and from ruthless 15th century Wallachian Prince Vlad III the Impaler,  tells of a Transylvanian count who travels to London, pierces the necks of his victims with his fangs to drink their blood and is pursued by a group of Victorians, including his real estate agent, Jonathan Harker. A fearsome, preternaturally strong creature, Dracula mesmerizes his victims with hypnosis and can morph into a bat, a dog, a wolf and fog.

In V is for Vampire (1996, Plume), horror expert David J. Skal says Stoker’s Dracula is an ugly creature who bypassed the “romantic, Byronic image of the vampire that dominated the page and stage in the early part of the 19^th century” in favor of the “Darwinian superman who blurs distinctions between humans and animals.”

An epistolary work told in journal entries, memos, letters and newspaper articles,  influenced countless other novels, including Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992), C. Dean Anderson’s I Am Dracula (1993), Elaine Bergstrom’s Mina: The Dracula Story Continues (2000), Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) and Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1999), which is told from The Count’s point of view. (There’s also Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, of course, but it’s not about Dracula.)

 One of the best Dracula novels to sink your teeth into is Salem’s Lot (1975) by Stephen King. Although the antagonist is called a “master vampire” instead of Count Dracula, the book is clearly a modern, small-town take on Stoker’s novel, as King, a former school teacher, states on his website: “One of my high school classes was Fantasy and Science Fiction, and one of the novels I taught was Dracula. I was surprised at how vital it had remained over the years; the kids liked it, and I liked it, too. One night…I wondered…what would happen if Dracula came back in the 20th century, to America.”

 If you like pictures with your words, check out DC’s Batman & Dracula: Red Rain and Marvel’s classic Tomb of Dracula graphic novels (the best representation of the subgenre), along with collected editions of such comic books as Image’s Sword of Dracula and BOOM! Studios’ Dracula: The Company of Monsters. Younger readers will enjoy the digital exclusive, Archie: The Vampire Saga.

Dracula on the big screen

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), one of the earliest and best Dracula adaptations, stars Max Schreck as Count Orlock, a hideous creature who ravages innocents in the German town of Bremen. Despite the name change (“Dracula” to “Orlock”), Bram Stoker’s widow, citing copyright violation, successfully sued to have the film destroyed. Fortunately, some prints survived, and you can even watch the creepily atmospheric film on YouTube.

 Every self-respecting vampire fan has seen Universal’s Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning. While modern audiences may find it slow and bloodless, it remains a cinematic treasure, thanks in large part to the timeless performance of Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi.

 “Lugosi is definitely my favorite movie Dracula,” says Fort Worth resident Kerry Gammill, who edits an anthology comic book series called Bela Lugosi's Takes from the Grave. “He has an otherworldliness about him that most of the others just don't have. The original 1931 Lugosi version is still one of my favorite movies. Especially the first act at Dracula's castle.”

Universal, a dominate studio for horror films during the 1930s and ’40s, kept the “Dracula” franchise going with Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein (1948), where Gammill first encountered the undead count.

 “My first memory of Dracula was seeing Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein when I was six,” Gammill says. “I was mesmerized by him. The look and the voice and sleeping in a coffin and putting people under his power and biting people in the neck and changing into a bat. Even though it was a comedy, the monsters were still very scary. It was exciting stuff to a little kid who had never seen anything like that.”

A good Dracula education is incomplete without exposure to at least some of English studio Hammer’s nine Dracula films, most notably the first, Horror of Dracula (1958), starring the recently deceased Christopher Lee, who played the Count many times.

“My next favorite Dracula is Christopher Lee,” Gammill says. “He was so physically imposing, and there was a feeling of eroticism when he bit the ladies that the earlier movies didn't have. And in the Lee films, they finally showed Dracula’s fangs and blood dripping from his mouth, which looked very cool.”

Dracula devotees should also see The Return of Dracula (1958), Blacula (1972), Dracula (1979), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), The Monster Squad (1987) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), which adheres to the original novel more closely than any other American film. Younger fans will enjoy Mad Monster Party (1967) and Hotel Transylvania (2012).

Dracula on the small screen

Dracula has appeared on countless TV shows, ranging from  to Superboy to Supernatural to . In the fifth season premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) battles the Count (Rudolf Martin) in “Buffy vs. Dracula,” in which Buffy’s pal Xander (Nicholas Brendon) falls under the thrall of the Dark Prince (similar to Renfield in Stoker’s novel).

In 1990, Count Dracula got his own show, Dracula: The Series, but it only lasted one season. In the made-for-TV movie department, there are two essential films: Dracula (1973), featuring Jack Palance in the title role, and the BBC’s Count Dracula (1977), starring Louis Jordan as the undead blood sucker.

Perhaps the most endearing Dracula on television is that of Grandpa from , followed closely by The Count from Sesame Street. These kid-friendly creatures are best viewed when accompanied by a heaping bowl of the sugary sweet cereal, Count Chocula, which General Mills introduced in 1971.

Battle Dracula

If you want a more interactive experience with Dracula on your television screen, check out some of the better video games in the long-running “” series. We recommend Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse (Nintendo NES), Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Nintendo DS), Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation) and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360).

Best Realistic Science Fiction Films -- by Guest Blogger Spencer Blohm

Presenting Another Guest Blog from Spencer Blohm

Best Realistic Science Fiction Films

Science fiction can get incredibly silly at times and there's certainly a place for that, but when a science fiction movie focuses on hard science concepts to build its story, there's a sense of realism that makes them so much more compelling. Some of the best sci-fi movies have at least a kernel of truth to keep them grounded.

 (1927)

A masterpiece of German Expressionism in silent films, Metropolis tells the story of two lovers from different social castes who try to defy the dystopian state they live in. It is one of the first dystopian films ever made and not only drew from a realistic sense of political science but also portrayed some of the earliest robots as we know them on screen.

 (1968)

It's fairly easy to tell this was written by an engineer, since so much of the technology of the film is either current or on the horizon. The story of the advancement of humanity through several time periods, the most famous being in the near future with a trip to Jupiter, 2001 has predicted video calling, commercial space flight, and even tablet computers. There are some people who suggest that artificial intelligence is also not very far off, especially with our security systems and home automation suites learning our habits like HAL did.

 (1993)

While the technological advances in this are dated by current standards in that we know that dinosaurs probably looked a lot different and genetics can't be used in that fashion, at the time of its release Jurassic Park was remarkably accurate to our scientific understanding and ahead of the fourth installment in the franchise 20 years later in some respects. That being said, it's psychological understanding, that the best fit for something like cloned dinosaurs would be the entertainment industry, is probably most accurate of all.

 (1997)

In another case where the influence of the writer is evident, Contact, based on a book by Carl Sagan, is both compelling and grounded in our scientific understanding. From the use of radio telescope arrays to math as a universal language to communicate with aliens, Contact does an incredible job of helping us understand what the implications of discovering a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be. Physicists have even suggested that the wormhole that Jodie Foster travels through toward the end of the film exhibits properties that are consistent with our current physical knowledge.

 (1997)

Another film where genetics plays a role in the plot, Gattaca follows Vincent, an ambitious young man who wants to travel to outer space, but because he is determined to be genetically inferior is not allowed until he makes a deal with Jerome to take over the latter's identity, including their genetics. While slightly advanced even for today, it's not out of the realm of possibility to see genetic engineering of babies that is common in the film as well as the use of DNA in modern criminal investigations.

 (2014)

As the Earth begins to die, a brilliant scientist deploys his plan to try and move all of Earth's population to another planet, using former NASA astronaut Cooper and a team of scientists to scout through a wormhole. Perhaps the most accurate scientific concept in the film is the time dilation caused by relativistic travel, but much of the space travel is grounded in an understanding of how we move outside of an atmosphere.

 (2015)

Much like 2001, Ex Machina explores AI in depth, which made it quite successful and popular, in addition to its being widely distributed on an indie budget thanks to the partnership between A24 Films and DirecTV. In this case, an eccentric billionaire hires a programmer to inspect an artificial intelligence he created to see if it passes a Turing Test. The concept, that a true AI would be able to convince a human being that it was also a human being through conversation, is a fairly old one, but Ex Machina does a good job of addressing its flaws and using them to really delve into what AI means.

Science fiction can be not only remarkably predictive, but when it incorporates things that we know about the world as it is, that makes it much easier to suspend disbelief and take a good, hard look at the ideas it espouses.