Back to the Future: the 40th Anniversary
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on May 18, 2025, 3:04 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
This year is the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, one of the most popular movie franchises of all time and one that many viewers regard as one that represents the popular culture of the 1980's.
Time travel is a popular idea in fiction, but I believe that this was the first story to have a time travel machine built into an automobile, and director Robert Zemeckis specifically chose to use a DeLorean for this movie because most automobile enthusiasts regarded the DeLorean brand as a joke or an oddity, at best, an inside joke that today's audiences may not understand, since most viewers now know the brand from this franchise.
Zemeckis had the idea for this film by wondering if he would be friends with his own parents, if he were to travel backward in time and meet them as young adults, so that is what happens, in this film, as Marty travels backward in time and meets his parents, nearly erasing himself from existence but instead altering his life for the better, which is another theme that is prominent in many stories that feature time travel. Although both Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox were established actors by the time that this film was released, most audiences still regard this film as the one that helped Fox to become a major star (as Lloyd had already been acting for several decades, by that point), and their characters in this movie are still perhaps their best-known characters. Some viewers may be aware that Zemeckis had originally cast Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, but replaced him with Fox, since he (Zemeckis) felt that Stoltz was playing the role too seriously, whereas Zemeckis wished for a more light-hearted tone (but Stoltz starred in Some Kind of Wonderful two years later, coincidentally alongside Lea Thompson, who played Lorraine Baines/McFly, Marty's mother in BttF, so his dismissal from that film was not a complete loss).
Many viewers regard this movie as one of the most significant pieces of popular culture of the 1980's, and one of the major themes of the story is how radically different society was, during that decade, compared to the 1950's, when George and Lorraine were adolescents, highlighting just how drastically society had changed in a mere three decades; if BttF had been made today, Marty would travel backward in time to 1995, which I think would actually be an interesting for a movie, as well.
The movie was so popular that it produced two sequels, which I feel are actually quite good, in their own right, since it is very rare for movie sequels to equal the originals, in addition to a television series, which is not as well-remembered, and it naturally has become an integral part of popular culture, with numerous other media making references to it. Therefore, I hope that Universal pictures does something to commemorate the 40th anniversary of this momentous franchise.
What does everyone else say, about this? How do you feel about this year being the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future?