Back to the Future 1992

[amadeus]

Rule: no coronavirus talk.

Suppose Back to the Future was being made today, and Marty McFly goes back 30 years to 1992.

What’s he going to play at the school dance? What technical wizardry will he bring with him? Gotta have a smartphone. There was this one movie with Whoopi Goldberg where I think she went back in time to King Arthur’s court and used the internet to resolve some plot issue... go figure that one out for yourselves.

Joe Biden doesn’t make the “Ronald Reagan? The actor?” scene seem as interesting.

If something else crosses my mind I’ll throw it up here.

 

[Zardnaar]

Probably grunge music. What band had the best guitarist? Soundgarden's Rusty cage or Jesus Christ pose?

Nirvana? Lithium?

 

[Zardnaar]

Rusty Cage Intro.

Plush?

 

[amadeus]

He could do “Gangsta’s Paradise”

Alfred! It’s your cousin, Marvin Yankovic! You know that new parody you lookin’ for? Well listen to this!

 

[Zardnaar]

He could do “Gangsta’s Paradise”

Alfred! It’s your cousin, Marvin Yankovic! You know that new parody you lookin’ for? Well listen to this!

1995 chief.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Marty performs "Smells Like Nirvana"

 

[warpus]

What’s he going to play at the school dance? .

I was going to say Skrillex, but Aphex Twin was already releasing some weird music back then.. but.. maybe "Come to Daddy", which came out later in the 90s.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Meat Loaf: I'll do anything for love.

 

[amadeus]

1995 chief.

Yeah. That’s that whole scene, Marty plays a song that hasn’t been released yet.

 

[The_J]

mmmhh.... Master of Puppets by Metallica maybe?

Or Nicky Minaj's Anaconda, but I guess that'll be tough with only one guitar .

 

[Kyriakos]

Nirvana, most likely.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I remember 1992, but I honestly couldn't say what music came out that year. I've never heard of anything mentioned in this thread.

 

[warpus]

Wasn't a big part of the scene that he's playing music that the audience just doesn't understand at first, because it's so much different from the music that was popular at the time? I see a lot of the suggestions here to be music that nobody would really find that "out there" in the early 90s.

 

[Traitorfish]

I see a lot of the suggestions here to be music that nobody would really find that "out there" in the early 90s.

I think that gets to the heart of the problem, that the original Back to the Future was set in a period which was on the brink of a bunch of major social and cultural changes that by the 1980s had become so entrenched as to be taken for granted, so there was a lot to play with. It was easy to put Marty, and by extension the audience, in a position of culture shock. There isn't much of that between 1992 and 2022; there's a much stronger sense of cultural continuity from the Reagan era to today as compared to the Eisenhower era to the Reagan era, and that most of what's changed could probably be extrapolated from existing trends.

 

[warpus]

Yeah that's why I was trying to think of something like Skrillex, since that type of music didn't exist in the early 90s. That wouldn't have really lead to anything near the same kind of reaction from the people alive at that time though, for the reasons you mention

 

[Quintillus]

The problem with taking modern technical wizardry back 30 years is that, especially in the home/consumer setting, a lot of it is evolutionary. Our cameras are better. Our TVs are larger and flatter, and weigh less. Our lightbulbs don't burn you if you touch them. But they had computers 30 years ago. Mobile phones existed, although much larger and with far fewer features, still making it having evolved enough to be impressive. Looking around my house, there's very little that didn't have an antecedent 30 years ago. That DVD I was watching the other night? Fancier than a videocassette, but does the same thing. Not as revolutionary as a radio was in the 1920s.

Even if Joe Biden had been an actor, the fact that we'd already had an actor become president by 1992 (Reagan) would have made that less shocking than it was in the '50s. Although it's possible than Donald Trump becoming president may have still been shocking - I'm not sure if his infamy had spread outside of New York real estate circles, and perhaps Atlantic City casino circles, but I do know that he was known for those reasons back then. Perhaps that he was elected after campaigning on his business credentials would have been the real shocker, considering one of his casinos had just gone bankrupt in 1989, and in 1992 he sold his airline due to unprofitability. Would it have been as implausible as Eddie Lampert (former failing CEO/owner of Sears and Kmart) being elected for his business credentials in 2049? I'm not sure, but that's the analogy that comes to mind.

 

[EgonSpengler]

In terms of pop culture, I would have a scene where people in 1992 are stunned by how little is different, 30 years into the future. You could have the main character - your Marty McFly - rave about the new Ghostbusters movie, and say that he's looking forward to Michael Keaton as Batman and the new Top Gun with Tom Cruise. Someone could ask him about music, and he'd say that he went to see David Byrne and he's been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails a lot.

 

[amadeus]

I think that gets to the heart of the problem, that the original Back to the Future was set in a period which was on the brink of a bunch of major social and cultural changes that by the 1980s had become so entrenched as to be taken for granted, so there was a lot to play with.

That's where I started from with this, could we find replacements for those things from the original movie? The radical social and cultural changes that happened between 1955 and 1985, like the end of segregation or portable video recorders, I don't see them as having really good enough equivalents in our own time to make a movie as interesting as Back to the Future was at the time it was released.

Picking one example of a social issue that was topical in 1992, gays in the military: should they be allowed to serve or discharged? We then went through a curious (pun somewhat intended) fifteen or so years where you could be gay, but not openly gay. Actually, there was an interesting discussion about this on Bill Maher's show years ago where Maher asked if PX stores that carry Playboy should then also carry gay pornographic magazines?

 

[Birdjaguar]

the original Back to the Future was set in a period which was on the brink of a bunch of major social and cultural changes that by the 1980s had become so entrenched as to be taken for granted,

Yea boomers!

 

[warpus]

Hmm okay so what if Marty went on stage and started making out with the male bassist (or Doc?) and then said

"Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet.. but you kids are gonna LOVE IT"