Nigel writes (and films):

When Marty McFly traveled 30 years into the future at the end of Back to the Future, he would arrive, in the sequel, just before 4:30 pm on 21 October 2015. At this exact time on this exact date, Michael J Fox’s singing voice double from the first film sang for fans at one the trilogy’s most famous locations.

And with that blast of Johnny B Goode - which takes us all the way back to 1955 – we’ll get in the Guardian Delorean and bid you farewell. Thanks for reading. We finally got back to the future!

Meanwhile a contributor has unearthed a shocker, which I suspect is a joke ...

Fail Much

21 October 2015 11:35pm

‘Back to the Future’ Reboot Confirmed with Shia LaBeouf and The Rock. http://failmuch.com/back-to-the-future-reboot-confirmed-with-shia-labeouf-and-the-rock

Well, nothing much happened in this office in New York, although rather spookily some of the lights went off. So we’re finally in the future! How does it feel for you? I’m pretty good, although this liveblog is arguably showing some signs of fatigue.

Strap in - here comes the future ...

A dissenting voice from one Guardian contributor.

OK, so we’ve got seven minutes until the future - and one fan has been enjoying getting to grips with the past.

Is it still Back to the Future Day?

Back to Nigel in the Burger King car park.

Yes, the boys from the rock band Minor Strut are all minors. Still, that didn’t keep the surprisingly stellar group from performing some jams featured in the Back to the Future movies for an adoring crowd of franchise fans in the Burger King parking lot in Burbank, California.

Just in case you thought Back to the Future Day was a celebration of fluff - perish the thought - the BBC’s outgoing economics editor Robert Peston has taken it as a pretext for a report on the prospect of a global currency. Take a listen here.

There’s a Delorean! According to Nigel, it doesn’t time travel but it does drive.

Back to Nigel in LA.

Two DeLauren owners got off work early to show off their Back to the Future outfitted cars at the Burger King parking lot where it all began. Back to the Future fans don’t come more diehard than these two.

Mashable have found some fantastic/diabolical (delete according to taste) Back to the Future-themed crafts on Etsy.

... and Michael J Fox has responded with typical graciousness to the President’s tweet.

There’s some confusion from my Australian colleague Claire Phipps about whether the future has already happened for those in other time zones, but I reckon we can take 4.29pm to be Pacific Standard Time as that’s where the film’s set. So in other words we’ve got about 35 minutes to go, at which point this blog may be vaporised by a disruption in the space/time continuum.

OK, so it turns out that President Obama also tweeted about Back to the Future Day a couple of hours back.

Sarah Larson from the New Yorker has just posted a perceptive piece about Back to the Future day and what it all means. She watched Back to the Future II for the second time today and found it “a tedious math problem, a rehash, lacking spontaneity and subtlety and involving multiple versions of characters. (In that way, I guess, it’s a bit like the internet.)”

She concludes by pointing out the ironies and anxieties of the fact that we’re in a future which is once more familiar and more alien than the one imagined by the films.

Ideally, we neither wax a bully’s car nor hire a former bully to wax our car. We continue to strive not to become assholes. We try, sometimes overzealously, to learn from our parents’ example. Meanwhile, the future won’t leave us alone. Everybody has a smartphone; some people drive vehicles powered by French-fry grease. When you hear about real-life wonders of science fiction—self-driving cars, Amazon drone delivery, the M.I.T. cheetah robot, a concert featuring a hologram of Freddie Mercury—you contemplate it with a mixture of wonder, anxiety, and fatigue.

More from Nigel!

Susan, the winner of the Hoverboard Contest, beat out her rivals by staying true to the sequel in her design of the hoverboard. She told us she was able to make the McFly March on a workday because she works evenings. We caught up with the victor seconds after she won.

Here’s the second video as Nigel goes deep into the judging of the hoverboard contest.

Contestants were each given blank cardboard hoverboards to design under a limited amount of time. The winner was chosen by a “jury” of hardcore Back to the Future fans.

Nigel’s flux capacitators are firing! He writes:

The Burger King is sunny Burbank, California is best known as the site where Marty McFly, on his skateboard, hitched a tow from a pickup truck in one of the first scenes from Back to the Future. Although the fast food joint is currently undergoing maintenance, its parking lot is teeming with diehard fans of the beloved franchise on a very hot Wednesday to ring in Back to the Future Day.

All day, from 9am to 6pm, the lot is playing host to The Million McFly March, named after the lead character, portrayed by Michel J Fox in the film. All proceeds from the raffle prizes that are being doled out throughout the day go to benefit Parkison’s research.

One of the key events at The Million McFly March is the Hoverboard Contest that occurred around 2pm at the all-day celebration. The Back to the Future sequel imagined a future where the cool kids ride flying skateboards (aka hoverboards) in 2015. Unfortunately that day has yet to come.

And here’s his first video from the scene. Have a look

The Washington Post has provided a handy roundup of the US politicians who jumped on the Back to the Future bandwagon on social media today. Somehow we managed to miss this Marco Rubio classic.

If I were Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale my mind would be blown about the amount of human ingenuity inspired by a film they can hardly have expected to become a cultural phenomenon. I’m indebted to Fact magazine for drawing my attention to this plug-in for music software Ableton which will make your music sound as though it was made in 2015, 1985 or 1955. Here’s a demo:

Meanwhile Future, currently riding high with his Drake mixtape, has got in on the act, posting a picture of him on Instagram riding a hoverboard and, in less family-friendly fashion, drinking a cup of sizzurp.

Meanwhile, there is now a gif of those self-lacing sneakers. Because of course there is.

We know all about the self-tying Nike Mag sneakers now – which apparently Michael J Fox will be wearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tonight - but I’m more tempted by these NikeLab Bruin Leathers which Nike are also re-releasing. They’re the filthy sneakers which the 1985-grade Marty wears, which will be upgraded to pristine white leather.

Courtesy of Slashfilm, here’s what they look like in the film, and what they look like in Nike’s PR bumf.

There’s been a ton of thoughtful commentary on the Back to the Future films around the web. I’m currently enjoying this illuminating (and long) piece from Matt Zoller Seitz about the whole trilogy, and particularly what it said about the 80s in America. Here’s a taste.

What strikes me about this trilogy now, during the final week of the final year of the saga’s Hill Valley narrative, is the way the individual movies, unlike their characters and town, have improbably escaped the ravages of time.

Once we got about twenty years out from the first film, their 1985 scenes became “period,” too, like the 1955 scenes. I showed the trilogy to my son and daughter not too long ago, and they laughed as hard at Marty’s once-hip ski vest and feathered hair as audiences during my era laughed at the 1950s signifiers. My daughter, who is a lot older than my son and is studying film history and sociology in college now, was intrigued to see how a trilogy conceived and filmed in the ‘80s viewed life in the ‘50s, and what it said about 1980s life without meaning to.

Someone has suggested that we’ve only got another 17 years until #DemolitionManDay, the Sylvester Stallone film about two cryogenically frozen policemen brought back to life in 2032. Who’s in?

And while we wait, here’s Michael J Fox modelling those self-lacing sneakers, the Nike Mag prototype, no less.

Oh, I almost forgot. It’s 4:29 … see you in 2015! BYEEEEE

I’m signing off to be replaced by Alex Needham, who’ll take the final leg of this lengthy BTTF marathon relay.

You may have noticed my slightly jaded tone but I’ve been genuinely staggered at the scale of today’s celebrations. Here’s the best thing I’ve seen today by way of a tie-in.

Brazen and brilliant.

Here’s some context (kind of), I can’t really explain darts to those who don’t get it but it’s ace. You’ll just have to trust me. Bye!

Here’s a no-way apocryphal ad for a hoverboard from Lexus

Turns out we were in good company when we slated the film on its release. The LA Times did as well:

Speaking of LA, Nigel is out in Burbank now taking in the sight and sounds of BTTF fans wearing body warmers and home-made Nike MAGs.

He’ll be sending us a report from the scene.

WiderInterestsDon

21 October 2015 8:55pm

Sad that this tosh is given more coverage than the anniversary of a battle that helped create the modern world.

I’d say it’s strangely fitting …

Don is, of course, referring to Trafalgar Day for those not in the know.

Our Nigel has landed!

The thread has thrown up this gem from the feed of Michael J Fox himself. Thanks Electrolito Karamanduko Quisquis!

The cast are reportedly reuniting for the first time in 25 years for a screening in New York at the Lincoln Center tonight.

As previously mentioned, members of the cast – including Christopher Lloyd – were in New York for a concert dedicated to the music last week.

Here’s his special message from yesterday:

We’ve broken the liveblogging fourth wall (engagement on Twitter). Here’s some DeLorean banter from Dom Kippin and his daughter AKA Doc Brown.

Here are some pictures of DeLoreans that Lyft is using as a BTTF tie-in promo

If anything/one is a breakout star today it seems to be these doomed contraptions. (Interesting sidenote, you can have a lot of fun by replacing the word Velouria with DeLorean when singing the Pixies song, Velouria) … you’ve got to do something to stay entertained as Back to the Future Day enters its 78th hour.

Complex are getting stuck into the style lessons from the film and specifically the importance of the Nike MAG (the trainers sneakers, Marty wears in the film). Entitled, How the Nike MAG Became a Sneaker Grail for ‘80s Babies - it’s quite the read:

The truth is, as unpopular as we would like to believe, the average non-sneaker enthusiast could ID the MAG over the Air Jordan. It’s that simple. The people who grew up on the film might have had atrocious taste levels with their Payless loafers, but still had an affinity for that shoe because of the movie itself and the technology.

It’s that simple. If Back to the Future fans can take the abuse, here’s the link to the whole thing.

A question from the thread now:

sarah6uk

21 October 2015 7:10pm

Watching Back to the Future II on ITV 2, it seems that the film predicted punk. Or was punk around in the '80's? I was there and I can't remember!

Using something called ‘Google’, I’ve found an answer for you sarah6uk. It turns out punk was invented in a sweetshop in Dundee on 21 October 1975 (or not).

Back to the Future day has left the Earth’s orbit

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a day which seems to have taken on far too much importance, there has been some backlash.

Here are some of the highlights.

In a piece entitled Obsessing Over What Back to the Future II Got Right About 2015 Misses the Point Entirely, Slate starts with this

Like film sequels that fail to live up to the original, our ideas about the future almost inevitably disappoint.

Before revealing the warning the film contains …

Here’s the trouble: When we obsess over what the movie did and didn’t get right, we may be missing its very essence. If Back to the Future II has a thesis, it’s that nothing is more dangerous than knowing your future – and nothing less productive than worrying over the way things might be. It’s a point that Christopher Lloyd’s wild-eyed Doc Brown makes over and over again. “No one should know too much about their future,” he tells Marty early on, only to repeat it almost verbatim mere minutes later. And he’s not wrong. As the story unfolds, Biff’s familiarity with things to come — in the form of a simultaneously comprehensive and slim sports almanac — all but destroys his timeline, turning once sunny Hill Valley into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

We ignored this and did a comparison anyway – with a sense of humour and in an A-Z format – and it’s well worth a read.

Rolling Stone took a swing at… the DeLorean

… before posting some never-seen-before behind-the-scenes footage from the film featuring Huey Lewis

Uproxx decided to focus on all the other home entertainment releases this week and it turns out there are some belters. Including Kwaidan (Kobayashi’s creepy horror), The Larry Fessenden Collection (off-beat horror thrills), Jurassic World (dino romp), Paper Towns (teen mystery featuring Cara Delevingne) and The Wolfpack (highly rated family doc).

A few outlets – including us – have been rebooting old (but now appropriate pieces) about things tangentially link to Back to the Future.

In a piece titled Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox” from 2014, the Scientific American tried to figure out whether meeting yourself in the future would be such a big deal.

It starts thusly: “On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d’oeuvres and iced champagne.”

Sounds delightful. After that there’s a basic explanations of time travel – “The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter.” – before long though it descends into the world of closed timelike curves.

Here’s an excerpt and a link if you’ve got the time and inclination to turn Back To The Future Day into a School Day:

“Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle –the particle – back into the CTC; if the switch isn’t flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle’s emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch’s insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands – good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.”

This one might be for Superbreed.

Ted Cruz has weighed into Future Day and managed to make it about the divisive Iran nuclear deal! Joy!

Back to the comments now and a dispute handled with manners and good grace that Doc would be proud of …

typernotfighter

21 October 2015 3:38pm

The first film contains a bootstrap paradox as it seems to suggest Marty invented rock and roll.

Seems legit, until Superbreed rolls into town and drops a knowledge bomb (which annoyingly won’t embed, so here’s a cut and paste job).

no it doesn’t

the bootstrap paradox doesn’t exist in time travel that uses the multiple timelines theory.

Timeline A

1950s: Chuck Berry invented rock and roll

1985: Marty goes back to 1955 to create timeline B

Timeline B

1955: Marty plays Johnny B Goode allowing band member Marvin Berry to broadcast the song over the phone to Chuck Berry

Who invented Rock n Roll - Chuck Berry of Timeline A

You are getting confused with that awful episode of Dr Who - that bootstrap worked in a single timeline that people move back and forth along - it’s ok but not what is happening in BTTF

Bootstrap that!

Here’s a huge infographic, detailing what the film got right (and wrong), from the minds at superscholar.org

After Daniel Dalton’s error in 2010 (which he brilliantly retells for Buzzfeed), someone might want to double check this… just to be sure.

Just dipping into the comments for a moment, chipsaunt is taking us on an interesting trip down memory lane.

chipsaunt

21 October 2015 5:09pm

I was thinking this morning that Back to the Future Day reminds me of how I felt in 1984, when everyone was going on about Orwell's view of the future (at the time he wrote his famous book), trying to work out how accurate his predictions were.

In the case of BTTF, we have a movie made in 1985 (or thereabouts), making predictions about what could happen in a fictional 2015, but were the writers actually trying to predict the future? Since there were 2 versions of 2015, it would be interesting to know.

I would be interested in the opinions of Zemeckis and co about what actually transpired during the 30 years since the movie came out (goes off to try and find out).

Zemeckis might want to watch out as things didn’t really turn out that well for Orwell …

North of the border, former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, has chimed in. He’s enthusiastic despite his pal Stephen Harper getting a shellacking from the Liberals during the Canadian presidential race …

Hello all,

Lanre here, logging in from New York to continue this celebration of how the internet can take a childhood favourite and wring every last ounce of fun out of it elevate a film to an almost unimaginable level.

Stateside things are being dominated by Joe Biden deciding to not throw his hat into the crowded presidential race, but there are still plenty of brands trying to cash in on BTTF Day. we’ll be updating you on that and other goings on.

Later on Nigel M Smith will be visiting a Burger King in Burbank, California which is right next to Doc’s garage in the original film.

It’s all in aid of a charity event where fans, dressed as Marty McFly, gather to raise money for Parkinson’s research. He’ll have video from the event later on tonight …

We don’t want to be too promo-y, but this Back to the Future Ultimate Visual History book is pretty tasty. Here’s a couple of pics we took from it, one showcasing the detachable Biff banknote.

Jury is out on whether this is a) BTTF-themed and b) complete gibberish.

Wise words, random duck.

A reminder we interviewed Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson about the 30th anniversary of the first film, and the advent of Back to the Future day.

(Also contains amazing behind-the-scenes shots and storyboard designs of 2015.)

We have a scoop! Via Flatulentus in the comments:

My uncle worked on BTTF2 and he told me that the scenes set in 2015 were actually filmed in 2030 for tax reasons.

So Ben Lee and Henry Barnes are down at the Cafe 80s in Leicester Square. Here’s some photos of the other folks there.

This is the tie-in which tops (or, rather, bottoms) Mashable’s list of the best and worst BTTF day piggyback ads.

They evidently haven’t seen that Churchill one.

Warning: this is very, very, very Toyota-y. But it’s also kind of irresistible.

Well 16.29 has now passed in the UK and the universe appears still in tact. So that’s good. Though presumably the real test to the space-time continuum will come in eight hours, when the time comes in Los Angeles.

Uncanny! Truly - uncanny.

Opportunistic tactics from Pizza Express here, capitalising on Pizza Hut’s apparent tardiness.

Curry’s are getting in on the act, in admirably subtle style.

Michael J Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson have appeared on breakfast TV in the US. Fox thinks it was prescient that Marty in 2015 have a receding hairline. Thompson thinks there could be flying cars already they just haven’t got on with it fast enough. Which brings us to these “confidential” “leaked” diagrams by Google for just such a vehicle.

There’s a DeLorean in Leicester Square if you fancy a gawp

Apple has programmed Siri to provide some topical quips today. If you wish her a happy Back to the Future day, she will reply with a number of options:

Happy Back to the Future Day. Let me know if you need airspace directions for your hovercar.

Well, they were right about the ‘antique computer’ thing ...

Happy Back to the Future Day. I’m looking forward to watching Jaws 19. I’m not sure it’ll beat Jaws 8: Robo-Jaws, though ...

A rather brilliant lesson on how to do a shameless BTTF2 tie-in even if your product has nothing to do with the film, courtesy of Arena Flowers.

The arrangement is of course missing one key flower:

We know what you’re thinking: “Why no rose?”Well... *cough*... Rose? Where we’re going... we don’t need rose!

Lea Thompson has just revealed some rather interesting news about her co-star Crispin Glover and how he wanted to prepare for their scenes together in the first film.

“The night before we were supposed to do it, he invited me over to his all black apartment; black lacquer floors, ceilings, everything. The way he wanted to prepare for that scene is that we were going to paint a painting of a volcano together, which we then did,” says Thompson, laughing. “I thought that was the most awesome preparation to play a character ever.”

Probably not

Aaron Paul has been hanging out in and dangerously in front of a DeLorean with his wife in case you’re interested ...

Even the White House is in on the action and taking it all extremely seriously ...

Michael J Fox has shared a letter about the advances in technologies related to a cure for Parkinson’s and has called for even more work to be done in the next 30 years.

Today, on “Back to the Future Day,” I challenge you to imagine the world you want to live in thirty years from now. The White House is hosting a series of online conversations with innovators across the country all day long. Check it out and add your voice here.

We can’t all be brain scientists, but all of us can get involved. One reason Parkinson’s research has come so far in the past 15 years is that people and families living with the disease have stepped up as advocates and innovators themselves, working to build the future we all want.

Back to politics and there’s an interesting article here on what world leaders from 1985 would think of 2015.

Would they be satisfied with the structure of the world system and their state’s current position therein? To paraphrase U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech – who from 1985 won the future and who lost? Which states fell backwards into the future and which ones shot forward?

Here’s the obligatory, but still quite impressive, Back to the Future wedding taking place today:

Don’t even begin to try and ask us what this is and what it means and how it works but Doc Brown has somehow been recreated as a virtual presence and you can ask him questions here via Facebook message.

Back to the Future day continues globally as fans celebrate the date of Marty’s arrival in the second film. You can see the first half of today’s coverage here.