Back To The Future Part II – What it got right and wrong?

Well, well, well, it’s finally here, that famous and once so futuristic date, 21st October 2015. In case you’re unaware, in 1989 the second instalment of the Back to the Future sci-fi series featured Marty Mcfly and Doc Brown time travelling to this very date, which has been aptly named as Back to the Future Day. Of course no one can predict the future and so director Robert Zemeckis’ idea of how 2015 would look is quite different to how it’s turned out in reality. But he wasn’t always too far off, so let’s travel back to the future together to see what they got right and what they got wrong.

The biggest – and unfortunately the most erroneous – prediction was the flying cars. Ask anyone what they think will happen in the future and they will still probably say flying cars, so maybe one day….?

Wearable tech such as self-lacing shoes, blow-drying clothes and flashing police hats are yet to come into fashion, such a shame that.

Talking of fashion, Zemeckis obviously thought everyone in 2015 would wear weird and heavy, robotic style clothes and bright colours that don’t match. What he should have predicted is that every man would have a beard and a haircut inspired by Tintin.

He also got it wrong with how he thought gaming would evolve. We have Nintendo Wii to thank for that.

What Zemeckis wasn’t too far off with though, was the idea of humans relying on machines to do things for us. OK there was an obvious lack of smartphones and internet, but smart glasses, fingerprints used to pay and a Siri like device are all scarily similar to what we use today. Unfortunately though, dog walking drones and pizza hydrators never happened and we haven’t seen a fax machine since the 90s.

Probably his most accurate concept was the video call, although in the film it’s on a TV screen, but it’s still very similar to how we use Skype today.

They also hit the spot with the rise of 3D technology, not quite in the same way but certainly in the same ballpark. Jaws 19 thankfully never was made, but there are a remarkable amount of reboots, sequels and remakes currently out there so they can be forgiven for that.

Hoverboards are one invention I’m sure we’d all love and just recently we have seen the rise of teenagers on Swegways – that is until they were banned, so it seems unlikely that these will ever truly take off.

But one thing is for sure, Zemeckis’ creative perception of the future was certainly an exciting one with some very accurate conjectures. If we were to go forward by another 26 years, I think the only thing we could be sure of is that the Chicago Cubs still won’t have won a World Series….