I blame Robert Zemeckis.

At the end of the monumental hit movie Back to the Future, as a joke, the time-travelling Delorean containing Doc Brown and Marty McFly alongside Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, takes off and zooms into the year 2015. Doc utters the words “roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” and the credits roll. The creators of the film never intended to make a sequel and ending the Back to the Future in this way created problems they’d struggle with once a sequel became inevitable, problems being the flying vehicle, and the presence of Marty’s girlfriend.

The second any film goes into the future, the makers are on a hiding to nothing because the majority of the future we see will be guess work. We are still waiting for a motorway in the sky and flying cars, for instance, but multi channel television screens are a thing, house security is pretty much where they said it would be and we had enough fun pubs in the nineties to show you the cafe 80’s looked positively prophetic.

One of the major plot points centres around a sports almanac Marty buys in an ‘antique’ store. In Hill Valley of 2015, books and magazines are considered artefacts of a bygone age. We watched that at the time and we thought it was funny.

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