I found the Back to the Future trilogy on special; watching it reminds me just how good the first film was. The opening shot is one of the best put to film, the dialogue crackles, the plot runs like wildfire, and it remains one of the very few time travel films that fully exploits its premise. If it was not for the near-ubiquitous imposition of the song “Power of Love,” it would be just about perfect. The second film is a noble failure, and the less said about the third the better.

The main source of the comedy in the original film is the cultural frisson between 1985 and 1955. That’s a thirty year difference. And yet here we are in 2009, nearly 25 years after the first release of the film, and the culture of 1985 does not seem all that removed from our own. There are still malls and skateboards and video cameras and portable music players ¹ and terrorists with rocket launchers and housing developments where the population has outstripped the infrastructure, and I can’t see things changing much more in the next 5 years.

The 50s are a much greater cultural distance from the 80s, it would seem, than the 80s are from today.