A very nearly perfect analysis marred by the desire to weld a call to action onto what should be a historical treatise.

It's unfortunate that the author (couldn't see who - something I hate about Medium) didn't delve a little deeper into the history of Back to the Future. Zemeckis and Gale were tarnished wunderkinds at the time; they were the screenwriters on the universally-reviled "1941" but hey, that was a Spielberg so at least they had good friends. And the version they shopped around, the version of BttF that everybody hated, the version they couldn't get made, had Marty and Doc working at a video rental store and bootlegging porn in the back room. It wasn't a DeLorean, it was a refrigerator. And it ran on New Coke. Which, of course, didn't exist in 1955. So Doc had to drag Marty and the fridge in the back of a pickup truck out to the Nevada Test Site where an open-air nuclear detonation would provide the 1.21 gigawatts of energy necessary to get Marty back to the future - which was much more 2015 than 1985 as 1955-doc had given Coke the new recipe so that he could partner with them to provide a Jetsons-like utopian economy due to unlimited cheap energy.

George resumes his own unfinished business. He attaches a suction cup to his forehead which is connected to a pen-like device by a wire, and waves the “pen” over a blank check---handwriting appears, accompanied by electronic beeps. It says, “Pay to the order of the Coca Cola Company.”

http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/back_to_the_future_original_draft.html

Zemeckis wanted John Lithgow and Eric Stoltz as pervy video store operators who save the world through a peculiar combination of armageddon and New Coke. I mean, they wanted to out-Repo Man Repo Man. Yeah, BttF is '80s as fuck.

The "tape" analogy is a good one, too - analog and digital. It was an era where we saw computers, we messed with computers, but computers weren't yet an integral part of our lives and we didn't fully understand what they did. They were bloopy bleepy things of spinning reels and vocoded voices that largely existed to cause mayhem. Real advancements were still physical - faster cars, more efficient microwave ovens, better blenders. I mean, this is the Cuisinart era. That thing was fuckin' revolutionary and it's nothing but a weird blender. We got a Discman that year - the first. Effectively, the same as a record player... except you could take it in the car. But o, children gather 'round and imagine if no one you knew had ever seen a compact disc before. I mean - rainbows'n'shit! For most people, it was legitimately their first experience with polycarbonate.

But then the author gets mired in the same tawdry "where's my flying car" whinge:

Instead, be disappointed that the momentum of the cassette era has slowed, stopped, and even been rolled back; be disappointed that tech and media companies alike work with judges and law enforcement to take our machines and our culture back out of our own hands.

And for this he points to ABC vs. Aereo... oddly enough, a ruling that says other companies can't use fair use to profit off of broadcast. It says exactly fuckall about timeshifting and everything about crass corporate profiteering.

Which, really, is the true harbinger of BttF. It featured more product placement than any movie before (or any movie for years after). Even Bob Gale is a little ashamed of it in the commentary. California Raisins paid $4m towards that film and all they got was a placard on a bus bench (the raisin council demanded - and got - their money back). And yes, JVC vs Sony... but Aiwa was always partly owned by Sony. And yes, it's ironic and appropriate that Universal, the respondent vs. Sony, was the distributor of BttF.

After all, BttF is structurally about George McFly. Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis freely admit this. But when Crispin Glover pointed it out as a reason why he needed more money for BttF Part II, Zemeckis fired his ass and used a look-alike. Glover sued, Spielberg & Zemeckis settled out of court and the Screen Actors' Guild changed their bylaws so nobody could ever do that again.

Crispin Glover still played Golem in Zemeckis' Beowulf.

The takeaway is not "Let’s stop checklisting and complaining and start opening things up and bolting them together again" it's "when did we give up ownership so easily?"

(hint: halfway to 1985)

sidenote to thenewgreen: I know almost as much about Back to the Future as I do about Red Dawn.