I’m not going to lie: The first thing I did after opening the excellent new Back to the Future Trilogy 25th anniversary Blu-ray package (Universal, $79.99 MSRP, but it’s been advertised below $50) was skip all the content about the movies, and jump straight into a bonus feature covering Back to the Future: The Ride. Opened at Universal Orlando in the early 1990s, BTTF: The Ride has loomed large in my memory both for the humorous quality of the content (involving Biff Tannen running amok in Doc Brown’s time travel institute) and for generating epic wait lines. Included in this set are all the lobby shorts the crowd would watch while waiting to board, followed by the pre-flight briefing and the film from the ride itself. Despite my couch not gyrating in time with the film (or inducing nausea), there’s real nostalgic power in chasing Biff through time on your home flat-screen.
Of course, “nostalgia” is the key when talking about Back to the Future (BTTF). During the film’s original 1985 release, the nostalgia was that of baby boomer audiences looking back at the 1950s with a longing for a kinder, simpler time. Watching BTTF now, I was struck by my own nostalgia for the 1980s — specifically the filmmaking of the era. BTTF is an early production of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment — the iconic “Steven Spielberg Presents” appearing above the title in all marketing materials — and the film pairs a sweet innocence (boy goes back in time and fixes his parent’s relationship) with high geek sensibility (time travel paradoxes, 1.21 gigawatts, a freakin’ Delorean). This geek-sweet mix was Spielberg’s trademark in the ’80s, with other Spielberg-produced Amblin titles from the era including The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes and Gremlins.
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2010.