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Kat Martin takes discarded landscapes and alters them just a bit. A monster here or a zombie there. In this case, the TARDIS and Doc Brown’s DeLorean have rematerialized in the same place at the same time.
Etsy Shop and Artist’s Website -via XombieDIRGE
Previously: Artist Buys Cheap Landscapes, Adds Monsters
Hill Valley of the future is such a wonderful place to live, or at least it is when created by Lego artist Alex Jones. He has even more cool movie sets on his Flickr page for the viewing enjoyment of any Lego enthusiast.
Link Via Geekologie
Christopher Lloyd was a great Doc Brown, but I can’t see him as the Doctor. Yet deviantART user Ratgirlstudios’s re-imagining of a Back to the Future Part II poster prompts us to consider the possibility.
Link -via The Mary Sue
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Autopia forums user AkamaiDetailing’s DeLorean is a thing of beauty. As long as it can still reach 88 MPH, it’ll be just fine.
Link -via Boing Boing
Great Scott! Fans of Back to the Future rejoice, the DeLorean is making plans to bring the iconic car back to the near future:
There is still a DeLorean Motor Co. of Humble, Texas, which supplies parts and occasionally builds new cars for DeLorean lovers, and it has now announced a new version -- a DeLorean powered entirely by electricity.
"The car of the future has really become the car of the future," joked James Espey, a vice president at DeLorean, which has about 60 employees.
So far, said Espey, the company has retrofitted one car with an electric motor. If all goes well, he said, the company would start selling built-to-order electric DeLoreans around 2013. The sticker price (if a custom-built car can have a sticker): about $90,000.
YouTube user troopertrent made a model DeLorean like the one featured in Back to the Future Part III. In that movie Marty McFly and Doc Brown had to push the time machine with a steam engine train to get it up to 88 MPH. troopertrent pushes his model DeLorean with a model train. As you can see at the end of the video, he went all-out on this production, because this is a completely functional model DeLorean time machine.
-via Nerd Bastards
Matt Mulholland replaced the soundtrack of the skateboard chase scene in the movie Back to the Future with his own voice. Yes, he does all the musical parts and the dialog, too!
Previously: The Matrix
If you thought you had to go back in time to see the shoes Marty McFly wore in Back To The Future II, you’ll be positively delighted by Nike’s release of the 2011 MAG, faithful reproductions of the shoes seen in the film which are being auctioned off to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. If you’re like me, though, and can’t come anywhere near affording the hefty $5000 price tag, you’ll just have to wait until 2015 when Nike releases the real deal version of these shoes, complete with power laces. Now someone needs to get to work on creating a working hoverboard and all of our BTTF fantasies will have come true!
-via Destructoid
With all of the remakes that keep coming out lately, it’s pretty reasonable to ask if any of your favorite films are going to be remade soon. If your favorite movie happens to be Back To The Future though, you’ll never have to worry again thanks to HaveTheyRemadeBackToTheFutureYet.com. And in case you’re wondering, yes, that is all they answer on that site.
Warning: Text on the site might be NSFW.
One of the authors at mental_floss asked managing editor Jason English a question he couldn’t answer, so he asked the readers.
“Is it ever explained why Marty hangs out with Doc Brown? He’s just in Doc’s house to start the movie and it’s just implied that they’re good friends.”
— Brett Savage
Among the many comments at that post was one from Bob Gale {wiki}, one of the co-writers of the three Back to the Future movies, who helped shape the history of all the characters. His explanation got its own post today. Link
Doc Brown from the Back to The Future trilogy has got to be one of the all time most memorable time travelers. He and Marty McFly usually save the day, but what if Doc had been the protagonist in other time travel movies? Great Scott!
With Added Doc Brown: The Doc appears in place of Michael Biehn’s resistance fighter, repeatedly turning up in the nick of time to spirit Sarah off to safety. This is one occasion in which he’s happy to meddle with the timeline!
Risk To The Space/Time Continuum: Despite keeping Sarah safe, the Doc lacks Biehn’s general hunkiness, meaning Connor remains unwooed, and young John is never born. Thus, humanity is screwed anyway.
Comments Off Quickly! A wormhole will only open if the ocarina is played at 88 beats per minute! This ingenious fan film by Grant Duffrin explains and unites the stories of The Legend of Zelda franchise by suggesting that they are all necessary components of a particular timeline. Doc Brown’s mission is to ensure that Link takes the necessary steps to set the chain of events in motion.
via Topless Robot
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The Shortlist has a pretty nifty gallery of 12 Back to the Future posters as interpreted by indie artists – my favorite two are shown above, the one to the left is created by Phantom City Creative in collaboration with Twitch Film and the TIFF Bell Lightbox and the one to the right is in Saul Bass-style by Dave Will (don’t miss his BTTF2 poster as well): Link – Thanks Benjamin!
See also: Back to the Future 2 DeLorean Time Machine | Bleak is the Future
Can you believe it’s been 25 years since we first went back in time? Well, maybe you can if you’ve seen all of the press coverage recently. With the trilogy just released on Blu-Ray, we thought it was a good time to do a little time-traveling back to 1985 ourselves to do a little trivia research. Here’s what we found.
In an alternate universe, perhaps one where Calvin Klein plays Johnny B. Goode at a school dance, John Lithgow is Doc Brown and Eric Stoltz or C. Thomas Howell is Marty McFly with Melora Hardin from The Office as a girlfriend. It’s a totally different movie, isn’t it? But that’s the way it could have gone. John Lithgow was unavailable and Christopher Lloyd was, so the role of Emmett Brown went to Lloyd.
Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the part – but he couldn’t do it because of his Family Ties commitments. The bigwigs behind the show really didn’t want Fox to focus his attentions elsewhere, so Robert Zemeckis started looking at his next two choices: C. Thomas Howell and Eric Stoltz. Stoltz won and actually started filming scenes before he and the producers mutually decided that the part was a bad fit for him. With nothing to lose, the Back to the Future people approached Michael J. Fox again. This time, he was allowed to do the film as long as it in no way interfered with his filming schedule with them. That meant that after Fox was done with Meredith Baxter, Justine Bateman and Michael Gross during the day, he spent his evenings and the wee hours of the morning with Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover, filming until 2:30 a.m.
Claudia Wells was the original Jennifer Parker in the first Back to the Future, but it easily could have been Melora Hardin, Jan on The Office. Wells was cast when Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly, but then a sitcom pilot she had shot got picked up and the powers that be refused to let her do the movie simultaneously. Hardin was recast in the role. Then Eric Stoltz was replaced and Michael J. Fox’s small stature became a problem: they didn’t want his girlfriend to be taller than him, so Hardin had to be replaced. By this time, Wells’ T.V. show had fallen through and she was available for the part again. By the time Back to the Future II was being cast, Wells’ mother had cancer and Wells turned the part down. It went to Elisabeth Shue instead.
I used to love looking at my parents’ old yearbooks, so I can relate to this inspiration: writer Bob Gale was going through his dad’s yearbook and found out his father was president of his class.
“I’m looking at this picture of my dad and I’m thinking about the president of my graduating class who was one of these ‘school spirit’ guys I would never have anything to do with … then I’m thinking, ‘Gee, was my dad a jerk like the president of my class?’” Gale said.
When he mentioned the idea to Robert Zemeckis, Zemeckis thought about that old stereotype of mothers who become prim and proper once they have kids but got around quite a bit when they were high schoolers themselves. The two ideas were merged to create the basis of the story – but don’t think that the writers banged out a script overnight. The story went through 40 rejections before it was finally approved.
If you’ve ever wanted to visit Hill Valley, well, you can – at least parts of it.
Hill Valley High School is actually Whittier High School in Whittier, California. Richard Nixon once roamed the halls there. But the dance scene wasn’t filmed there – it was filmed at Hollywood United Methodist Church, which is famous for the 20-foot-tall AIDS ribbon affixed to the exterior of the church.
Twin Pines Mall is really Puente Hills Mall in Rowland Heights, California… but we’d advise against trying to hit 88 mph in the parking lot like Marty did.
The house used for Doc Brown’s house is quite famous – it’s the Gamble House in Pasadena, as in David B. Gamble of Proctor and Gamble. Today, it’s a National Historic Landmark that’s open for tours, so if you should feel the need to live out a personal dream of pretending to be Doc Brown, the opportunity is available. But no experiments on the premises, please.
The Internet hoax that was so hotly forwarded earlier this year may have been inaccurate, but here’s something to look forward to: in Back to the Future II, Doc and Marty look at a 2015 USA Today newspaper with the following headlines:
• Slamball Playoffs Begin
• Cubs Sweep Series in 5
• Marshall Runs 3min. Mile
• Washington Prepares For Queen Diana’s Visit (Sadly, this one won’t be happening.)
• Thumb Bandits Strike (This refers to an unused bit about people using thumbprints to pay for things instead of cash, leading to thieves cutting off people’s thumbs)
• Man Killed By Falling Litter
• Tokyo Stocks Are Up
• Swiss Terrorist Threat
• Shredding For Charity
• President Says She’s Tired
• Kelp Prices Increase
• Pitcher Suspended For Bionic Arm Use 10.
• “Jaws” Without Bite (We see Jaws 19 playing at a theater earlier in the movie)
Bob Gale isn’t concerned about any of these headlines coming true, but he does think they probably got the entire concept of the newspaper wrong: “In 5 years, will we still have paper newspapers? I don’t know!”
It was Billy Zane’s movie debut. He played Match, a member of Biff Tannen’s gang.
Remember how Reese’s Pieces made such a splash after E.T.? California Raisins was looking to do the same with Back to the Future. They suggested having the raisins prominently featured as a snack at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, but Bob Gale told them that a bowl of raisins simply wouldn’t read on camera and would resemble a big bowl of dirt. To appease them, he did throw in a shot of Marty jumping over a bench with a big California Raisins ad plastered on it.
Tony Hawk was originally hired to be a stunt double for Marty’s skateboarding scenes. When Eric Stoltz was replaced, however, so was Hawk: he was far too tall to be Fox’s stunt double, and Fox was actually pretty adept at skateboarding and didn’t need as much help.
The lead role in the movie Back to the Future was originally played by actor Eric Stoltz. After five weeks of filming, director Robert Zemeckis decided that it wasn’t working, and replaced him with Michael J. Fox. The above video shows Stoltz in scenes that will be familiar to fans of the movie.
via blastr
A new coffee shop in Chicago called The Wormhole is dedicated to 1980s pop culture. The centerpiece of the shop is a DeLorean that the owner modified to look like the time traveling car in the Back to the Future movie franchise. Other displays pay homage to Top Gun, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars.
Link via Geekosystem
Do you remember the powered shoe laces from the movie Back to the Future II? Instructables user blakebevin made one and provided instructions on how you can build your own:
Why wait until 2015? Inspired by ‘Back to The Future II’, this project is less ‘Practical’ than ‘Proof of Concept’, but hopefully it’ll tide you over until Nike comes out with something more polished. This was also the first time I worked with an Arduino microcontroller, and I wanted to get some experience with the little guy. Operation is quite simple- step into the shoe and a force sensor reads the pressure of your foot and activates two servo motors, which apply tension to the laces, tightening the shoe. A touch switch reverses the servos. Due to budget constraints, I only modified one shoe. Where did I put that darn sports almanac?!
Well, real in the sense that opposing magnets suspend this Back to the Future model in the air without any structural support. French artist Nils Guadagnin made it for an art installation:
Integrated into the board and the plinth is an electromagnetic system which levitates the board. A laser system stabilises the object in the air. In the making of this work, this artist was thinking about different ways of presenting sculpture. In fact it’s a reflexion on the multiple possibilities of how to give a sculpture full spatial autonomy.
via Geekosystem | Artist’s Blog | Previously on Neatorama: Back to the Future Hoverboard Auction
John Madden of GeekDad relates the story of how the ‘smoot’ became a measurement of distance:
Way back in 1958, the MIT chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge in Massachusetts, coining the smoot as a unit of measurement in the process – one smoot equaling five feet, seven inches. Smoot (the man) lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, and he moved on (or was moved on – eventually he so tired from the movement that his frat brothers carried him), until the bridge was established as being 364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear, in length. Appropriately, Smoot would later become chairman of the American National Standards Institute.
Madden then passes on ten more recent forms of measurement, including some of his own devising. These include the milliwheaton (number of Twitter followers), the Warhol (fame duration), and the Emmet (power). The latter comes from the movie Back to the Future:
1 Emmet = 1.21 Gigawatts, or the amount of power required to operated the flux capacitor in a modified DeLorean DMC-12. GeekDad note – when describing the Emmet, it’s pronounced ‘Jigga’ watt. There was briefly some debate as to whether this should be called a ‘lloyd’ or a docbrown’, But for simplicity (and to honour the character rather than the actor – though don’t get me wrong, Christopher Lloyd rocks) I’ve gone for ‘Emmet’.
In the comments, propose Neatorama-themed measurements.
Link | Images: MIT and Universal Studios, respectively
