Pop Friday: Back To The Future in Chronological Order!

I am, as we speak, seeing something I’ve waited 10 years to see. Back To The Future in chronological order! Call it a triumph of the information age. Ever since I was a child, and I first learned that video could be rearranged I have wanted to see this, but I just never found the time to learn to do it myself.

People who have known me for a long time know that, being from California, I started my odyssey into liberty as a default socialist. I only became market friendly through a process of study and contemplation. But the last pieces of that transition (dare I call it a healing process) have been deeper than mere mental postures. They have been overcoming learned behaviors that reflect values I no longer hold. For example I’ve been struggling with an irrational aversion to hiring someone to do something I could potentially figure out how to do myself. In other words, I have a bad habit of ignoring the power of division of labor.

With that in mind, I went to Facebook and posted, “Is there someone out there who is video editing savvy who can give me a quote to splice all the Back To The Future movies together so the scenes are in chronological order? I’d like to buy that DVD. This is a serious inquiry.”

Keene activist, Sovereign Curtis suggested videographer Beau Davis from Shire Free Press, and Beau offered me an initial quote of $100 for the project. What a deal! Can you imagine! I have this highly unusual request and for only slightly more than the box set of Back To The Future movies I can hire a person who possesses the expertise that I never acquired. To me it seemed a miracle of the market place. But moments later New Hampshire State Rep Seth Cohn tipped me off that it had already been done, and I could download it from The Pirate Bay.

I am ecstatic! So, this Pop Friday I would like to offer a review of the Chronological Back To The Future. But to make it more fun for me, and hopefully for you, I’m going to suspend my memory of the previous films and attempt to see it anew, as if for the first time.

Once downloaded the series was broken into 4 mp4 episodes: 1885, 1955, 1985 and 2015. I will review each separately.

1885

I’m only ten minutes in and I’m already confused. Some kid named Clint Eastwood just showed in the wild west in a Delorean (What a silly contraption). He’s dressed like a gay cowboy. Imagine Woody from Toy Story dressed in panther pink and teal. There seems to be some heavy foreshadowing going on, but it’s incredibly subtle. The character seems to know things about places and people but but they never let the audience in on what he knows. It’s a strange story telling style… but pleasantly immersive.

As best I can figure it appears Clint is some kind of time traveler who traveled back to 1885 to rescue another time traveler named Doc who has gone into seclusion in the distant past posing as a simple blacksmith. They have some good old fashioned wild west shenanigans, complete with a runaway carriage, a pistol duel and plenty for modern know-how creatively applied to old technology. Shades of early steampunk. A compelling adventure story, with a little romance woven in by Doc’s main squeeze, Clara. In the end Clint finds his way back to the future by train, but Doc and Clara stay behind. Although it was just a little too convenient that they just happened to have some kind of magic flying skateboard randomly at the end.

1955

Very strange. When Clint left 1885 the time machine was on train tracks, but when he arrives in 1955 he crashes into a barn dressed in a hazmat suit, and now his name is Calvin. The whole thing is difficult to follow, but I think I’ve pieced together that he’s staying with the distant relatives of the family he stayed with in 1885, who are also relatives of his, but that was totally unclear in the first episode.

I figured out that we’re dealing with two different time lines after Calvin, or Clint, or Marty or whatever his name is said “Woah Doc, this is heavy,” and Doc inquired whether or not something was wrong with the Earth’s gravitational pull in 1985, apparently unfamiliar with 80s slang. But I distinctly remember Doc saying “heavy” in 1885, and the McFly’s of that period being confused by the slang “far-out.” So this must be a younger Doc, before he went back in time.

This episode is all kinds of confusing, but at least we know Marty’s real name. There’s an early version of Doc who is indigenous to 1955, but there’s also two versions of Marty, an older version of Doc, and briefly some other old guy, all here from the future for undisclosed reasons. Something to do with a Sports Almanac. And for some reason one of the Deloreans flies now. It’s all very difficult to follow, but at the very least we’ve learned how Doc got to 1885, and why Marty went after him.

1985

1985 is even more confusing that 1955. They’ve made swiss cheese of the space time continuum, with different versions of past and future selves coming and going with nothing to distinguish one from the other except the costume changes. Reality itself lacks any semblance of continuity. Characters change jobs, change personalities, change homes and in the case of Marty’s main squeeze Jennifer, change actresses midstream. But for some reason no one sees the changes but Marty and Doc. For a series that has been completely consumed with rectifying paradoxes in the past so far, they’ve sure made a mess of the present. But the past is starting to make sense. We learn why both sets of characters went back to 1955, and why the Sports Almanac is so important. And, we know why a third set of characters went forward to 2015. So, even though this episode makes the least amount of sense so far, at least it makes some sense of the other episodes, and I’m going into the 2015 with some idea what to expect.

2015

Finally an episode that makes complete sense from start to finish, and I finally figured out where the hover board came from. This was the shortest of all the episodes. In fact, not very much happened at all. It was mostly tying up the loose ends from previous episodes, and oddly enough when it does end it has more the feeling of a beginning, with Marty and Doc rushing back to 1985 on another mission.

Awesome. Simply awesome!

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com