At 4:29 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Oct. 21, 2015, Marty McFly and Doc landed in the future.
A future filled with hoverboards, video chat, flying cars and crazy style. Today, we land there as well.
So what did the movie get right? And what did they fall short on? We recommend you watch “Back to the Future II” yourself today, but if you don’t have the time, MOVE broke it down for you.
####Baby, you can drive my hoverboard.
In “Back to the Future II,” hoverboards are a popular mode of transportation. Kids and teenagers casually fly through the streets in their version of 2015. While hoverboards aren’t quite as popular as predicted, they are coming into the spotlight.
A new trend of hoverboards has been sweeping the nation recently, as many companies have released relatively inexpensive non-hovering hoverboards, which doesn’t really make any sense. They are essentially segways with no handles.
Real hoverboards, however, actually do exist. The Lexus and Hendo hoverboards are made with magnetic material strong enough to keep an average-sized person off the ground, but only on certain floor types. Unfortunately, we aren’t as technologically far along as they’d predicted by now. Watching [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwSwZ2Y0Ops) of people riding these real hoverboards, you can tell they’re much harder to stay on than expected and don’t go very far off the ground.
Why people of the past were so obsessed with skateboards that don’t touch the ground is beyond me, but we’re starting to see that trend reappear in society today. But this time, it’s within the realm of possibility.
####Wait, _who_ is winning the World Series?!
It’s been 107 years since the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series. Now, four wins stand between the team and a chance at a victory 26 years in the making. The key to their success? A bold prediction (and a joke aimed at the Cubs) made by a conspicuous USA Today article and sports almanac in “Back to the Future II.” The movie came out in November 1989.
Although the mindset of “the more unlikely the better” is a common trend within the movie’s musings about the future in general (think flying cars), this bit of fortune telling may prove itself a reality in just a few weeks.
One piece of foresight that can’t become truth? The Cubs were supposed to compete against Miami, a team that didn’t exist when the movie was created. Unfortunately for us, the Marlins and the Cubs will never compete against each other; they’re in the same league.
There is one thing even non-baseball fans can look forward to. The grapevine says Christopher Lloyd may be throwing the first pitch at the World Series game if Back to the Future’s predictions about the Cubs prove true.
The amount of “real-world combining with nerd world” giddiness is almost too much to handle right now.
####You can fly, you can fly!
Sadly, we’re nowhere near approaching the time machine technology Doc created in 1985, though the movie does touch on some vehicle improvements from 2015 that look familiar. We’ve capitalized on a culture of auto-payments for rideshares in the form of Uber and Lyft, and projects to make robotic gas pumps are in the works.
Some predictions are just completely out of reach for us, though. We don’t have flying cars and we won’t anytime soon. We can’t fuel our vehicles with trash (though this sentiment seems to conflict with the gas pump one in the movie), and we don’t have barcodes for license plates.
Instead, cars have built-in GPS and the ability to pick up radio that is broadcast from a satellite. Soon cars in 2015 (2016, perhaps?) will be able to drive themselves. (There are already cars that will parallel park. Praise.)
####Bonus play
Personality-wise, they guessed our tastes pretty on-point. People of the future in this film are also just as technologically savvy as people today (minus the smartphone obsession). At the dinner table, while we may not use phone glasses (though we definitely [could](https://www.google.com/glass/start/)), we are individually obsessed with our phones. We also wear technology, such as Apple Watches, as they predicted when the police officers in the movie wore hats with electronic messages scrolling across the front.
The movie was right about a number of other technological predictions, including holograms, TVs hanging on walls, video calling, finger scanning replacing house keys and many other minor predictions.
Some predictions, such as dogs walking themselves, windows having projection screens showing whatever scenery you’d like, and watching multiple channels at once could most likely be reality if we wanted them to be. But why would they dream of having screens block out natural sunlight? We aren’t that technologically obsessed — or so we’d like to think.
Although the majority of their major predictions came true, the movie was off on a few details. Nobody uses fax machines and waiters still work in restaurants. Unfortunately, the weather predictions still are usually incredibly inaccurate, and the justice system still takes a _long_ time.
Their newspaper also used female pronouns for the president and mentioned Queen Diana’s visit. 2016 may be the year of our first woman president, but Princess Diana died in 1997.
Overall, we’re pretty impressed with the amount “Back to the Future II” got right about 2015. Although their depiction of our fashion sense was _way_ off, and they missed out on the iPhone, Marty McFly and Doc traveled to a world that really isn’t that different from our own, and that’s pretty freaking cool.
Welcome to the future, folks. Hover your hearts out, and let’s keep pushing for those flying cars.
