Monday, September 27, 2010

It's 2010... which means I'd better have my hoverboard in five years.


Back to the Future Part 2 was on TV recently, and as I watched it, I realized something: I’d better get my damn hoverboard in five years.

I’m serious.

If I don’t have a hoverboard and a flying car by 2015, I’m going to be really, REALLY angry at that whole movie franchise.


I think it’s absolutely hilarious to look back at old movies with “future” scenes and see what they thought the world would look like by now. Although, except for the tv/video phone stuff, which we do actually have now, our current world more closely resembles Hill Valley in 1985 than the Back to the Future’s version of Hill Valley in 2015.

Oh wait, that’s just the 1980s style fashion. They had Delorean time machines in 1985. Geez, we’re further behind than an ‘80s movie’s representation of the ‘80s.

Although the best were when movies and tv shows from the ‘60s and ‘70s showed their version of the future, because then there were always colonies living on the moon and flying? Yeah, you could fly if you wanted to in the future. But why would you want to when teleporting is so much quicker and easier! And it was all done with such HORRIBLE special effects. I love it.

To be honest though, I don’t want flying cars. I think people are terrible drivers; I don’t want to give them the opportunity to be terrible drivers IN THE AIR. If you’re flying, and you hit another car, not only do you crash, you both then FALL and hit something else. Talk about a pile up!
(Yes, that was terrible. All you former Rampage kids out there know that if Keegan said that, he’d have had to hit his bell. I’m sorry.)

And even though the technology was out of control advanced in their version of the future, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, did you ever notice that there were no minorities in their version of the future? (With the exception of Star Trek, which had a token black woman, a token Asian, and a token William Shatner… but Klingons far outnumbered the minorities.)

I feel like Rod Serling would be more surprised by Obama than by the internet.

What I think is amazing is that no one saw most off our biggest technological changes coming, whereas the things that everyone assumed would be commonplace by now didn’t happen. You didn’t see cell phones or computers or ipods or the internet or anything else that’s so necessary to our survival now in any “futuristic” shows.

Okay, that’s not ENTIRELY true. We do have the video chat technology that all of that stuff predicted, it’s just not as commonplace as they said it would be. And Maxwell Smart of Get Smart (the tv show, not the movie. If you haven’t seen the show, you need to watch it on dvd or Nick at Nite ASAP. Classic show.) didn’t have a cell phone, but he DID have a shoe phone.
 Man. I wish I had a shoe phone. Then again, that wasn’t set in the future.  So it doesn't REALLY count.

Here are my predictions for thirty years in the future. I don’t think we’ll have flying cars.

I don’t think we’ll be living on the moon (hell, we haven’t been there in more than forty years). And I don’t think we’ll have a woman president (sorry Hillary, I just don’t think it’s happening. But don’t feel bad. I don’t think we’ll have had a Jewish president by then either. So I’m doubly out of the running).

So what will we have? I’ll tell you. Those horrible speed cameras? They’re going to be everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. But, the good news is that there will be some kind of device to avoid them capturing you. It won’t be legal. But it’ll be sneaky. And it won’t be like those stupid license plate covers that any cop can spot now. It’ll be something that like senses the speed cameras and puts a mirror over your license plate so it can’t get the picture, then hides the mirror again.

I think we’ll have electric cars. Not because people care about the environment (the Republicans still won’t, even when there’s serious incontrovertible proof of all the climate change stuff we’ve been warning them about), but because the gas situation is finally going to get too extreme to keep our current usage up. Sorry Sarah Palin, drill baby drill isn’t gonna save us.

I think Comcast is still going to suck. There’s no getting around that one. It may have a different name, but whatever we’re calling our cable provider in the future, the bottom line is we’ll still have reasons to hate them.

And lastly, we will have hoverboards. Because if I don’t get my goddamned hoverboard in the next five years, there’s going to be hell to pay. You hear me, Robert Zemeckis? You’d better get on that.  You've got five years.  Because in 2015, if I don’t have one, I’m going to be knocking on your door.

And if you don't have a hoverboard for me, I won’t be happy.

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