Letter Graded MailSent to Garcia@computerhistory.org

On issue 316’s note on the DUFF paragraph, here’s the good man known as Glenn Glaz-er! In your brief paragraph on the DUFF race just passed in Drink Tank #316, I think you really skirt the issues here and do your readership a disservice in the process. There really needed to be some discussion of why the DUFF race started so late and why the current administra-tor could not effectively overcome the short deadline, not to mention the highly irregular “enhancement” of the candidate descriptions. These things are important for the fol-lowing reasons. The race had just 95 voters, the second lowest in DUFF history[1]. DUFF, like every other fan fund, has only two sources of income: auctions and voting. When and adminis-trator fails to get a large number of voters, this translates directly into an attack on the funding

of the fund and works to kill interest in the fund generally by disenfranchising people. For this reason, among others, I am glad that Hold Over won, so that DUFF can recoup its losses from this election with a hopefully greater turn out in the next. Fan funds are one of fandom’s great-est, most charitable institutions. Seeing one die from neglect or malpractice would sadden me greatly. Unfortunately, this debacle has shown us that when we vote for fan fund winners, we should consider not only their worthiness as del-egates, but also what kind of administrator they will be. Are they fair and impartial? Are they organized and able to reach out to fen through many channels of communication? These sorts of questions will unfortunately be going through my head the next time I vote in fan fund race.

Best,Glenn[1] The previous two had 131 and 218 voters respectivelyYou raise some very good points, some of which I addressed in 317. I have since spoken with John and while I still don’t agree with some decisions that were made leading to the race, I see why they would have made them and more clearly how it led to a race that was as late as it was. I will say that get-ting 94 voters (more than the most recent TAFF race) was a good sign when the time-line is considered. I do know that in recent races, the quality of what people saw as the individuals’ qualifications for Administrator. It happens. I think DUFF will bounce back, and something I hadn’t realised, this is the setter for what we do after Hold Over wins.

You may be asking yourself why I didn’t do this one last issue. I hope you are. The rea-son is simple - This one’ll be big. The Mo Starkey cover (she also did the one for last issue, which I forgot to mention) shows the two main charac-ters in the film. Well, two of the main characters. The real main characters of Back to the Future are the 1980s and the 1950s. That’s right, two decades should have gotten top billing, and with-out doubt, they would have deserved it. Back to the Future is probably the best record we have

the connection between the two of them with the possible exception of Peggy Sue Got Mar-ried. It’s an amazing film, as simple and silly as it may seem. It also is one of the few trilogy fran-chises that holds together for all three films. Let us start with an idea. Time Travel is possibile. It’s not only possible, it’s controllable. A scientist, in this case one who happens to be a lovable loser, has figured it out and has wasted his family fortune on devising the means to make it happen. He got teh idea after hitting his head

on the toilet while trying to hang a picture. He figures out a way to do it using a HUGE amount of energy - 1.21 gigawatts. That’s a bunch, rough-ly the amount you can get off of a single lightning strike. The only way he can find to create that much juice is using plutonium he gets from Liby-ans. He double-crosses them and it ends up with them coming after him. The scientists best buddy is Marty, a hopeful rock ‘n roller and it is widely believed that he is a ‘slacker’. He goes to record the

Doctor’s adventure that night, and wit-nesses the Doc getting murdered by the Libyans and then becomes the first hu-man to travel in time, ending up in No-vember 5, 1955. That, incidentally, is the day my Mother was born. It’s the only way I re-member that fact. The Slacker is stuck in 1955 until there is a known lightning strike. While he’s there, he meets the younger form of his mother and father, a pair who have little in common. His mother falls for

you’d find in Happy Days. None of them are like what it really wouldhave been like, but it’s all the way it would have been presented on TV at the time... or ever since. Looking at just one scene actu-ally gives you an interesting taste of the entire concept behind the movie. Marty goes back in time to 1955, and after hav-ing interupted his father and mother’s meeting, he has to convince his father, played by the amazing Crispin Glover, that he should make a play for Marty’s

him and that leads to a difficult time as he has to get his mother and father together, get himself back to the site so that he can go back in time, and at the same time, save the Doctor from his fate. So simple? This is the first real Time Travel film on the list, and the reason for that is pretty simple: it’s the first one that makes sense. There’s a ton of hand-waving to make science go away, which is the best way to make time-travel make sense. Just give it some cool name (Flux Capacitor is a great name to do just that) and then come up with absolutely 0% of the required physics. Just pretend that it happens and go with that. At no point does Doc Brown, played by the im-measurable Christopher Lloyd, make any sort of attempt to make Time Travel work intellectually. Very, very smart of him! Well, very smart of the screenwriters, in this case the great Bob Gale and Robert Zem-eckis. Gale is an important figure here because of his long-standing connection with Comic Book fandom. When he was a kid, he made his own version of the Commander Cody seriels. He also

did his own comics as a kid, and later wrote vari-ous things for Marvel. This script is very much in the vein of 1950s comics, where you’d never see people trying to justify their science. Mysterious rays, chemical interactions, weird chants, they were all a part of comics before the Seriousining of the 1970s. This is a story written by someone steeped in comics who never left for the world of ‘serious’ science fiction. And Zemeckis is good too. His direction was solid, if unspectacular, but his touch on the script is evident. He grew up with a love of TV, and with the possible exception of Steven Spiel-burg, is probably the first important director to have grown up mostly influenced by television. His scripts have a television-like quality, especial-ly evident in Forrest Gump. Here, that feeling of 1950s and 60s television comes through stron-gest in the way that we are presented images of everyday life. The dinner scene where we meet Marty McFly’s family, including the younger ver-sion of his mother, is straight out of an episode of My Three Sons or The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. The dance we’re shown is much like

Mom, who is his wife in the timeline that Marty came from. Marty convinces him by showing up in his HazMat outfit, placing Walkman head-phones on the young George McFly’s ears as he sleeps and blasts a squeedley-deedly Edward Van Halen guitar solo and claiming to be Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan. It works, as George goes and announces to Lorraine, his wife in the othe timeline. Now, let’s look at what that says about the times. We see a copy of Fantastic Stories with a robot on the cover that looks a lot like a guy in a HazMat suit. The cover, which I would say most looks like the style of Lawrence (Sterne Stevens) when he did Amazing covers. The style of the cover speaks to EXACTLY the kind of imagery that would have existed in the time. Now, being a science fiction fan in the days of the 1950s was still a ‘Proud & Lonely thing’, but by the 1980s, you could love Science Fiction and not be a ‘geek.” But, that stuff that they loved in teh 1950s, THAT was still the stuff of nerds and pencil-necks. It’s the best marker there is for a loser in the 1950s: if he read Sci-Fi, he’s a

nerd and waste. When, at the end of the film, we revisit the much-improved life of George McFly when Marty returns and George has received his first book, a science fiction romance novel that shows the scene of his visit by Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan. In the 1950s of Back to the Future, it is too geeky for words to even read the stuff; in the 1980s of Back to the Future it is success and great improvement to write to write the stuff. That alone tells you how the sta-tus of SciFi had grown. The appearance of Marty was comical to the audiences of the time, because while in his time it woudl still have been seen as something out of the ordinary, it wouldn’t be completely lost on the average person of 1955. There were already radiation suits similar to those that Mar-ty wore in use and the images of them would

have been seen two plaeces - science fiction magazines and on television in any of the many reports of nuclear testings. There are tons of im-ages of guys in suits much like the one Marty wears, only not bright yellow in all sorts of infor-mational shorts and in news coverage. I believe that you see one in Duck & Cover, for example. The average person would have expected it to have been a human in a suit, but with George’s fondness of Science Fiction, he assumed that Marty was an alien. Makes sense: Marty knew his audience. The use of the Walkman is another in-teresting point. He blared it into George’s ears using the headphones, which he assumed would wake him up and make him feel like he was in a different time because no one had heard any-thing like that in 1955. In fact, the electric guitar

was less than 10 years old and while you heard it in pieces from Elvis, Chuck Berry and Les Paul, and there had been Jazz folks recording stuff for a while, but there were no effects pedals, no feedback, no squeedly, a fair amount of deedly. When Marty gets to play Johnny B Goode, he goes ape and plays a Van Halen-esque solo that turns folks off really quick. Why would he use a guitar solo like that after he obviously knew how disquieting it was when he used it on George McFly? Those two scenes, along with the opener where Marty goes into Doc Brown’s garage lab and plugs into the HUGE stacks he’s got in there and blasts away at the first notes of Huey Lewis’ Back in Time. Here, we can see how the 1980s and the 1950s were so very alike. Rock was HUGE among the younger folks of the 1950s. It was the most important passtime. In the 1950s, we had a revolution: rock itself. R&B rhythms and electric guitars hooked the kids hard. It was the new thing, the debut of a new style, seemingly from nothing but really from decades of Jump Blues. This is EXACTLY what happened in the 1980s, only it was with electronic music. Kraft-werk and folks had laid the foundations in the 1970s, and now they were showing up on the pop charts. Rock, in the 1950s, came out of the Black Music experience, but in the 1980s, it was out of Eurotrash to the masses. If you compare the way the youth of the days interacted with music, you’ll see just how similar the 1980s and 50s were.These were two decades were there was a youth culture that was rising, almost com-pletely without a political bent, and they had a good time listening to good music. Elvis was Mi-chael Jackson. Bill Haley & The Comets was New

Order. Yes, I can back that up! You had a ton of acts and they were both powered by new facili-ties for experiencing the music. In 1955, it was TV shows like The Ed Sul-livan Show, American Bandstand, and the Buddy Deane Show. They exposed teenagers around the country to a national music. The radio had done that with bands like Bob WIlls & His Texas Playboys. The 1980s had MTV. Bak then, there was enough juice from the music itself to draw tons of teens to MTV just to watch videos (though early on they had other shows, includ-ing The Young Ones and Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and there were also video programmes like Night Tracks that draw large number late at night. Plus, for almost the entire 1980s, American Bandstand did big numbers because the penetra-

tion of the musical acts into the mainstream of the teenaged world. The 1970s, and even the 60s, really, hadn’t had the level of celebrity of with the stars of the musical world since the 1950s. Yes, the Beatles, were HUGE, but there were half-a-dozen acts that came close to the Beatles level in the 1980s. Michael Jackson and Madonna were every bit as big as The Beatles, without a question. There was nothing in the 1970s that came close with the possible exception of Led Zepplin and, maybe, Fleetwood Mac. While NO ONE has ever come close to the level that Elvis managed, Michael Jackson certainly came close. Let’s look at the actors involved, because it really was a brilliantly cast film. The first one was Michael J. Fox. The role was first offered to him, but he had to back out, and they gave it to

Eric Stoltz. Luckily, they realised that he wasn’t right for it and went with MJF again. He was per-fect for it in a way he’s never managed since. He had that ‘Whoa’ factor that is so essential for a guy who is playing the Fish Out of Water. The real power of Fox as Marty McFly is that he’s so perfect in both time periods. He’s so clean-cut, a look that hadn’t changed in those 30 years, and he is completely convincing in both time frames. Lea Thompson isn’t quite, but she had a much harder role. She had to play a late 40-something wife and mother and a 1950s teen-ager. While she was good and got the notes she needed to hit in the 1980s, it’s in the 1950s that Lorraine absolutely shines. She is radiant, and Thompson gives the flirty, slightly naughty side of Lorraine so much zest and gauzy-eyed beauty that she makes the most of the situation. That shot of Thompson over there <-, that one alone is enough to make me fall in love with her! And then there’s George McFly, played by the quirkiest actor of all-time: Mr. Crispin Glover. He takes George and throws in a heaping tea-spoon of tension between two worlds. He plays George as a geek who has no convidence, and the guy who knows that he’s got all the tools. The way that he orders a milk to steal his con-fidence on the way to asking Lorraine out is the stuff of John Wayne in his most swaggering west-ern. There are few actors that could put on both of those concepts and not have them running all over each other. Glover is about the only one. There’s also Mr. Christopher Lloyd. He’s always been brilliant, and here, as Doc Emmett Brown, he’s particularly good. Funny thing is, he’s good here as the quirky doctor, but when he’s

given more to do, as in Back to the Future III where he has a love interest and storyline, he’s way better. And that brings up the ability of sequels to tarnish an original. The sequels were fun, es-pecially the third, but they were not at all what the original had in mind. THey played with Time Travel more, but they seemed to fall short in the area where I thought that Back to the Future had its best, and most optimistic, message. That message, which plays so well with the 1950s and 80s, is that if you work towards a goal and stay on target, even if you cheat a little, you’ll end up with an outcome better than you hoped for. This one might take a while. You see. Marty knows he has to get his parents together again, and that’s the key, but the real problem is that Doc Brown is murdered by the Libyans when he makes his attempt at be-ing the first human time-traveler. When Marty keeps tryign to tell Doc about what will happen to him in 1985, the Doc keeps reminding him that changing the timeline could have huge ef-fects on the future. This is a big deal as Marty does not want ot lose Doc, but Doc keeps tell-ing him not to tell him anything. In the end, and I guess I should say Spoiler Alert, he goes through

with everything and ends up that the letter that Marty had snuck into Doc’s pocket gets discov-ered, Doc tears it up and then Marty leaves. In the end, though, Doc recovered it saying ‘What the hell?” and he wore a bullet-proof vest. That’s a cheat, but it worked out into the best of all possible worlds. And, instead of George McFly being the bully Biff ’s punching bag, since he stood up to him defending Lorraine’s honor, his life has changed for the better and Biff is his bitch. Again, a great outcome, even though it was not the timeline that young master McFly had planned for, it was the best outcome for him. It’s a very 1980s idea, that no matter what the path you take towards achieving your goal, hard work and a little luck will make tomorrow better than today... or will make tomorrow better than another tomor-row. You get the idea. This idea was very much a part of 1950s philosophy as well, and let us not forget that it is via a punch that George McFly conquers Biff. Not through his intellect or abilities, it is through a physical blow, a show of force. That is what bullies understand, and thus we can see the attitudes of Eisenhauer and Reagan playing in that part, no? The 1960s had not that concept, what with the infusion of all sorts of new political con-cepts, and by the 1980s, that optimism had re-turned because at the time, we thought we had solved all those pesky problems that the 1960s demanded we take a look at. By the 1990s, we realised that we hadn’t. A decade later we had the means of attacking ourselves with commu-nications of the fact that we hadn’t advanced as

far as we had thought, and now we’re in a period where we’re addressing it and all sorts of new things. In essence, we’re in the 2nd decade of an-other 1960s (or maybe we’re in the 1970s again, as it seemed like a decade without a focus, at least from where I’m sitting.) The 1950s and the 1980s were so closely tied, and in Back to the Future, it is the optimism of the time that ties them so closely. So, Back to the Future is a film that talks about time, and illustrates how two time periods can be very closely connected, both in spirit and by a Delorean.