Isn’t it bizarre when the universe conspires to present almost-related seeming things to you time after time? OK, a lot of this is probably actually just my own subconscious (or conscious) thought pushing me in one direction, but there were a couple weird coincidences rolled in as well.
It started Friday night, the night Jenn and I reserve to do something fun together. It’s usually pretty simple, go see a movie, or just hit a local restaurant for a nice dinner out. Last Friday though we couldn’t seem to agree on anything (or there just wasn’t anything appealing out there), so we decided to order some take out and see if we could find a movie on TV to watch. After scouring Comcast’s On-Demand menus, the best we could find was Hot Tub Time Machine. I was skeptical when I first heard of this movie, but Jenn claimed she heard it was actually kind of funny, so lacking anything better we rented it.
Actually, I thought it was pretty hilarious. Just the right level of not taking itself very seriously and not too much poking fun at the 80’s (if anything it was probably more satirical about modern day than the 80’s). I thought while watching it that perhaps it might be an homage to Back to the Future, chiefly due to the presence of Crispin Glover, but I hadn’t seen that move in ages. Jenn was headed to bed, but I wasn’t too tired, and I knew I had the entire trilogy stashed on my DVR. So what the heck, I watched Back to the Future. The movie holds up pretty well, and I would say there are definite connections between the two. Hot Tub Time Machine has guys traveling from 2010 to 1986, while Back to the Future features a guy going from 1985 to 1955. In BF, Doc tells Marty his initial plan is to go forward 25 years, which would be the year 2010. HTTM’s musical performance pretty much apes BF’s famous scene where Marty plays Johnny Be Good. Feels like an homage to me.
Saturday was Helga’s. I went only to discover our host had laid out ready to play a game by Looney Labs called Chrononauts, a game in which players are time travelers tasked with repairing paradoxes in the time line. This was pretty weird, but I was definitely in the right mindset, so I was happy to play it. It was pretty fun actually, I’ll probably look for a copy for myself when we’re at GenCon.
Sunday it got pretty hot out, with occasional rain storms. Just the kind of weather I did not want to face. So we stayed in, and I let the weird mood flow and watched the remaining two Back to the Future movies. BF2 is quite a hoot, if you can look past the crazy plot holes, especially in their depiction of the year 2015. I’m curious why they jumped 30 years instead of 25, possibly for parity with the 1985->1955 jump of the first movie, or perhaps because it wasn’t made until 1989, at which time 2010 may not have seemed far enough into the future. Anyway, the predictions of the future in that movie are pretty amusing. We get anti-gravity (flying cars and hover-boards), but the best telecom advancement is video phone calls and faxes printed on dot matrix printers. Not that you can really fault anyone for not predicting the internet, but still, dot matrix? The fashion is especially humorous, being an extension of the trends in the 80’s to even more vibrant and wild colors and styles, instead of the actual reversal.
Finally, I was reading the weekly webcomics I follow before going to bed Sunday, and sure enough one of them made a time travel joke. It was kind of a throw-away joke, but still, the theme was there. Now I’m not sure how to get this all out of my head today. Do I run with it and try to watch Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure or 12 Monkeys? Or should I run screaming?
Maybe I just need to hear some more Huey Lewis and the News.
Just go back and kill Hitler a couple of times, you’ll feel a whole lot better.