Yes, there are a lot of people on Facebook who just love to say “today is the day Marty McFly goes into the future”. That meme is old as it is incorrect, but today, October 21, 2015, it just happens to be true.

Yes, back in 1989, there was a little film called Back to the Future II, which wasn’t really little. In fact, it was probably the biggest of the year, but it is most famous for showing us a future that seemed quite realistic.

Yes, the world of 2015 in Back to the Future II showed us flying cars, holographic movies, cold fusion generators, hover boards, all in a very pastel and eighties way with a lot of product placements. I remember thinking that 2015 was going to look like that, and it seemed a start contrast to the dark futures still seen in most speculative fiction movies today. Of course, the future shown in the film wasn’t all good, as it had skyrocketed inflation.

At the time, I was about to graduate high school, and I wanted the future of 2015. There was no way that they predicted Internet, cellular/smartphones, and some things that would be a more realistic future. However, that future seemed to show that we would all turn out okay, in spite of things happening to us. Sure, Marty McFly didn’t get to be a rock star, but at least he had a decent family. Yeah, his dreams didn’t really come true, and neither did that movie’s idea of 2015.

I’m not certain if Back to the Future Day is a lesson that we shouldn’t put a date on a movie. Seriously, when I first saw the first back to the future film, I thought it was a bad idea for Marty to give Doc Brown a date of 1985. All I could think of was how that film was going to be dated in a few years. Now, here we are, 30 years later, and the film is just as good as it was then, with time making it even better.

So hey, 2015 isn’t the cool wizmo-gizmo future, but so what? At least it’s not like Minority Report or Blade Runner. We’ll have to wait another four years for the latter, and thirty-nine years for the former.