Is That Legal?

Abby is an attractive child. And, I don't think she resembles you at all.

Nice!

Gotta brag, eh, Dad? I understand, to wit:

My son was watching a Disney time-travel something-or-other called "A Wrinkle in Time." I sat in the far corner reading. Suddenly he stabbed the pause button and exclaimed, "Wait a minute! I figured it out. There has to be time!"

He held his hands in the fish-this-big way. "If there wasn't time" -- he moved his hands together -- "there would be no place for anything to happen. But since there's time" -- spreads his hands real wide -- "there's room for everything to happen! You see? There has to be time."

This was about a year ago when he was 7.

Back to the Future on DVD yet? He's ready.

I'll point out what I think is the most annoying plot-hole in BttF:II. After the sequence where Old Biff goes back and visits his younger self and delivers the records book, he then goes FORWARD in time to the SAME FUTURE HE CAME FROM to return the Time Machine. This is not only incorrect (he should have altered the future and thus traveled into the altered future, leaving Doc and Marty stranded), it also makes it utterly pointless for him to have done what he did.

Meanwhile, Doc and Marty are still in the "Biff never found success" time-fork, with a normal future, and presumably a normal 1985. Yet when they jump back to 1985, they jump to the "Biff found sucess" timeline - how? Whacked. Major plot badness. Intersecting grandfather and free-lunch paradoxes.

Hehe, that brought back some happy memories--and it seems to be coming up a lot, what with Brokeback to the Future and all that. I also remember piecing out plot holes. . .but I think I had already reached the age where I could accept that there were plot holes without it ruining the movie for me.(At this point Superman II was my favorite movie, despite the fact that clearly it made no sense for the humanization process to be reversible.) I don't care about the haters, BttF will always be one of my favorite childhod movies. I remember totally geeking out on the concept of Marty slowly fading as his own timeline became increasingly less probable. I still remember the thrill of seeing the DeLorean on a field trip to Universal studios on my 9th birthday. I will always hold that the special effects business, and the explaining of special effects, are some of the best hooks for getting kids interested in engineering and, by extension, science.

Thanks for taking me back to my days in the Third Street cinema in DeKalb, Illinois, where I returned 4 times that summer to watch Back to the Future I. I can't wait to show my daughters the film - we've been watching The Princess Bride (I cover their eyes when the Rodents of Unusual Size leap onto Wesley and the Shrieking Eels slither toward Buttercup), just as I saw that film with my dad, that time in the Egyptian Theater on Second Street. I'd love to go back into time and rejoin my dad when he took me to a freezing theater to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Robert Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps"

Best. Time. Travel. Story. Ever.

No plot holes, except for the fundamental circularity of all time travel stories. I always liked Larry Niven's idea that time travel so violates the order of the universe that the universe won't actually allow anyone to invent it.

And I managed to make a diagram of the whole first 2 movies so far! But I'm not sure that it's right. And it's kind of messy and confusing.

I saw 'Back to the Future 2" in the theaters when it came out. I wasn't crazy about the movie, thought it was rather mean-spirited. But the one thing I will always remember is the scene in the future when Doc Brown explains to Marty how his future (son? grandson?) got caught, tried and convicted in the matter of a single day. "Justice goes a lot faster ever since they got rid of the lawyers," Doc Brown says. At that line, the audience in the theater burst out into wild applause. I was astonished, as I did not realize there was such a negative sentiment against lawyers.