Time travellers use cars, hot tubs and more to get from AD to BC
Spiffy DeLorean sets tone for Back to the Future
“The way I see it, if you’re going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”
This was Doc Brown’s insouciant answer to Marty McFly’s voice-cracking question: “Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?!”
There was, of course, also the matter of the car’s stainless steel construction, which made the flux dispersal — but never mind that. What’s incredible is that it took a century of automotive technology and modern time travel tales running on parallel tracks before Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale came up with the idea of marrying the two in 1985’s Back to the Future and its two sequels.
They also fitted their 1981 DeLorean DMC 12 with hover capability, a steal at $39,999.95. That was hardly a stroke of genius — there have been fictional flying cars for almost as long as there have been real ones.
But of course you’d want your time machine to be a car! How else are you going to get from A to B after travelling from AD to BC? Yet it’s an oversight to be found in almost every famous time machine in motion picture history.
Steampunk sled (The Time Machine), rocket sled (Timecop), sphere of nakedness (Terminator), fancy watch (Harry Potter), storage locker (Primer), Hot Tub (duh) and those weird devices that transport Bruce Willis in Looper and 12 Monkeys — all have the habit of dropping off their passengers in time with nothing but their feet to carry them forward in space.
It’s an omission that can become almost comical. Time Bandits features chrono-rovers in possession of a stolen wormhole map. So, a GPS but no vehicle.
Bill & Ted’s phone booth, like its grown-up cousin from Dr. Who, could travel in space as well as time, although it was a cumbersome matter of dematerialization if you wanted to move in three dimensions only.
Trust me, you don’t want to parallel park a TARDIS.
Then again, many stories have skipped the machine altogether. In the 1819 tale of Rip Van Winkle, the title character nods off for a few decades after drinking moonshine. Eighty years later, the protagonist in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court suffers a blow to the head and wakes up in the sixth century — not that different from the 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married, in which Kathleen Turner faints and is revived in 1960. And let’s not get started on the combination of autohypnosis and interior decor Christopher Reeve practises in Somewhere in Time.
But not every machine-less time story is doomed. Donnie Darko from 2001 went far with nothing more than a giant rabbit. Edge of Tomorrow featured Tom Cruise caught in a time loop rather than propelled by a machine, destined to meet Emily Blunt doing Pilates every day. And one of the greatest time-after-time stories ever, Groundhog Day, features a time loop with no explanation for its appearance or eventual dissolution.
Oddly, Back to the Future did not even attract its share of copycats. The nearest a film has come to replicating its five-speed-plus-fluxcapacitor model DeLorean was in Woody Allen’s 2011 comedy Midnight in Paris, when a 1922 Peugeot takes Owen Wilson back to Paris between the wars, where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald. Great Scott! No wonder the film was such a hit with critics and audiences alike.
Thus it appears Zemeckis has all but cornered the market on runabouts that take you when-abouts. Much of that is due to the time when Back to the Future was made.
The film has also aged well due to its special effects, groundbreaking in the early digital age and still hard to top.
Yet for all its innovation, Back to the Future didn’t invent the wheel. It merely had the stroke of genius of attaching four of them to the bottom of a time machine. The rest is history.