THE DECODER
… was the price paid at a recent auction for these light-up Nike trainers. Here’s what makes them so cool
What makes a pair of light-up Nike Mag trainers from 1989 worth Dh150,000?
The shoes are the actual Light-Up 2015 Nike Mag pair worn by actor Michael J Fox’s
endearing character Marty McFly in the 1989 film Back to the Future II. McFly time-travels in these shoes to the year 2015, to prevent his future son from ending up in prison.
In a bid to replicate the shoes of the future, the scruffy-looking pair features
a textured blueflecked foam sole that creeps up along the upper, LED lights behind the heel, and a glowing Nike logo on the ankle straps.
While the trainers famously self-laced in the film,
these prop shoes, clarifies the auction description, are “a light-up, walk-around version” minus the “special-effects requirements for the self-lacing sci-fi shoes”. Nike did, however, release a button-powered, self-lacing shoe last year called Marty McFly, sending a first pair to Fox for trial. The sale of that limited-edition collection of 89 pairs of shoes raised money for the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, with one buyer paying as much as $52,000 (Dh191,000).
This original pair, meanwhile, was estimated to sell for between £25,000 and £35,000 (up to Dh128,500),
at Prop Store’s Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction, which was held in London last month and showcased 600 original props, costumes and rare production materials.
Other lots at the movie memorabilia auction included: the wallet carried by Samuel Jackson’s character
in Pulp Fiction; a light-up miniature model of the Millennium Falcon building from Blade Runner; Jack Nicholson’s jacket from The Shining and Joker costume from Batman; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines costume; and the hand-painted portrait of Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeifer) from Scarface, complete with bullet holes.