MORE CULTURE HITS FROM ‘FUTURE’ TIMES
What else was huge in 1985? USA TODAY’s Patrick Ryan and Eli Blumenthal recall other pop culture milestones from the year that ‘Back to the Future’ hit theaters:
MOVIES
‘Back to the Future’ was the year’s highest-grossing film, earning $189.8 million ($210.6 million total) and spending nearly 40 weeks in theaters. When ‘Future’ opened July 3, 1985, it went up against Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fantasy flop ‘Red Sonja.’
MUSIC
The first week of July, Phil Collins’ ‘Sussidio’ unseated Bryan Adams’ ‘Heaven’ for No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Other chart-toppers that summer included Duran Duran’s ‘A View to a Kill,’ Tears for Fears’ ‘Shout’ and Huey Lewis’ ‘The Power of Love,’ which was written for ‘Back to the Future.’
TV
New and notable TV included the debuts of ‘MacGyver,’ ‘The Golden Girls,’ ‘Growing Pains’ and ‘Larry King Live.’ Top-rated returning shows included ‘The Cosby Show,’ ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ ‘Future’ arrived the week that ‘The Jeffersons’ ended its run, having tallied 11 seasons and more than 250 episodes.
BOOKS
Stephen King notched three books on ‘The New York Times’ fiction best-sellers list in 1985: ‘The Talisman’ (co-written with Peter Straub), ‘Thinner’ (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) and ‘Skeleton Crew.’
TECHNOLOGY
In July, Commodore released its Amiga personal computer. It cost $1,595 and featured 256 KB of RAM — a tiny fraction of the 2 GB in Apple’s iPhone 6S. Later that year, Microsoft released Windows 1.0 ($99), which was poorly received for being slow. In its review, ‘The New York Times’ likened it to “pouring molasses in the Arctic.”
PRODUCTS
In July, Coca-Cola Classic returned after consumers overwhelmingly rejected New Coke, which changed the soda’s formula. That September, Nintendo released ‘Super Mario Bros.’ In its recent list of the top 100 games of all time, video-game site IGN ranked it fourth.