I’m going to geek out for a moment about the Ready Player One trailer released last weekend. Specifically, I’m looking at the “Back to the Future” trilogy reference dropping in at the 1:42 mark.
(Ready Player One is a book, and 2018 movie, about a dystopia where millions of people retreat into 1980s pop culture in virtual reality. See this publicity still, with the VR player in a trailer, and look for the Garfield stickers. I haven’t read the book but I get the gist.)
This is the best resolution I can get, and the display rapidly retreats — just enough to make us say “Those were time circuits on a flying DeLorean!”. The Variety article about the trailer essentially classifies the time machine as a character from the movies, which makes sense from a certain point of view.
Here are the time circuits from Back to the Future II when Doc, Marty, Jennifer, and Einstein are returning to 1985 from 2015, after Old Biff has been to 1955 and returned to the future:
Well, lookiee here. The only difference is that “Present Time” is Feb. 11, 2045, the year the book is set, and there are no AM/PM indicators. (Also note 2045 is as far away from 2015 as 2015 is from 1985.) The specificity of 7:28 is a dead giveaway easter egg — although the scene in Ready Player One is in daylight, it’s also in virtual reality.
A couple of frames after the trailer frame above, Last Time Departed has just enough to tease out Nov. 12, 1955. Also, the car in the trailer is flying, which it was capable of at that point in the movies.
The reference is fast, but does what it sets out to do — spark a “Back to the Future” nostalgia kick and get dissected by geeks with too little to blog about in July.