LA Weekly went to every (or nearly every) shooting location in Back to the Future, and the comparisons of then and now, especially the Universal backlot and Whittier High School, are very interesting. The backlot certainly has changed — kind of had to after the fire. Perhaps the most interesting bit of all is that the war memorial in Hill Valley’s square is an actual memorial, for the people who worked at Universal Studios and served in WWII or Korea.
It’s a 108-frame slideshow, but it loads quickly. (There should be Internet laws against slideshows, but I digress.)
Remember, this is supposed to be the year of THE FUTURE in BTTF II, even if it didn’t quite come to pass, except maybe for USA Today Hill Valley Edition. (And today is closer to Jan. 1, 2030, than Jan. 1, 2000. How’s that for blowing your temporal mind?)