Is 1985 as far away for us as 1955 was in 1985?
I think in terms of society and technology 1985 is closer to us than 1955 was for the ppl back in 1985.
shareDefinitely.
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It's alright, Betty, you were just doing some very stupid things.
MovieChat Forums > Back to the Future (1985) Discussion > Is 1985 as far away for us as 1955 was i...
Not really. i don't think things have changed quite as much. We were as gadget obsessed in the 80s as now.
"He's dusted, busted and disgusted, but he's ok"
1955 seemed a lot further away at the time... 1985 still seems like yesterday. I wouldn't mind going back to 1985 right about now. That was a great time for me personally.
shareby Kruleworld - Fri Oct 23 2015 13:20 -I don't agree entirely Yes, we liked gagets back then but not like today.
... i don't think things have changed ... We were as gadget obsessed in the 80s as now. ...
Cellphones were too expensive for most people and they were really bulky. Pocket sized phones weren't yet devised. There were no touch screens, and the mouse (as we know it today) did not exist.
There was no real email (except for acoustic modem based email), no GPS, no world wide web, fax and voicemail were still relatively new, and telegrams were still currently being sent.
There were no airbags, no antilock brakes. There were no solar panels. People still were using mostly typewriters, and word processors were basically still a novelty. Home computers were mostly used as glorified toys. There was no such thing as a graphical user interface. Computers were text based, and windows didn't exist yet.
There was no wheelchair access in public places. There were virtually no African Americans in D.C.. Apartheid was in effect and Mandela was behind bars, and would stay there for almost another decade.
I think there's a lot of changes.
''I'm fortunate the pylons were not set to a lethal level.'' share
It's a great question. For me, when I first saw BTTW in 1986, I was 8 years old. To an 8 year old, 30 years ago seems like forever ago. And plus, since TV was black and white in 1955, that makes the old times seem that much older. The music/movies/culture in 1955 was soooo different from 1985. Now, at 37, I look back to 1985 as a time when I was a kid. Doesn't seem like forever ago at all. The music/culture is different but not out of this world different.
We have much better technology and computers, but overall have we progressed as a society? I suppose so, in the sense of race relations and whatnot. But in a lot of ways, we haven't come that far.
Because I really didn't in the '80s, I've been watching movies and tv and the 1950s culture is hardly present. Today, the 1980s culture seems to be everywhere, like music, cars, and clothes.
shareThere were airbags, solar panels, and computer mice. There was even an airbag joke in National Lampoon's Vacation which came out two years before BttF.
shareI think 1955 seemed so far removed from 1985 than 85 is from 2015/16 is due to two things, technology not being a new thing anymore and changing social perspectives. When Lorraine's father brought home a TV, this was game changing. You could see people in a box in your living room entertaining you. At the very least it made radio shows visual. The 80s era equivalent of such a game change is the PC. There was no precedent and now its part of everyday life. From the 80s onward we got so used to tech that any gradual change to phones, TV and PCs we just roll with so it colors our perception that it wasn't so different. We just take technology for granted because most of what is new and innovative are just augmentations on existing mediums rather than completely new technologies.
The second and more definitive is the social. The seismic shifts that happened in race relations, women in society, people dressing more casually and in places they never used to cannot be overstated. The character of Goldie Wilson is that example. He went from being ridiculed for thinking he could be mayor to being mayor. Today a black mayor even of a mostly white town is no big deal. Social attitudes, for the most part, are not so different than the 80s so it doesn't seem so far removed. You cannot say that about the social attitudes of the 50's being similar to the 80s. They are worlds apart, where the 80's to now not so much. The only real seismic shift that can compare to the civil rights and women's rights are gay rights and that's relatively recent.
Just to reiterate what you said, going from 1955 to 1985 has bigger gap difference than going from 1985 to 2015/16.
To add, looking at the fashion of the '50s to the '80s looks more different than the '80s to the '10s. In the '50s people dressed formally with suits even though there's no big event. In the '80s and '10s, people dress in shorts all day long. I was only an infant in '80s but watching those films made in the '80s, I hardly hear any '50s music. Today, '80s are as popular as today's and they're everywhere. So, I think there's a bigger rhythmic difference from the '50s to the '80s than from the '80s to today.
In terms of finances, Biff was complaining about that 'expensive' $300 body car damage in 1955. Adjusting for inflation, in 1985, that would be $1,200 and, in 2015, $2,600. So, from '55 to '85, the price quadrupled while from '85 to '15, the price more than doubled.
Also, I think it has to do with the diminishing returns or differences of technology. For example, the iPhone is claimed to have smaller and smaller differences due capacity. I think the Internet has made it harder to come up with a revolutionary invention because it's that much faster and we don't miss anybody who's distant.
Having said that, the difference from 2015 to 2045 might have no difference but if so it would be inconspicuous.
"Is 1985 as far away for us as 1955 was in 1985?"
No. Time has sped up. From 1955 to 1985 is an incredibly long time and an enormous wait.
From 1985 to 2015 is a quick bunny-hop, that happens in a blink of an eye, cosmically speaking.
I can't still come to terms with the fact that the year 1995 happened overy twenty years ago. It just doesn't seem possible.
However, when in the eighties, you thought of things that happened 'twenty years ago', they were ANCIENT, long forgotten, completely different era things, from when people were something else.
This is of course even amplified, when we talk about thirty years.
Do you still listen to '80s and '90s music?
shareJust think about Marty walking through 1955. He stood right out in his outfit at that time. Today, if my 17 year old son traveled back to 1985 in his usual street cloths of a t shirt & jeans, he wouldn't really stand out like that as much. The popular fashions in the media have changed a lot, but the normal, every day, Joe Blow from Idaho would almost fit right it. My son knows a lot (relatively speaking) about 80s culture from movies, TV shows, & music that his generation has assimilated from the internet, netflix, satellite radio, & Itunes. He has a lot more in common with me & my wife as parents than I did with my mom & dad back then because there was more of a generation gap at the time that resulted in less common culture. The internet & cell phones would probably be the biggest changes since then. Other than that, a lot about our way of life is pretty similar, unlike the differences between '55 & '85.
shareThis same topic was brought up at the Brady Bunch Movie board...where someone said that the 90s are to today what the 70s were to the 90s, as far as vintage goes...and I disagreed. 1996 and 2016 aren't as far removed as 1976 and 1996 were. It's the same scenario here. Just about everything about today is a just a more accelerated version of what was already happening, or in motion back in the 80s. So 1985 and 2015 aren't the same leap as 1955 and 1985 were.
shareAs we have moved forward, the recorded history increases. If you think about what kids in the 1980s saw from the 1950s, it was minuscule. Movies and early TV shows, sure, but things recorded that were happening live on TV news not so much. In the 1980s, the recorded medium was used more widely, kids in the 90s and 00s see a lot of content, real and fictional from the 80s, still, think about our selfie-obsessed world we are in now. Recorded history happens everywhere and everyone is a cameraman/archivist. Kids now have a better idea of where they stand in the world based on all of the information available from the prior generations and it just grows and doubles every 10 years.
shareStuff is smaller and faster now than it was then, computers, cellphones, internet... Not too much about today's world would be beyond the imagination of people in the 80s as the 80s would be to people in the 50s.
I think it's relative to each person, how old they are and how much, if any, of both time periods they experienced. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, some parts of the former seem more removed than others. I was thinking the other day how you don't see too many cars with chrome bumpers any more; just a random thought about the some of the minor changes over time.
When I was in middle school, they had "hippie day" where students dressed up like hippies; despite everyone I went to school with having grown up in the 80s, the hippie era seemed totally foreign to us. That was our parents' time - or at least most probably assumed it was, and took for granted how young many of them probably were during that period.
Recently I directed a school production of Footloose, and the play itself doesn't inherently reflect too much of the culture of the time it's set - in fact, I don't think there's any particular reason it had to be set in the 80s, but that's the look we decided to go with. I put together an "80s retrospective" to give the cast some 80s flavor; some of it, surprisingly they knew, other things they were surprised by (like Richard Simmons. That threw them for a loop). We discussed a little bit about the change in times, and they wrote character bios from the perspective of how old they'd be now in 2016, if the events of the play happened in '84. Some of the leads got a kick out of the idea that their characters would be 50; some of the adult characters even older than that
For them, the 80s are a pretty far removed point in time;roughly 20 years or more before they were born for most of them; and for some them that really would be about when their parents where around their age or a little older, just like Marty with his parents.
Kids now don't call collect from a payphone. They've always had the internet; even from their point of relative consciousness, they may not remember a time where there wasn't Facebook. Even if they've only just started using it themselves, it's been there for at least half their life or more - which from a point of awareness, at that age, is basically their "whole life". If one a teenager today went back to 1985 and was asked who the president was, they might very well get the same response as Doc gave to the "actor" Ronald Reagan in 1955.
There are things from when I was growing up, that I'll sometimes remember, having forgotten them or taken them for granted, because of how things have changed; and it'll give me a nostalgic chuckle. TV networks signing-off late at night, and there was literally nothing on TV until about 5 or 6 am.
I don't miss the way everything seemed to need some sort of wood veneer; like minivans - and just blatantly fake, painted on wood grain, purely for the look of it.
Grays and browns are the color scheme I've always associated with growing up in the early 80s, with occasionally puke green or burnt orange hold overs from the 70s thrown in; earth tones seemed to be a popular choice for a while, and then gaudy combinations of "neon" colors became the overcorrection, and carried into the early 90s, and has a distinct influence on Back 2. Thank God none of those style predictions for 2015 came true.
I don't remember as many places of real estate being development, the way my parents do - that might be a bigger generational difference, for me anyway. I can only think of one, "I remember when that was a field," anecdote, and it's only occurred within the last couple of years, so some of the teens today can say that too, and maybe more if or when that area changes over the next few years. Right now a lot of it still is farm land, so it's not saying much; and apart from that the town I grew up and the surrounding communities all seem generally the same. It's not like my parents, who can genuinely recall fields, where now it's a thoroughly settled and developed area, and has been for as long as I remember. A few places have been torn down, and I may occasionally give directions referencing where something used to be, if I think they might know where that was.
Printers don't have ribbons any more, and the paper is generally not attached ended to end and perforated. Few teens will know what it's like to have their wife and children die of dysentery on the trail to Oregon.
We had a breather for a few years, where we could sit back and laugh at the people who had mullets back when.... Now we have the "man bun," so we've reached the start of new hair style epoch cycle.
"I'm in it for the power and the free robes." - Harry Stone
people in the 80's would not be weirded out by us wearing t-shirts and jeans in to school.
They'd be able to eventually guestimate what a current computer was/how to use programs pretty easily even if most of them were unsure of what the internet/email was.
I think they could also figure out the purpose of a CD, DVD/blu-ray was. And what a flat screen digital TV was.
Might be a little stunned re the disappearance of the four food groups and new food labeling.....while everybody is getting bigger. (remember all of the fast/convenience food pushed in these movies). Surprise!!
Oh and the disappearance of smoking sections--first indoors and then outside.
Maybe they'd be looking for the card catalog/how to check out items at a library.
But since they had credit cards in that era---if somebody explained it's like a credit card---they'd quickly realize how library checkout worked.
"I think they could also figure out the purpose of a CD, DVD/blu-ray was. And what a flat screen digital TV was."
Especially since optical discs and digital video displays already existed in 1985. LaserDisc and CD date from 1978 and 1982 respectively, and the first LCD TV dates from 1982.