So Back to the Future Day happened this past Wednesday, the 21st, and I feel like I need to write this down before the whole thing fades into "remember when," because it was dumber and more fun than I expected and also I lost twenty bucks to it.
Quick recap for anyone who was off the grid: October 21, 2015 is the exact date Marty McFly lands in when he goes forward in time in Back to the Future Part II. The internet has known this was coming for years, so of course everybody and their marketing department showed up for it. Pepsi did a limited run of "Pepsi Perfect," the clear plastic bottle from the movie, six and a half thousand bottles at $20.15 each (get it) sold through Amazon starting at 12:38pm Eastern, which is the actual minute Marty arrives in the movie. I had the page open. I had my card info ready. I refreshed it like I was trying to get Springsteen tickets. And it was gone before I even got past "add to cart" - sold out in something like a minute, maybe less. Within the hour bottles were already relisted on eBay for $100, $200, one listing I saw was pushing past a grand for a case. I did not pay a grand for soda water that's allegedly just regular Pepsi with a fancier lid. I have my limits, barely.
The part of the day I actually liked was the Nike thing, and it got way less attention than the soda. Nike showed off the real, physical Mag - the self-lacing shoe from the movie - and instead of just doing a splashy sale, they announced they're making 89 pairs and running it as a lottery through an app, sometime next year, with the money going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Fox played Marty, obviously, and he's had Parkinson's since the 90s. That's the one piece of all this hype that isn't just a company printing money off nostalgia. Everything else - the hoverboard knockoffs, the "future" home appliances no one asked for, some ad I saw for self-lacing shoes that definitely were not the real Nike ones and definitely will not lace themselves - was noise. Also can we talk about how half the internet is calling those two-wheeled balancing scooter things "hoverboards" now even though they very much touch the ground and have wheels. Marty would be unimpressed. I'm unimpressed. Call it what it is, a Segway with the handle cut off.
Separately, and only loosely related except that it's also tech nostalgia dressed up for theaters, I went and saw the Steve Jobs movie this weekend, the Danny Boyle one with Michael Fassbender, now that it's finally in wide release instead of just a handful of cities. I went in skeptical because it's basically three long backstage arguments strung together - the Macintosh launch in 84, the NeXT launch in 88, the iMac launch in 98 - and almost no actual computer stuff happens on screen. But it works better than it has any right to, mostly because Fassbender plays Jobs as someone who's genuinely unpleasant to be around and the movie doesn't try to sand that down into "eccentric genius." Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman steals every scene she's in, honestly. If you go in expecting a product-launch highlight reel you'll be bored. If you go in expecting a fight, you'll be fine.
Funny pairing, watching a movie about how ugly and human the actual history of computers was, in the same week everyone's cheering over a soda bottle because a movie said it'd exist someday. One of these things required decades of actual work and burned relationships and a company that fired its own founder. The other required a licensing deal and a bottling plant. I know which one I respect more, even if I definitely wanted the soda more in the moment.
Anyway. If anyone did manage to grab a Pepsi Perfect at retail and wants to sell it to a guy who missed it by forty seconds, my email's in the sidebar. I'm not proud.