So Wednesday was the day. October 21st, the exact date Marty McFly lands in the future in Part II, and I will say up front I'm not going to do the thing every single tech blog on the planet did this week, which is a big misty-eyed rundown of what the movie got right and wrong. You've read that post already. You've read it four times. Flying cars, no. Hoverboards, kind of, sort of, not really. Everybody's tired of it and so am I.
What I actually want to talk about is Pepsi Perfect, because I spent an embarrassing chunk of Wednesday afternoon driving to three different gas stations near my apartment looking for one, and came home with nothing but a regular Pepsi and a bad mood.
For anyone who somehow missed it: Pepsi made a limited run of bottles matching the prop soda Marty drinks in the movie, clear glass, retro label, the whole bit. Twenty bucks or so if you actually found one at retail. Within hours they were showing up on eBay for four, five, six times that. I watched one listing go from $60 to $140 while I was sitting in a Wawa parking lot refreshing the page like an idiot. By Wednesday night people were flipping cases of the stuff for actual real money, like it was concert tickets and not soda. I get that this is just how limited drops work now, I'm not naive about it, but there's something specifically funny about a movie that was supposedly warning us about corporate excess in the future turning into the exact merchandising stunt it was joking about. Doc Brown would have opinions.
The part of the week I actually thought was worth caring about was the Nike Mag thing, and barely anybody I talked to knew it was happening. Nike built real, working self-lacing shoes, the actual power-laced high-tops from the movie, and instead of just selling them they're auctioning off a limited number of pairs on eBay through the end of the month with every dollar going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Bids were already climbing into the tens of thousands per pair by Wednesday night. That's the version of this whole nostalgia wave I can get behind — somebody actually built the impossible object from the movie and pointed the money at something real, instead of just printing a label on a soda bottle. Fox has Parkinson's himself, obviously, so it's not some random tie-in, it's personal for the guy whose face was on the poster thirty years ago.
I rewatched the trilogy that night with my friend Dev, which we do roughly every two years whether either of us wants to or not, and I will die on the hill that Part III is the weak one. Cowboy setting, sure, fine, but it drags in the middle in a way the first two never do, and nobody's going to convince me otherwise over beers at 11pm on a Wednesday.
Then Friday, Steve Jobs opened wide, the Aaron Sorkin one with Fassbender playing Jobs across three product launches instead of doing a normal biopic. Didn't see it yet, going to try to catch it this coming week before it disappears from the good theater and ends up only playing at the mall multiplex at 10:40pm. Early word from people I trust is that it's more of a Sorkin movie than a Jobs movie, which honestly sounds like exactly what I want, since the last thing I need is another two hours of turtleneck hagiography.
Anyway. That's the week. A soda bottle that costs more used than new, some genuinely good shoes doing genuinely good work for a genuinely bad disease, a rewatch that confirmed my priors about a thirty-year-old sequel, and a movie I still haven't seen sitting in my Fandango cart. Not exactly the future Marty promised us, but it's the one we've got, and at least nobody tried to sell me a real hoverboard this week. Give it time.