195 words about hoverboards

And we won't float on, okay

In 1989’s Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly travels to 2015 and steps into, well, a very fun Hollywood set. It’s a bit of retro-futurism as only the past can imagine a futuristic future to be, a mishmash of ‘50s and ‘80s design concepts, punked up then with a bunch of silly thrown in. There’s a holographic ad for Jaws 10 that makes Marty cower before declaring that the shark “still looks fake.” There’s a booming video billboard that dominates the soundscape. There’s an antique store with stuff from 1989, including a sports almanac that Zemeckis’ camera lingers on, lustful for its knowledge. There’re hoverboards, and they’re the best. Watching this sequence now, everything comes off garish and obnoxious, but as a kid it was enchanting. I dreamed of being an adult and gliding down that zany boulevard — frictionless, buoyant. Now I’m nearing 40 and it’s 2021. Yeah, we dream of finding the future’s almanac in the form of some algorithm or app that holds the key to projection and profit. Our phones could probably engineer space rockets, but they don’t take us anywhere. Our planet’s dying and we still don’t have hoverboards.