Back to the Future is a franchise with a very close relationship to time for obvious reasons, but one of the most important details is that it manages to withstand it. The adventures of Marty and Doc Brown remain intact, and its special effects still hold up at a more than acceptable level, even with three decades behind them. Captain Disillusion on YouTube completed his exploration of the effects in Back to the Future last week, and here we share both videos.
The story tells us that Robert Zemeckis had no intention of making a sequel to Back to the Future. $380 million and four years later, Back to the Future II was arriving in theaters, and six months later we enjoyed its conclusion, as it was filmed back-to-back. Over time, Zemeckis said that Back to the Future II needed more postproduction, and that there were several holes in its rushed editing, but the film not only stood up, but became an unforgettable catalog of special effects. Have doubts about that? Then maybe Captain Disillusion can convince you:
Think about it for a moment: the past, the future, its holograms, the clothing, the flying cars, all the hoverboard scenes, three Michael J. Foxes in the same rehydrated pizza scene... we're talking about 1989. The best personal computers of that era ran MS-DOS 3.31 or IBM DOS 4.0. Industrial Light and Magic shattered several limits and rewrote multiple rules during the development of the trilogy, combining the best technology available with the talent of incredible people, true titans of engineering and miniature manipulation. And there were no shortcuts: when it was necessary to draw, they drew. If there was room to improvise, they did it. And when the scenes demanded a new system capable of controlling cameras with high precision, they built it.
Captain Disillusion needed three months and twenty minutes of video to explore all the contributions that Back to the Future made to the world of special effects, and it's worth every second. In the second video we can see the collaboration of Ami Yamato, a coffee-addicted YouTuber who always presents in animated form, and who definitely deserves a closer look.
You can find both videos on Captain Disillusion's YouTube channel.
