I love time-travel movies. Part of it is the thought of ‘what might it be like’ when skipping ahead into the future. The nostalgia of rewinding into the past definitely is fun. Experiencing an ‘alternate universe’ always gets the brain thinking. And those ‘fish out of water’ moments are either hilarious, painful, or both. Though Martin Lawrence makes it work pretty well in this scene from The Black Knight.
While trying to remember of my favorite time travel movies, I came across this Top 50 Time Travel Movies Countdown.
So I might as well get further off my original game plan for this blog and list my own top 10. Sorry Hot Tub Time Machine, but even letting the Browns beat John Elway and the Broncos couldn’t quite get you on the list.
#10 Frequency (Dennis Quaid Hamm radios with his son with the 1969 Amazin’ Mets mixed in)
#9 12 Monkeys (Bruce Willis movie)
#8 The Time Travel’s Wife (guilty pleasure confession: I kinda like a good chick flick. Especially one with Rachel McAdams!!!)
#7 Austin Powers—The Spy Who Shagged Me (groovy, baby!)
#6 The Butterfly Effect (this underrated Ashton Kutchar flick makes ya think!)
#5 Groundhog Day (I read somewhere that supposedly Bill Murray’s character re-lived his day like 10,000 times since it takes about that long to become a master pianist!)
#4 A Christmas Carol (The 1970 musical Scrooge is my favorite version of this Charles Dickens classic)
#3 Terminator 2 (the special effects of this movie are still mind-blowing today!)
#2 It’s A Wonderful Life (One of my top-5 all-time favorite movies. And confession #2—I cry like a baby when I watch the end alone. I can just hold the tears off when I have to be a man around others).
And my #1 time-travel movie is….
I saw this as an 8th grader in the summer of 1985. I watched it as a father with my three kids in 2013. They loved it. And I watched it about 100 times in between. Our hero, Marty McFly travels back 30 years in this timeless classic. But you might not remember in the first sequel, Marty travels 30 years into the future—the mysterious far off time of 2015! What was that world like? A time of flying cars, floating skateboards, and—get this crazy vision—the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series!
<script type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8″ src=”http://static.polldaddy.com/p/8276476.js”></script>
<noscript><a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/8276476/”>Which of these is your favorite time travel movie?</a></noscript>
As I was taking in all of the sights and scenes in Dover Crater Stadium Thursday evening as the Tornadoes took on Team Canada, I wondered what Marty McFly would think of how high school football has changed in the last 30 years.
#1: I thought Astroturf was only for the Astrodome and my grandpa’s back porch!
In the 80’s, the only place around with turf for high schoolers was the Akron Rubber Bowl. And the turf back then was brutal—a heavy dose of carpet burns with a few blown-out knees sprinkled in. Now, Dover, Phila, and a majority of Stark County schools have it. And it is as plush and beautiful as your grandpa’s well-manicured front lawn.
I was fortunate to get to play on turf once in my 30 high school games. This season, my alma mater will be playing only two games on grass! But you know what McFly won’t see anymore on this newfangled turf? This…
Or, more importantly, this…
#2 What’s with the uniforms? Are they football players or soldiers?
30 years ago, you stuffed your knee and thigh pads in their pockets (the bigger, the better), put your hip and tailbone pads on a belt (or in one of those hand-me-down girtles), and if you were lucky, got to mix in a neck roll with your shoulder pads and helmet. If you were a lineman, maybe you had a pair of forearm pads. Everything was loose and heavy and old.
Like Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves…
Or maybe Mac Aljancic in All the Wrong Moves…
From this background of this picture, it looks like some New Phila 1986 seniors did a number on the Dover Brickhouse wall!
By the way, Tom Cruise was a pretty good corner in that movie! He needs to listen to his coach, though, and play the ball. Browns’ corner Leon McFadden might want to try that as well.
Now let’s look at the 2014 uniform…
Everything is tight and sleek and modernistic.
Many high schoolers spend $400 or so on spikes, girdles, padded undershirts, chinstraps, facemasks, mouth guards, and socks. Don’t believe me? Just go to Dick’s Sporting Goods & bring a calculator.
And you gotta make sure everything you buy has either this…
Or this…
# 3 Shot gun every play? Who do you think you are?
Roger Staubach?
The game has definitely changed at every level, especially high school. Thirty years ago, it was a big night if a guy ran for more than 100 yards or passed for more than 150 yards. Now, its not that unusual to see that in a half, and maybe even in a quarter.
Someone once sent me a link to a YouTube video of highlights of one of my brother’s football games from 1992. What I found interesting is that the fans were going nuts on plays that gained 10 yards. Now, that’s just another play. Kinda like riding the Gemini at Cedar Point. Those high hills (and thrills) don’t seem so high as they did 30 years ago.
And ust about every school runs the spread offense with the shot gun and 4 or 5 receivers. Makes those ground-oriented wishbone, wing-T, and power-I offenses look like watching a silent movie.
#4 Am I at a football game or a Las Vegas show?
Off the field, entertainment in McFly’s days was pretty limited outside of the band’s halftime show. You could mix in some cowbells, an airhorn or two, cheerleaders chucking little plastic balls into the stands, and maybe crawling under the bleachers to find some lost treasures. And on a big night, you might get this…
I couldn’t help but use this again. I don’t know who it is, but Isn’t this an awesome picture!!!
What do we have nowadays? A sound system and music play list that would make even the best disco DJ envious.
And I thought you had to be in the NFL to run through one of these inflatable football helmets…
Here is a picture of Crater Stadium’s scoreboard in 1988…
Pretty flashy stuff!!! it has a Pepsi logo, and even the down and distance!!! Side note to this photo: this was the first night that my wife and I saw each other. Well, kind of. I am betting that as Dover JV cheerleader, she glanced at me on the field at some point. And being a teenage boy, I’m sure I took a moment to check out the opposing cheerleading squad during warm-ups. Especially a fox like this…
Little did we know that destiny would bring us together 4 years later at Muskingum College!
Back to our topic. Here is the 2014 version…
A Video screen on a scoreboard at a football game? The only way McFly could watch a video in his day was with one of these…
Marty would be overwhelmed with all of these advancements. It would be like Disney World to him. But for us 2014’ers, it would be no big deal. If fact, all these bells and whistles might even lose the battle for our attention much of the night to one of these…
