I was hanging a clock in my bathroom in 1999 when I slipped and fell. When I came to, I had a vision, a vision of this… Actually, I could only wish that’s what happened. Here’s the real story. In 1999, I was just seven years old and had just gotten home to start my after-school tradition. That tradition was to change out of my school uniform, take my shoes off, pay no attention to any homework I had, play with my next-door neighbor, Emerson, and then go to my room. My room for some reason had bunk beds even though I had no siblings close to my age, and there’s no way my brother (twenty-three years older than me) would want to take the top bunk. But once I arrived in my fortress of solitude, I would find the remote and turn on the Disney Channel.
Disney Channel was awesome when I was a kid. You had Boy Meets World, Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, and others that I am sure I am forgetting. Anyhow, Disney Channel would always show a movie at seven o’clock Central, but something odd happened with the schedule one fateful evening. Instead of a Disney Channel Original Movie playing, there was a marathon planned for that evening: three time travel films of which I had never heard prior to that day.
Now, let’s take a pause there just for a second. I mean, we have all the time in the world, right? Many fans of Back to the Future will know the famous story that Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis (the cowriters of the film) tell about pitching their idea for a time travel story. The idea they pitched was a story about a boy who goes back in time and accidentally interrupts his parents’ first meeting, which led to his mother falling in love with him and caused him to never be born in the future.
As the story goes, every studio they met with said they were looking for a raunchier 1980s comedy and this film seem to have too much of a soft side. The heads of all the major studios told Bob and Bob the same exact thing: “You know what? You should pitch this to Disney! They would love it!” So, Bob and Bob took this advice and went to Disney, which told them they were out of their minds if they thought the “House of Mouse” would ever produce a film with an incestual relationship between a mother and her son. I don’t blame them for this. Back to the Future’s plot could be worrisome if you didn’t see the film that eventually came. Either way, Disney wanted no parts of the odd story Bob and Bob had concocted.
I tell the story because eventually, I experienced the greatest cinematic adventure in movie history for the first time, ironically, on the Disney Channel. I will never forget it, sitting there on the lower bunk when the title card that came across my television screen read, “up next, Back to the Future.” From the moment I heard the title, I knew I was locked-in. The idea of time travel was fascinating, and when I saw the DeLorean time machine and Doc Brown and the music and Marty’s life preserver, I had entered a world where I felt at home. That night, one film into the next, I stayed up way past my bedtime to watch the stories Gale and Zemeckis had dreamed up. The next morning, thankfully a Saturday, I ran down the stairs as my parents were making a sweet Southern breakfast of scrambled eggs, pigs-in-a-blanket, and grits and told them about this phenomenal story I saw last night on the Disney Channel. I begged and pleaded with my parents to take me to the local Blockbuster so I could rent these three movies and dive back into their world. My mother obliged, as she always did when she could tell I truly wanted something, and we drove down to Blockbuster that moment. Well, not that moment exactly, because I couldn’t leave those eggs just sitting there.
After finishing my feast, I entered the blue and yellow cladded Blockbuster, went straight to the Science Fiction section, and found the trilogy. Sadly, Back to the Future Part III was rented out and I could only rent parts one and two. As soon as I got back to the house, I ran to the linen closet and grabbed a large, pink, hand-woven blanket of my grandmother’s (that in my mind was made in 1955) off the shelf. I took that blanket and some art supplies to the room in the house with the largest, albeit square, television set and spread the blanket in the middle of the room. I dumped my bucket of art supplies—an assortment of colored pencils, ink pens, and crayons—and did my best to draw blue sparks and red lightning designs on white printer paper so I could place them on either side of the blanket to imitate the flux capacitor at full flux. As soon as I believed my calculations were correct and my version of the time machine was ready for temporal displacement, I went eighty-eight mph back to what should be the United States of America’s capital: Hill Valley, California, and the world that Gale and Zemeckis created.
To say the very least, I was obsessed—there’s no other word to use for it. Like many kids, when something catches your attention, you latch onto it and dive in headfirst. Similar to the way I was with the WWF starting in 1998, Back to the Future claimed a large part of real estate in my brain. I could not wait to get back to Edgar Allen Poe Elementary School Monday morning to tell my friends about these brand-new movies I had just discovered. To my surprise, I was the only one who watched that Disney Channel marathon over the weekend. Even more troublesome to me was that no one else in Mrs. Gray’s first grade class had even heard of the films. Before we move further, I want to let you know that I did do my due diligence during that time. I felt it was rather odd I had just watched these films and that I had a teacher who shared her surname with a popular book of sports statistics. I approached Mrs. Gray before lunch one day and I did indeed inquire if she had written the Gray’s Sports Alamac. I thought I had a lot of circumstantial evidence since were nearing the end of the twentieth century with the year 2000 quickly approaching, and I thought the fact she was an English teacher was suspect because writing a book would not be out of the realm of possibility for someone with her skill. So, needless to say, I thought the chances were rather high that she penned the book that would cause Marty, Doc, and company such great angst and peril. Once I confronted her with all of this information, Mrs. Gray quickly denied any involvement or connection with the creation of the almanac. All these years later, I am not so sure I can take her at her word, but I’ve moved on.
Back to the Future became my life, and it’s all I could think about. Just a couple years later, I would become even more connected to this series in a way I never thought I would. Most kids, if they are lucky, have both a mom and a dad in their lives, but they are really fortunate if they have a relationship with their grandparents. I was one of the lucky ones. I saw my grandparents every day after school. My grandparents were more than just my mother’s parents—they were my second mother and father and two of my closest friends. That is what made my grandmother’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease so tough. When I was nine years old, I didn’t know the severity of the condition, but I was more than aware of it because my cinematic idol’s real-life counterpart, Michael J. Fox, suffered from the same diagnosis.
Over the next several years, I saw the disease take a toll on my grandmother’s body. She eventually succumbed to it in 2016 after more than a decade of battling the disease. I share this because her diagnosis brought me even closer to these films, and Michael J. Fox became a symbol of hope for me, my family, and others who were affected by Parkinson’s. Fox’s raising of awareness, funds, and research through the Michael J. Fox Foundation has greatly benefited so many people. I support the foundation on a daily basis by wearing my “Team Fox” bracelet that matches the colors of the Back to the Future logo. I will forever love Michael J. Fox not just for these films, but for doing everything he does to find a cure for this horrific ailment. Michael is truly a man who believes, “if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”
I continued my love for Back to the Future and consumed all the content I could get my hands on. With each release of an anniversary edition of the films, I happily spent my money so I could see new special features and learn more about my favorite franchise. In the months leading up to the actual year 2015, which Doc, Marty, Jennifer, and Einstein travel to in Back to the Future Part II, I wanted to see what was out there as far as a countdown to Future Day. In 2015, podcasts were starting to boom, and you could find a show covering whatever