Trivia / Number Two

• Life Imitates Art: Several innovations seen in this script's version of 2015 ended up coming true (more or less):
  • Marty and Jennifer run into a McDonald's restaurant where customers can order from an electronic console instead of waiting in line, pay by scanning their thumbprint, and receive their food at their table. In real life, McDonald's happened to introduce touchscreen kiosks in 2015, and contactless payment methods have been around since 1997 and became widespread around 2010 (though they tend to use cards or mobile phones, not thumbprints). However, table service wasn't introduced at McDonald's until 2017.
  • They use a similar public kiosk to find listings for nearby retail bookstores instead of looking through the yellow pages; by 2015 in real life, people had been doing the same thing on their phones with apps like Google Maps for years.
  • A bookstore offers electronic books in multiple formats; in real life, the first electronic books appeared on the consumer market in 1992, ebook formats began competing with each other in earnest around 2007 with the release of the Amazon Kindle, and ebooks outsold paper ones in the US for the first time in 2012.
  • The bookstore also offers high-definition home video in multiple formats; in real life, HD DVD had lost to Blu-Ray in the HD format wars by 2015, though you can now choose between buying videos on disc, as downloadable files or through streaming (though the latter two usually aren't sold in brick-and-mortar stores).
  • The bookstore clerk hints that the penny has been phased out and that cash transactions in 2015 are rounded to the nearest nickel; this hasn't happened in the United States yet, but it did happen in Canada in 2013.
  • The same clerk references "privacy activists" who avoid using electronic devices and payments as much as possible to avoid being spied on, a fear that was very commonplace by 2015 in real life, given that Edward Snowden had revealed the extent of the global surveillance apparatus two years previously.
  • Marty's son Norman apparently does Griff's homework entirely electronically, using encrypted files with traceable metadata. This was indeed commonplace by 2015, though in real life kids don't often carry around lots of different disks.
  • Marty stumbles upon a holographic Huey Lewis and the News concert; in real life, a posthumous "holographic" performance by Tupac Shakur made major headlines in 2012, and by 2018 holographic concert tours by dead musicians like Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse and even Frank Zappa were becoming a lucrative industry.
    • However, it should be noted that these aren't true holograms; they use a projection technique called a "Pepper's ghost" that was invented in 1862, are two-dimensional, and are distinguishable from real, tangible people. The band Marty watches are three-dimensional and he can't tell they're holograms until they vanish.
    • The real band was still touring in the flesh in 2015, but had to stop in 2018 after Lewis' hearing disorder Meniere's Disease worsened, so who knows, we may get a holographic version of the band sooner than we thought.

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