Jake

Idle Thumbs 177: The Good Ones

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This is why the Looper explanation of time travel is the best: don't think about it, it's happening, it doesn't matter why it's happening.

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it seems implied if you watch BTTF 1 separate from the others in the trilogy, that the reason Doc and Marty are friends is because Marty met Doc in the 50s.

 

I forget if I read it somewhere or if it was in the commentary for the movie, but I recall that the opening scene of the movie where Marty plays his guitar using the giant amp was created to provide an explanation for why they're friends, the idea being that Marty wanted to hang out with Doc so he could use the giant amp but they ended up becoming BFFs.

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Yeah, 2 is a bit of a mess and all over the place, which is what can easily happen when you want to actually explore branching possibilities resulting from changes in the past. It's a lot easier to keep the story clean and elegant when you are mostly restricting your action to a single time like 1 and 3 did.

That stuff doesn't really bug me though, at least not in a movie that isn't taking itself very seriously like BttF.

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This is why the Looper explanation of time travel is the best: don't think about it, it's happening, it doesn't matter why it's happening.

 

My favorite line about trying to explain time travel comes from the Gargoyles cartoon.  In one episode, Goliath and Xanatos end up in the past and before they return to the present, Goliath tells Xanatos that he would leave him there if he didn't fear the damage Xanatos would do to the timestream.  Xanatos' reply is "But you won't.  Because you didn't.  Time travel's funny that way."

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I generally give time travel a pass because it's so messy and not really the interesting part of these kinds of stories (I hear Primer is the only movie to do time travel well, but I haven't seen it yet because I'm garbage). What always bothered me more about BttF 1, even as a young kid, is that Biff tries to rape Marty's mom as a teenager and then years later he's employed as their oafish repairman AND NO ONE IS BOTHERED BY THIS. Seems kind of weird of you, beloved 1980s children's movie!

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Yeah, 2 is a bit of a mess and all over the place, which is what can easily happen when you want to actually explore branching possibilities resulting from changes in the past. It's a lot easier to keep the story clean and elegant when you are mostly restricting your action to a single time like 1 and 3 did.

That stuff doesn't really bug me though, at least not in a movie that isn't taking itself very seriously like BttF.

 

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong I LOVE the Back to the Future trilogy.  I'm not bothered by the complications, its just something I can't help thinking about after seeing all the movies a thousand times.

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I didn't realize that Sunless Sea was Early Access, I was pretty much sold on buying it this weekend, but maybe I'll wait until it releases.

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I find it extra fun/fascinating/horrifying when the length of time traveled is very short like in Primer or Timecrimes.

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Here's a good video of Gang Beasts, from Giant Bomb. It looks hilarious.

Can we get an Idle Thumbs stream for the love of dog?!

 

Holy shit that game looks amazing!

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I find it extra fun/fascinating/horrifying when the length of time traveled is very short like in Primer or Timecrimes.

 

Like going one minute into the future?

 

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And never returning!

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I find it extra fun/fascinating/horrifying when the length of time traveled is very short like in Primer or Timecrimes.

 

Primer is so hard to talk about because all of the things that are really interesting about it end up giving away too much.

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I don't get caught up in being terribly critical of time-travel stuff, because at the end of the day if something is just fun and enjoyable I'm pleased. If I had to give critical thought to time travel, it would be that Dragon Ball Z (of all things, stick with me for a sec) is an example of it being handled best - you don't time travel within your own line, but leap into alternate dimensions / timelines at the same time. It's better at avoiding logical errors.

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Holy shit that game looks amazing!

The newest build allows 8 people to play at once. It's pandemonium.

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The newest build allows 8 people to play at once. It's pandemonium.

 

 I wish I had more controllers and more space and more friends. But mostly more controllers.

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I generally give time travel a pass because it's so messy and not really the interesting part of these kinds of stories (I hear Primer is the only movie to do time travel well, but I haven't seen it yet because I'm garbage). What always bothered me more about BttF 1, even as a young kid, is that Biff tries to rape Marty's mom as a teenager and then years later he's employed as their oafish repairman AND NO ONE IS BOTHERED BY THIS. Seems kind of weird of you, beloved 1980s children's movie!

 

This is definitely a really big deal for me. Beloved eighties children's movies had some fucking weird, gross shit in them. See also: The Goonies, Monster Squad.

 

 

I don't even try to think about the time travel in BTTF anymore, because then you have to think about stuff like the fact that there's logically another Marty running around somewhere at the end of the first and third movies that our Marty is a changeling for, or why in the third movie Doc Brown never decides to just use the perfectly functioning DeLorean he's stashed away after Marty arrives and his DeLorean gets wrecked.

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I have only played Gang Beasts with 4 people and that seems like the optimum number.  Though playing it with 8 does seem like it would be glorious.    

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The other is the weird delay in the effects of time travel that the movie shows, such as when Marty's siblings slowly fade from his picture in the first film or the tombstone changing in the third one.  Its possible that in this universe, the changes hadn't "caught up" yet so old Biff went back to the future he left from.  Then again other stuff changes almost instantly such as went Marty stops fading from existence as George and Lorraine kiss.

Ryan North had a go at rationalising the delayed effects of changes in the timeline in his review of the BttF novelisation; I don't remember whereabouts it is in that blog, or much about his hypothesis other than that the effects of things that Marty changed gradually rippled forwards through time to 1985, which seems like a pretty obvious assumption to make. I'm pretty sure it was more clever than that! Anyway, I strongly recommend reading that whole thing (It's also available as an eBook), because it's brilliantly funny.

 

Back to the Future (1) is one of those movies that as a kid I liked in part because it was part of this epic three part story, but at this point I much prefer to look at it as it was originally presented -- as a single film that had no plans for sequels or continuity or a universe or mythos or reason, and was concerned with being a thrilling and interesting story in and of itself, not how it slotted into a rule system.

I always thought I preferred the second movie as a kid, because it had future stuff in it, but going back to it as an adult, I realised that it's kind of a mess. Fun, but much goofier than the first movie, and with some mega-clumsy exposition. The first movie, however, is so tight, and everything is so purposeful.

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I only watched Back to the Future as (sort of) an adult, and I found the fact that Marty doesn't mind at all that his fucking up the past has changed his family almost beyond recognition somehow extremely sad. "I love my new successful and self-confident stranger family much better than the pathetic losers I had spent and the entirety of my life with."

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Something I like about Primer is how shitty the method of time travel is. It's not get in this awesome car or enter an infinitely big police box and go anywhere(anytime?) you want in an instant. No, you crawl inside this small-ass box and just lay there for a few hours.

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I was really happy to hear the Sunless Seas has a non-binary option for gender; that's something I rarely, if ever, see in video games.

 

Primer is a neat film. It takes all the glory and spectacle that most stories bring to time traveling and throws it out the window. Time travel would of course be done by a bunch of nerdy ass dudes who wouldn't know how to deal with it when they go through it and that it's story would be elliptical and somewhat Lynchian. 

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I have never actually seen BttF 2 all the way through. I've seen essentially all parts of it but not sat down and just watched it as an unbroken whole. It's the one that feels like the out of place crazy weird movie to me.

 

I've seen 3 by far the most times. Because, I mean, cowboys and time trains.

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DooMero is actually well known for his "Other games in Doom" experiments.  Making the Doom engine do things that it has no business doing is kind of his thing.

 

If you take a look at his Youtube channel you can see all sorts of crazy stuff.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UgXQpWrT84&list=UU-f6moVlnHkm-b58De34RTA

 

This one won't embed for some reason but it's a remake of Resident Evil 2 with coop 

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