At this point in the Technology Age, any design of an actual working hoverboard is just a concept design, as they still don’t quite exist. But if they did, what would they look like? They couldn’t possibly retain the hideous look of the hot-pink mess that Marty McFly stole from that little girl in Back to the Future: Part II, could they? We probably won’t know for a while yet, but now we can look back on the original illustrations that birthed the post-skateboard craze in Robert Zemeckis’ sequel.

These concept images were created by artist John Bell, whose visual effects work on Back to the Future Part II earned him an Oscar nomination and a win at the BAFTAs. His talents have since gone into the productions of Back to the Future Part III, The Rocketeer, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Rango, with concept work for G.I. Joe: Retaliation serving as his most recent accomplishment. And judging from these drawings, it seems like Bell should have also worked on some underground comic books in the 1980s.

With three Michael Bay Transformers movies already in our rearview, and another, this summer’s Age of Extinction, looming on the horizon, we’ve already seen just about every vehicle imaginable turn into a giant robot at one time or another. While the act of shape shifting in and of itself is pretty damn cool, you have to wonder what it would look like if some of our favorite cinematic automobiles just so happened to be Transformers. And if you’ve thought of it, odds are that someone out in the wide, wild world of the Internet has probably thought of it, too. In this case, someone has, and that person happens to be a way, way better artist than I am, and the result is pretty damn sweet.

Artist Darren Rawlings has taken it upon himself to imagine iconic cars, trucks, buses, and what have you, as if they could also morph into big ass robots from space. This collection of awesome images definitely runs parallel to my tastes and predilections. It’s impossible not to look at these and get giddy thinking about all my favorite childhood properties, which almost all represented here. About the only ones not part of this collection are Airwolf and the Batmobile. The best part of these pictures is that they look like they could be characters from the actual animated Transformers series of our youth.

UPDATED: Well, that didn’t take long. After a bunch of people kept insisting the hoverboard video was the real deal, Funny or Die has finally come forward to take credit for it. You can see Christopher Llyod’s “apology” below, followed by the original viral video. But hey, at least we’re getting power laces…

Back to the Future has inspired all kinds of futuristic technology, including time-traveling DeLoreans, not to mention a serious yen for hoverboards and predictive sports almanacs. Nike harnessed all that Back to the Future love and in 2011 put it into a shoe: the futuristic Back to the Future II Air Mag. As awesome as those shoes were, they lacked one important detail: power laces. But Nike intends to rectify that situation that in 2015, the year Marty McFly wore those iconic kicks.

If there’s one thing we see a lot of here at GFR, it’s funny/cool/interesting videos. The problem is, there are too damn many of them out there and not nearly enough of us to write them all up. So every once in a while, when my blood pressure is particularly high and my hair is falling out in clumps and forming a debris field around my feet, it’s time to just round up a mess of them and throw them full-speed at your face. Welcome to the Giant Freakin’ Video Round-Up,

First up is Darth Vader’s “Facebook Look Back Video.” If you’ve got a Facebook account — and let’s be honest, who doesn’t at this point? — there’s a good chance you’ve seen your friends posting these “Look Back” videos, which Facebook lets you put together in honor of the social media giant’s tenth anniversary. They retrace your time on the site by showcasing some of your earliest posts, photos that got the most attention, that sort of thing. So what would show up if Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader had kept a Facebook account updated during his slide into the Dark Side? Unsurprisingly, there are lightsabers, there are revelations of surprising parentage, and there is choking — both Force and the standard variety.

Dr. Walter Bishop (Fringe)
By most, if not all definitions, Fringe’s Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) is a mad scientist. He experimented with sensory deprivation and LSD, spent decades in a mental institution, and even had pieces of his brain cut out at his own request. Oh, and he managed to tear a hole between two universes and generally disrupt the very fabric of reality as we know it. If that doesn’t earn him a place at the all-star table, I don’t know what does.

Walter has something that sets him apart from many of his mad kin, especially those who fall in the evil camp. Over the five years where Walter, his son Peter (Joshua Jackson), and FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) ran all over the globe, hopping dimensions left and right, saving the world more times than you can count, the elderly scientist formed the emotional core of the series. At times driven, power hungry, and neck-deep in a serious god complex, he is also fragile, sweet, loving, and afraid. The notion that he may be responsible for the end of multiple worlds, that he was once so blinded by ambition that he performed medical experiments on terrified children, absolutely haunts him. How do you cope with the fact that you may be responsible for the end of existence? That’s not an easy one to wrap your mind around, no matter how brilliant or crazy you may be.