Giant Freakin Robot

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.

Great Scott! Almost 30 years after its release and Back to the Future is still a pop culture phenomenon. The trilogy that sparked the imagination of filmmakers, engineers, and fans is arguably the best film trilogy of all time, surpassing Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings. While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get Back to the Future Part IV, or god forbid a remake, a new iteration of the time travel franchise will make its way to the London stage.

As reported on /Film, creators Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale are working to bring Back to the Future to London’s West End as a musical. The two are reportedly working with Amblin Entertainment and Universal Stage Productions to bring Back to the Future to the stage. Universal Stage Productions previously worked on the musical adaptations of Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz and Billy Elliot, which debuted on Broadway and in the West End, respectively. From Bob Gale (via BTTF.com):

We’re thrilled to be at last in partnership with a creative and producing team that will create a show that is true to the spirit of the film without being a slavish remake. Director Jamie Lloyd is full of passion, energy and imaginative ideas and we are overjoyed to have the film’s composer Alan Silvestri composing the music, with lyrics by Glen Ballard who has also collaborated with Zemeckis before on many projects. With all of us working together, we know the integrity of the material will be preserved in a production that will be a wonderful companion to the Trilogy. We intend to use music from the movie along with brand new songs to make a version of Back to the Future that is fresh, entertaining, and takes advantage of all the amazing things that can now be done on stage. We can’t think of a better way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film.

In 1989 Back to the Future II showed us a vision of a not-too-distant future where the world had become a strange place where things hover off of the ground much more often than they do in our own time. That particular imagining of the future is almost upon us—Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly flies his DeLorean into October of 2015—and because our sort obsess over this sort of thing, we keep comparing the reality of the film to the reality of our reality, to see how the two stack up against each other. This new inforgraphic does the same thing, listing out some of the inventions that the movie shows, and seeing which of those have come to pass over the last 25 years.

In this image, which popped up on T-shirts.com, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) himself—sort of—guides you through items that have and have not materialized since Robert Zemeckis’ second time going back to the…you get it. How prescient was the film? Like most predictions, it was way, way off about some things, but it did manage to hit the mark on a few. Overall it’s batting about .500, which, given the circumstances, isn’t bad. There’s still one still left to happen, and a couple inventions even Hollywood didn’t see coming.