April 27, 2018

Back to the Future, by Kim Smith

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, Back to the Future was my favourite movie. Marty McFly was so unfathomably cool hitching a ride on his skateboard around town, and the movie suggested a perfectly ordered universe where there was such a thing as destiny (and density) in that mom was always going to fall in love with dad, Michael J. Fox actually invented rock and roll, and the bully wouldn’t triumph. I mean, just as long as no one disrupted the Space Time Continuum, obviously. In a perfectly ’80s anecdote, I will tell you that I once tried to install a flux capacitor (I think it was a a coat hanger) to make a time machine out of my Dukes of Hazzard Big Wheel. Sadly, it didn’t actually work, probably because I couldn’t get any plutonium.

A few months ago, I decided it was finally time for us to sit down and watch Back to the Future en famille. (“Your kids, Marty! We’ve got to do something about your kids!”) And unlike many movies that had delighted me once upon a time (The Goonies? So shrill!) Back to the Future held up perfectly. 33 years later, Marty’s suspenders/puffy vest outfit just works somehow, the Huey Lewis is fantastic, the ’80s are the future arrived at, and the jokes are still funny—remember Uncle “Jailbird” Joey and “get used to those bars, kid?” Plus, Wayne from The Wonder Years in a Davy Crockett hat.

Harriet loved Back to the Future as much as I did when I was her age, which has made the new Back to the Future picture book an especially coveted item at our house.

Part of Quirk Books’ series of nostalgic pop-culture picture books (whose titles include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the X Files and E.T.) by Canadian illustrator Kim Smith, these books are a kids’-eye-view of the pop-classics we grew up loving. Skipping some bits—the Libyan terrorists, George McFly as a peeping tom, the whole “Calvin Klein” mix-up surrounding Lorraine and Marty’s underwear—the film’s plot is told in picture book form, right down to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance and the disappearing photo of Marty and his siblings in front of the wishing well.

Will Marty be able to teach his dad to stand up for himself, reunite his parents, invent rock and roll, and drive his De Lorean by the Hill Valley clock tower at the precise moment that lightning strikes, by which powering his journey back to the future? Well, no spoilers here, but I’ll tell you that the story ends with Doc Brown and Marty heading off on another time travelling adventure.