Back to the future:The story

Back to the future:The story

Back to the future

Back to the future: the story (1985) is a storybook by Robert Loren Fleming based on the film Back to the future (1985), directed by Robert Zemeckis, and illustrated internally with footage from the film. In fact, the text of the book is exactly the same as the story of the film, and it‘s film script that Robert Loren Fleming has rewritten into a novellas, which allows the reader to get a quick idea of what the film is about, and a quick recollection of the exciting episodes of the film. This book is an officially licensed copy of the Back to the Future film, published in the same year as the film's release, with the publication date following the film's release, so the audience for this book is not those who are casual viewers, or people interested in the content of the time story, but rather those who have a love for the Back to the Future film itself. Unlike Back to the Future (1985), a novel written by George Gipe that was also published in the same year as a complete companion novel to the film, Back to the future: the story is less of a storybook and more of a fan's collector's manual. Its appearance has enriched the animation, theme parks, toys, games, comics and other spin-offs that have been developed as a result of this film series to another level.

The main character of the book's story is young Martin McFly, who is energetic, loves rock music, and develops a strong friendship with scientist Elmer Brown. Elmer has invented a time machine, which is actually a modified limousine that travels through time and space. The story begins with Emmer demonstrating how the Time Machine can be operated by teleporting a cat from one point in time to another, showing what the machine can do. But one night, Martin is accidentally caught up in a time machine adventure. When a group of criminals attack Elmer, Martin must evade them, but he accidentally activates the time machine and takes himself back to 1955. In 1955, Martin encounters the parents of his youth, George and Lorraine McFly. However, his presence is a threat to the story of their meeting and love. To prevent himself from being erased, Martin must help young Elmer and find a way back to the future. In doing so, Martin finds himself in a very complicated situation. He has a series of very interesting conflicts with young George McFly, young Lorraine McFly, and a schoolyard bully named Baines. To keep his future self-alive, Martin has to manipulate events so that his parents can meet and fall in love in 1955. At the same time, he must avoid changing too many historical details that would change the future. At the same time, he befriends a younger Elmer, with whom he co-operates in restoring the timeline. Elmer had some difficulties in this era but found a way to solve the problem with Martin's help. Martin's efforts are ultimately successful, and he repairs the timeline, secures his existence, and manages to return to 1985.

There's no doubt about Back to the Future's success as a film. The topic of time travel is a never-ending theme in cinema, and Back to the Future is a classic example of a series of films about time travel. This series of films about time travel is not good enough if you look at it from the point of view of rigorous reality-theoretic science and rigorous logical rationality, because it only explains the concepts and principles involved in achieving time travel in a very simple way, and throughout the entire story, time travel and time paradoxes are presented like children's education, gently touching the edges of the topic without having to go into depth. And that's what makes this book suitable for all ages in terms of content, and in fact it is a very ordinary popular storybook - without any deeper meaning, without any exploration of the science, and simply as a scripted read.

The book uses a lot of film footage as illustrations between the stories, and famous scenes from the film appear as pictures in the book, printed right next to the descriptions in the text. This is because Back to the Future is different from other films of the same subject in that it has a unique style of combining science fiction, which was very advanced at the time, with a great deal of comedy, and the essence of the film is to show the modern life and emotions of ordinary Americans by going back in time, this has led to countless stories that have made people laugh. Before the 1980s, this first attempt was unprecedented. "the language to master or reproduce the visual aspect and emotional impact of the scene is insufficient."(Ann Lewis; 4-5; 2016), the film, because of its visual uniqueness, makes it easy for the audience to understand and recognize the actions or personalities of the characters in the story, often an action as well as an expression that would require more words to describe in a literary text, and this is when the illustrations in the book play a big role. Whether it is the scene where Martin travels to the farmhouse or the Doctor climbs the spire of the church, the reader can look at the illustrations and understand or remember what is happening.

Stories are always thought-provoking. In this book, as in the film, the philosophical questions raised are also thought-provoking: What is the meaning of scientific creation? Would people still strive for their destiny if they could foretell it? After exploring the possibilities of time travel and its significance at multiple levels in the story, the film's thematic and ideological nature is also sublimated, and it tells us such an easy-to-understand and profoundly difficult truth in a not very complicated story.

Compare that to the Back to the Future spin-offs that are popular all over the world, the book seems to be less popular than the toys, moulds, and games, and therefore lacks many reviews and impressions of this book, and even now the book is hard to find on the market. In the catalogue of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (BDCM) it is only described as an "illustrated photo book". The main reason for this is that film is often seen as a more relaxed and entertaining form of media. Viewers tend to choose films that can easily pass the time and provide visual and auditory enjoyment, whereas reading a text usually requires longer time and more thinking. Secondly, films stimulate the audience's senses in a more comprehensive way through multi-sensory elements such as images, sound effects and soundtracks, making the viewing experience richer. In contrast, a text is presented primarily through words and may be relatively devoid of multi-sensory stimulation. In addition, the book is a spin-off from Back to the Future, and by its nature does not contain any innovative elements, but is more like a poster or booklet that would be given away after seeing the film. It has received far less academic attention than the film itself, but as a non-digital preservation of the film's story, its role in the archive is unquestionable, and given its complete retelling of the film's story and its preservation of great footage, it deserves to be in a collection!

Reference：

Lewis, A. (2016). Intermedial Approaches to Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne: Text, Illustration, Film. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39(4), 621–642. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12423

Robert Loren Fleming

Film:Back to the future

A GORGI BOOK 0 552 992291
published by arrangement with MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MAC, Inc.

First published in Great Britain by Corgi Books 1985

YuChen Guan

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part , by mimeograph or any other means, without permission of the copyright holder.

length 280mm; breadth 203mm; height 4mm

English

Fiction

ISBN 0-552-99229-1