Back to the Future fans will have been alert to wobbles in the space-time continuum this weekend. After all, Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of the film's release in the US – a momentous date, then, in any right-thinking person's calender.
But surely a mind no less dastardly than that of Biff Tannen himself could have started the rumour that Doc Brown types today's date (5 July, 2010) into the DeLorean's register? Such a fact was eagerly tweeted around the globe, while aficionados of the film were left quietly scratching their heads. Yes, Doc did express a desire to travel 25 years ahead in time. Yes, he was sitting by the monitor when he said it. But did he type in today's date? Surely not? Surely he was too busy showing Marty McFly how he could get back to Independence Day, or the birth of Christ, before inputting the date when he dreamt up the flux capacitor – 5 November, 1955 – which was accidentally left in when Marty makes his 88mph escape from the Libyans chasing him around the parking lot. Were that 5 July myth true, Marty would have pitched up right here, right now, rather than 55 years ago. Exciting, but not the film I remember.
In fact, some of the culprits now seem to have fessed up, which is a relief. But it got me wondering: why do I care so much? Traditionally speaking, I'm not a big stickler for accuracy. But Back to the Future is a film so powerful, especially if it hooked into your brain at an impressionable age, a film so intimately wedded to the idea that a split second can make all the difference, that to shuffle its finely wrought construction in this way (the critic Tom Shone has written of the plot's similarities to a Fabergé egg) feels like sacrilege. Even if it was, in this instance, affectionately, even jubilantly, intended.
So, we need your help. We have no copy in the office, and a colleague returning from Soho reported a sinister absence of copies in the HMV Oxford Street. Can someone please confirm that Doc types in today's date? And, if as we suspect, he doesn't, why on earth do we care?
