Back to the...What was it again?

I admit I'm a little surprised to hear that anyone is throwing accolades at this series of movies. The last time I heard them mentioned was when the derelict movie set burned down a couple of years ago. A great comedy series of the 20th Century? Well, maybe we're too close to it to judge them clearly. They have an artificial 80s vibe in my mind.

I remember going to see them all when they were new, and dutifully, too. I must have liked them to have made the commitment. And I have some recollections of scenes: the town clock, the Delorean, Christopher Lloyd's goggles...I see an old locomotive in the Old West, and Shirley MacLaine's daughter, Sachiko, in a bit part (I remember hoping she would have a career in movies out of it), and Crispin Glover scratching his head and being all weird, and I was left wondering what he was doing there in such wholesome company.

These movies were anchored so well by the capable and immensely likable Michael J. Fox. Is anyone more likable? Not even Tom Hanks.

The films are perfect popcorn fare. I was going to say that it would be too much effort to watch them again, that there are too many new movies to watch, lined up on my Netflix queue. But, you know, somehow I'm starting to think these would be great to watch with my son. Sure, the special effects probably look a little dated, but I am no big fan of CGI myself.

One weekend, some years ago, I stayed in a little rental house in the Connecticut countryside, and in the cellar I found an old diary, written by a teenaged girl in the 1960s. She offhandedly mentioned going to see a Dean Martin comedy at the theatre in town, and I was struck by the lack of enthusiasm she had about it, for I'm never not charged up one way or another about any movie I go see. But it dawned on me that this Dean Martin comedy was nothing but a summer evening pastime for her. Americans line up for movies as a matter of course, not always expecting more than a smile or a momentary thrill. The "Back to the Future" movies were fluff, zany big budget pastimes. My son goes to the movies far more often than I did as a child - I can count the times I went on one hand - and a movie of his youth like "Up" or "Avatar" may, for him, be nothing more than a Dean Martin comedy in retrospect, just like "Back to the Future" registers so dimly with us.