by Curtis D. Tucker
Posted: 10/21/15
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Why Is Today Back To The Future Day?
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In the 1989 hit movie “Back to the Future Part II,” Marty McFly travels forward in time to Hill Valley, California, on October 21, 2015. He blasted through the space-time continuum with Doc Brown in that now famous DeLorean. For “Back to the Future” junkies, today’s date has been a revered pop-culture milestone. The movies producers liked the idea of going 30 years into the past and 30 years into the future which is why 2015 was chosen.
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But why was the date October 21, 2015 chosen? It all comes down to the Chicago Cubs.
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In “Back to the Future Part II,” a large part of the plot involves Marty’s nemesis Biff, who finds the Grays Sports Almanac in 2015 and steals Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine to go back to 1955. When he did that, he gave his younger self the almanac so he could place lucrative bets on events that haven’t happened yet.
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Marty originally purchased the almanac in 2015 after he noticed the Cubs finally won a World Series. Marty hoped to take it back and make a quick buck himself, but Doc Brown foiled his plan and threw away the almanac, which Biff later found.
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The producers wanted something that somebody would say, "I wished I’d bet money on that." The Cubs winning the World Series was the most absurd thing they could think of. If the Cubs were going to win the World Series, what date would that be on? In 1988, when they wrote the movie, the Cubs feasibly could have swept the World Series on October 21. That’s how they arrived on that day.
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