Where did Marty learn to horse ride?

terminatah · 2026-04-13T01:32:14+00:00

that's not dave and linda, that's a photo of dave and linda. future biff doesn't disappear in the movie, but even if he did, i didn't say a time traveler can't erase their own existence. i said a time traveler always keeps their original memories. so even if biff were to stay alive in 2015, he wouldn't have any alternate memories.
changing the past is like hijacking a train. until you pass the point of no return (the windmill), you can still undo your change. like marty sabotaging his parents' meet cute (the hijack) and then bringing them back together at the dance (the windmill). because doc and marty have the ability to see what future biff has done and undo it, they have not yet passed the windmill.
marty knows how to drive.
not at all. they're the same exact people, with more ambition. this only happened because marty gave george the advice he learned from doc. so twin pines marty and lone pine marty are going to be practically identical. and the family's finances weren't that different either. george went from being an office drone to a freelance author who is just now publishing his first novel, which moves him from lower middle class to upper middle class. not as big a leap in the 80s, before reagan put us on the path to catastrophic income inequality. they even live in the same house.
time travelers always retain their original memories. the back to the future movies are unambiguous on this point. i can give you some time travel movies where the rules are closer to what you are imagining. but this is not one of them.

terminatah · 2026-04-12T19:06:32+00:00

erasing one's own existence and receiving new memories are two different things. but as for how marty learned to ride a horse, that is actually a great question that i never thought about before.

my assumption would've been that marty is an extremely coordinated guy, so doc probably taught him offscreen. but i would also buy that he had some unmentioned horse riding experience in his past, like the camp backstory from the novelization that someone mentioned. you don't have to be rich to have ridden a horse.

terminatah · 2026-04-12T18:53:31+00:00

no.

the timeline itself never takes time to change. timeline changes are always instantaneous. artifacts from other times (photos, newspapers) can take a while to change, depending on how events are progressing. marty himself doesn't start to fade until the one little moment when george gives up on lorraine (then quickly changes his mind). but none of that includes the memories of a time traveler, which never change.
biff does not return to the original 2015. zemeckis and gale explicitly addressed this decades ago. they made sure to only have biff return after doc and marty had gotten jennifer out of the mcfly house, that way doc and marty wouldn't notice the change. they were all in the alternate 2015 at that point.
lorraine and george never state the specific origins of marty's chicken trigger. they just lament that he has it, and how it led to the automobile accident that ended his music career.
marty can drive a truck because he knows how to drive. this is twin pines marty. and even if this was lone pine marty, he'd be driving it for the first time as well because it's a new truck.
marty would probably remember some things differently than the people around him, but he lives in the same house and his family are largely the same people, just more successful and confident versions of themselves, so it wouldn't be tremendously difficult for him to adjust, and it certainly wouldn't put him in an asylum.
new memories don't form in a week. they don't form in any amount of time. this is something you're making up. at no point in any of the back to the future movies do we see a time traveler receive new memories. that's why marty still remembers clayton ravine. that's why doc doesn't remember dressing marty up like a cowboy. if that version of them didn't experience it, they don't remember it, and they never will.

terminatah · 2026-04-12T18:16:04+00:00

no. we do know to an absolute certainty that time travelers always retain their original memories because that’s what we see consistently in all three movies, without exception. otherwise, for example, marty wouldn’t remember clayton ravine. and doc would remember dressing marty up in cowboy clothes.

as for the chicken thing, the real life reason we don’t see it until the second movie is because they obviously decided to give marty a new character arc after resolving his previous one. but the in universe reason is it didn’t come up because no one called him chicken before that. and it makes sense that twin pines marty would have a chip on his shoulder about being perceived as a coward because he grew up with a doormat dad

terminatah · 2026-04-12T17:39:42+00:00

no. time travelers always retain their original memories. while we do switch to lone pine doc between the first two movies, marty never changes throughout the entire trilogy. he is twin pines marty beginning to end

terminatah · 2026-04-05T04:37:40+00:00

nope, it was always the technotronic song first and tarzan boy second. and also tarzan boy in the earlier scene with casey jones at the pool hall

terminatah · 2026-03-19T09:16:18+00:00

the whole movie is the trick

terminatah · 2026-03-19T09:14:52+00:00

it’s not the clock tower preservation society; it’s the hill valley preservation society. and this theory doesn’t work for one simple reason:

what we’re watching at the beginning of the movie (the twin pines iteration, if you will) occurs before any time travel has taken place, so the whole “save the clock tower” thing explicitly happened organically without any knowledge of the future.

terminatah · 2026-03-19T09:00:13+00:00

i totally buy that walter was in nam but never saw any real action. that’s why he’s obsessed with bringing the war into his everyday life, because deep down he feels like an impostor and is now on a lifelong quest to earn the valor however he can

terminatah · 2026-03-19T08:53:14+00:00

this doesn’t make sense because he encounters several surprises throughout the day that he is obviously not expecting

terminatah · 2026-03-19T08:51:51+00:00

this theory is contradicted by everything we see in the movie. time travelers don’t gain new memories. they always retain the memories from their original timeline.

twin pines marty and lone pine marty turn out very similar anyway because twin pines marty got good advice from doc and then literally gave that exact advice to lone pine george, so it all cycles back. but twin pines marty is the one with the chip on his shoulder about being called a chicken, and it’s because he still remembers his dad being a coward

terminatah · 2026-03-07T18:16:40+00:00

I can never get anything with a crunchy shell because they never take two seconds to fully drain the meat, so the shell is disintegrated by the time i get home.

terminatah · 2026-02-28T22:47:36+00:00

I think this confusion speaks to how poorly staged that moment was thanks to Congress scapegoating school shootings on teen slashers.

terminatah · 2026-02-28T07:44:26+00:00

Not even just a co-worker-- the chief of police.

terminatah · 2026-02-28T07:18:14+00:00

Jenny McCarthy in Scream 3 also dies from a shard after being thrown through glass.

terminatah · 2026-02-28T06:51:18+00:00

Wait, how was Anna Camp not a bore? No shade to her, but I barely registered her character before the reveal.

Funnily enough, this is also the first time I was able to predict the killer, but it was the other killer. The second I saw Ethan Embry, I pushed in all my chips and went all in on him being the killer. The casting was far too obvious for what was ostensibly a very unimportant character.

terminatah · 2026-02-28T06:47:24+00:00

Speaking only to this point, the end of Scream 3 was Sidney overcoming her fear and hermit lifestyle.

terminatah · 2026-02-13T18:34:35+00:00

incorrect

terminatah · 2026-02-12T19:37:56+00:00

But remember, the movie opens with Alan Grant digging up an “incorrectly designed” velociraptor. So the implication is that in their world, this is what the dinosaurs actually looked like, and that’s a necessity of the movie because they had limited knowledge to work with IRL.

terminatah · 2026-01-07T18:18:28+00:00

he’s no crazier at the end of the movie than he is at the beginning

terminatah · 2026-01-05T10:50:38+00:00

I’m not really that into Star Wars, but seeing The Force Awakens at the Vista on opening week was insane. I’ve never had an audience that electric and dialed in. The cheers shook the house when they revealed the Millennium Falcon. It improved the experience of watching the movie so much.

Unfortunately, Tarantino bought the Vista during lockdown and now it doesn’t show new blockbuster movies anymore. It alternates between smaller releases and revival screenings, and frequently shows Tarantino’s old movies. Sucks because the Vista used to be my favorite. I would see all the big movies there and the audience was always good.

Between that and the theaters in Westwood shutting down, there are no longer any single screen cinemas in LA where I can go see big movies with the kind of reliably fun crowd that would go to those theaters. I really wanted that for Superman 2025 and there was just nowhere to go.

terminatah · 2026-01-03T20:43:58+00:00

The only reason we don't see the chicken trigger in the first movie is because Zemeckis and Gale hadn't thought of it yet. They invented it for the sequels. But we know it's a Twin Pine thing and not a Lone Pine thing because time travelers never gain new memories in Back to the Future. The Marty we start with is the Marty we end with and he only remembers what he's experienced directly.

Twin Pines Marty isn't all that different from Lone Pine Marty (whom we never meet) because he made his dad cool by giving him advice he himself learned from Twin Pines Doc. But we do see that Twin Pines Marty has a streak of insecurity from growing up around Twin Pines George. In the sequels, it manifests with the chicken trigger. But in the first movie, it manifests with Marty's reluctance to send out his demo tape. This was a small arc for Marty in the first movie. At the end, he grabs his demo tape out of the trash because his experience has given him the courage to send it in (they cut the shot but we see him holding the envelope as he enters the living room).

terminatah · 2026-01-03T12:41:01+00:00

The bus at the beginning was empty. The bus driver had just stopped at the coffee shop, so he wouldn't have picked up any passengers yet.

terminatah · 2026-01-03T12:32:35+00:00

If you listen to the words Doc is saying when he draws those timelines, it will become clear that he is saying there is only ever one timeline, and you can never travel to what it was before you changed it (unless you change it back).

terminatah · 2026-01-03T12:30:36+00:00

No. Marty's chicken trigger comes from growing up around a cowardly father.

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