# Back To The Future Day Back to the Future Day is the internet event tied to October 21, 2015, the future date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II. Between 2010 and 2012, photoshopped images of the DeLorean's time clock repeatedly tricked fans into thinking the film's date had already arrived. ## Overview Back to the Future Day refers to October 21, 2015, the exact date Doc Brown and Marty McFly punch into the DeLorean when they jump forward in Back to the Future Part II[1]. Long before the real date rolled around, the label attached itself to a running online joke where people photoshopped the DeLorean's dashboard time clock to display the current day, then watched fans of the trilogy panic that they had somehow missed the moment[2]. The format is simple. Take the movie's famous digital time readout, swap the destination date for today, and post it with a caption about Marty arriving. The gag worked so well that news outlets covered it repeatedly across separate years, treating each new fake image as its own small scandal[3]. Because the real 2015 date sat almost three decades in the future when the film came out in 1989, there was plenty of runway for the joke to keep looping around online[4]. ## How It Spread News aggregators including BuzzFeed, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Age picked up the 2010 hoax within days[4]. Writing at The Guardian, Catherine Shoard called the tampering sacrilege against a film so tightly built around split-second timing[1]. Total Film owned up on July 6, 2010, publishing a blog post that walked through how they pulled the stunt, and mentioned that a fresh hoax image dated for July 6 was already circulating[4]. The joke came back bigger on June 27, 2012, when Steve Berry, social media manager at UK mobile checkout startup Simply Tap, uploaded a fresh photoshopped time clock reading June 27, 2012 to promote a Back to the Future trilogy Blu-ray box set for a client[2]. Berry told Mashable he built the post on the assumption that no one could possibly fall for the same joke twice, and he deliberately reused the earlier caption word for word so people would catch the reference[2]. Instead the image kept moving. Reposted to the Facebook page of craft company Colour Me Fun, it picked up more than 10,000 shares plus nearly 1,000 likes, with follow-up coverage from The Telegraph, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME[3]. A July 11, 2012 revival version made another lap on Facebook with the same Marty-arrives-in-the-future caption, prompting Snopes to file a debunk[4]. Each fresh hoax cycle spawned another round of news write-ups, which in turn taught more people about the meme, which fed the next round of doctored images. ## How to Use The Back to the Future Day template is a photoshopped edit of the DeLorean's dashboard time clock, with the film's real destination readout of October 21, 2015 swapped for whatever date the poster wants people to fall for[3]. Posts typically pair the doctored screenshot with the standard caption about Marty McFly arriving in the future, matching the phrasing from the 2010 Total Film hoax that started the pattern[2]. Single-serving joke sites like October212015 and itsbacktothefutureday.com later offered generators and running counters so anyone could produce their own fake without touching Photoshop directly[4]. ## Cultural Impact The repeat hoaxes turned a niche film reference into recurring international news between 2010 and 2012, with pieces at The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Week, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME all treating each new fake DeLorean clock as its own story[1][3]. Steve Berry, the Simply Tap manager behind the 2012 version, later told Mashable his one regret was forgetting to add his client's web address to the image, joking about all the traffic he failed to catch[2]. The pattern of fans falling for the exact same trick multiple years running made the DeLorean time readout into one of the most reliably remixable movie stills of the early 2010s[4]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Back To The Future Day? It is the internet label attached to October 21, 2015, the date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II, and to the recurring photoshop hoaxes that pretended the date had arrived early[1]. ### Where did Back To The Future Day come from? The first hoax came from British film magazine Total Film, which tweeted on July 5, 2010 that the day matched the movie's future date and then posted a doctored DeLorean time clock as fake proof[1]. ### What does Back To The Future Day mean? It refers both to the true in-film date of October 21, 2015 and to the culture of fake time clock images that fooled fans of the trilogy for years before that day arrived[4]. ### How do you use Back To The Future Day? People photoshop the DeLorean's dashboard time display to show the current date, then post the image with the standard caption about Marty McFly arriving in the future[2]. ### Is Back To The Future Day still popular? The specific 2010-2012 photoshop hoax cycle is a classic movie-meme moment rather than an active format, since the real October 21, 2015 date has long since passed[3]. ### Who started the first Back to the Future Day hoax? British movie magazine Total Film kicked it off on July 5, 2010 with a tweet and a photoshopped screenshot of the DeLorean's time readout[1]. ### What was the June 2012 Back to the Future Day hoax? On June 27, 2012, Steve Berry at UK mobile checkout company Simply Tap posted a fake time clock reading June 27, 2012 to promote a Back to the Future Blu-ray box set for a client[2]. ### Why did people keep falling for the same hoax? Berry told Mashable he assumed nobody could possibly fall for the same joke twice, so he even reused the original caption word for word, and the 2012 image still picked up more than 10,000 shares on Facebook[2]. ### What websites were created about Back to the Future Day? Single-serving sites appeared after the 2012 hoax, including October212015, istodaythedaymartymcflyarriveswhenhetravelstothefuture, and itsbacktothefutureday.com, which hosted a custom time clock generator[4]. ### What is the real date shown in Back to the Future Part II? The DeLorean's time circuits read October 21, 2015 as the destination when Doc and Marty jump forward from 1985 in the second film of the trilogy[3]. ## References 1. [https://theweek.com/articles/492975/great-back-future-web-hoax]() 2. [https://mashable.com/2012/06/27/back-to-the-future-hoax-explained/]() 3. [https://mashable.com/2012/06/27/back-to-the-future-hoax/]() 4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/back-to-the-future-day]() 5. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF2jpIhxQmQ]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/back-to-the-future-day Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library