04 Jun

Save the Clock Tower

written by Eric Greenberg in Blog | 3 comments

No, for real. Someone get the Hill Valley Preservation Society on the horn! Lightning may not strike twice, but apparently fire does. As you may have already read, one of the big casualties in this weekend’s Universal Studios blaze was Courthouse Square, a key location in the “Back to the Future” trilogy. First things first. Nobody was seriously injured, so I’m not being completely insensitive whining about losing a set from a movie. That being said, I would argue something like this could be considered, let’s say, a “pop culture tragedy.” Nowhere near as bad as a real tragedy, but still troublesome to anyone who’s a fan of the series or a supporter of time travel in general. The thing is though, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll actually find that within this ”tragedy,” is a “pop culture miracle.”

What a lot of the news articles don’t tell you is that the Courthouse Square destroyed over the weekend wasn’t really the set seen in the films. Most of the original was destroyed in another fire back in 1990. One of the few things that survived back then was the famous clock tower itself. So Universal rebuilt the square from the original plans only to have it burned down again 18 years later. Yet once again, amid massive destruction, the clock tower has apparently managed to beat the odds. Reports are it’s a little banged up, but if there’s anything at that studio worth saving, it’s this.

Someday maybe I’ll write a post on the merits of “Back to the Future.” Something about how unbelievably intricate the script is. How hard it must have been to weave together all the events and references over three films and the time space continuum. But it’s late and thinking about it makes my head hurt. Just do me a favor and don’t throw these films into the generic “80s movie” category. They may be more entertainment than serious message, but it’s entertainment on a high level.  Plus, I have to think that somewhere in these films lies the solution to the current oil crisis (Um, hello renewable energy experts. Lightning?). Am I biased because I own a flux capacitor t-shirt? No, that just makes me a little weird. The reason I bought it is that the series still holds up and is ridiculously fun to reference.

Now instead of being completely cheesy and trying to weave all the other classic references in throughout the blog, let me just get a few of them out of my system: 1.21 gigawatts, Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, Great Scott!, 88 miles per hour, Libyans, “don’t need no credit card to ride this train.” Thank you.

As for the clock tower, I can’t think of too many cooler buildings in all of film. Certainly none that weren’t already landmarks in their own right. And none that were so essential to the plot of a movie. So if all is good in Hill Valley, life will imitate art and the clock tower will be restored to the way it was prior to June 1, 2008/November 12, 1955. Yes, fans will still like seeing the square when it’s rebuilt once again, and most probably won’t even know the difference. It would just be nice to know that the tourists passing by on those Universal trams will still actually get to see one original piece of movie history.

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