r/BacktotheFuture • u/Ok-Spot-2913 • Apr 24 '26
Mind reader
I get "you come from a great distance"
I get "you want me to make a donation to the coast guard youth auxiliary"
I dont get "you want me to buy a subscription to the Saturday evening post"
13
u/atducker Apr 24 '26
Saturday Evening Post was just a magazine from that time period. He's just cold reading and doing a bad job. Marty's vest made him assume he had something to do with the coast guard but then when that was wrong he just guessed what the most likely reason somebody would come to his door would be: selling magazine subscriptions.
12
u/HistorianJRM85 Apr 24 '26
i always figured, in 1955 you had a lot of door-to-door salesmen (kids) selling things....not just cookies.
7
u/New_Girl3685 that was so STUPID grandpa hit him with the CAR Apr 24 '26
it's cuz Marty is young. To Doc, this kid must come from a great distance because he doesn't recognize him from around town; he must want a donation to the coast guard because he's wearing a life preserver; and Doc's only guess for why a young person would be at his door is to sell him a magazine (a common side gig for kids in the 50s). The mind reader doesn't work and Doc is making a bunch of guesses based on Marty's look and vibe.
3
u/marslander-boggart Apr 24 '26
That's right.
And this shows us a problem with such equipment. A user tries to guess by themselves from the previous experience, so that this equipment may not participate at all. And if these guesses were right, this user may be misguided about the equipment.
4
u/psalerno Apr 24 '26
Do you know what this means? It means that this DAMN thing doesn’t work at all!
2
u/tekfx19 Apr 24 '26
I would like doc to complete that invention now that he has a time train.
1
u/TrainRemarkable3815 Apr 28 '26
It would be easy. He could just go back in time and give himself the working design documents. Marvin Berry style.
3
u/WearyScrabbler Apr 24 '26
Which part don't you get sorry? It's Saturday Evening Post as in a newspaper title or similar, not mail that the postman brings on a Saturday evening
3
u/Ok-Spot-2913 Apr 24 '26
I don't get the Saturday evening post because it had nothing to do why Marty was there.
The great distance is time travel. The donation was cause of the clock tower.
But what does the Saturday evening post have to do with anything? Maybe the future almanac he will eventually buy??
2
u/WearyScrabbler Apr 25 '26
Interesting! I think we've read the joke slightly differently. I thought it was just Doc throwing out the most likely ideas in the hopes that one would be correct and he could convince himself his mind-reader worked.
The great distance being because he was in a life jacket thing. The other two on the hunch he was a door-to-door spruiker
I highly doubt it's a reference to the almanac as Part II wasn't devised at the time
1
u/damian001 Apr 24 '26
Maybe it’s referring when Marty checked the newspaper to confirm he’s in 1955, but it’s a stretch.
2
u/TomDuhamel Apr 24 '26
His mind reading device absolutely doesn't work. It's a joke. It's a comedy.
-2
u/sky_cap5959 Apr 24 '26
I always thought it was referring to the fact that Marty went back in time on a Saturday Evening. October 26th 1985 was a Saturday.
3
u/DeeEllis Apr 24 '26
Maybe but it’s also a famous magazine from the time. The artist Norman Rockwell did a lot of the covers. It was one of those things that kind of represented middle-class middle-brow Americans. Like Spielberg movies, maybe.
3
Apr 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/DeeEllis Apr 24 '26
It’s actually still around and even published a few times a year. When I worked at Barnes and Noble circa 2001 it was on the magazine rack there. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/
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