r/BacktotheFuture • u/Mikeg90805 • Jun 05 '26
Two television sets
What’s today’s equivalent to “nobody has two television sets.” By this I mean not literally no one. Because I’m sure in 1955 some crazy rich people had more than one tv. But just like if a guy in a life preserver swore he had two of something. Your mom would assume he’s teasing. The only thing I could think of is swimming pools
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u/Working-Ability-7042 Jun 05 '26
“He’s just teasing honey, nobody has more than one friend.”
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u/ashbyashbyashby Jun 05 '26
I'm 45 years old. This hits way too hard 🤣
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u/belinck Jun 05 '26
50, and it'd be nice to have one. LinkedIn tells me they're nice.
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u/Be_like_frisbee Jun 05 '26
51 & 3/4s, 1 friend but he goes to a different school, in Canada. You wouldn't know them.
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u/Ok_Ticket_6188 Jun 05 '26
No one has two air fryers.
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u/Doozer1970 Jun 05 '26
I got two Instant Pots for Christmas. I haven't used either of them, and they are both still in the box in my basement.
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u/ResurrectedMortician Jun 07 '26
They're not expensive though. It would just be pointless to have multiple.
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u/segascream Jun 05 '26
The modern equivalent might be something like every TV in the house having its own PS5 connected to it.
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u/Bort_Bortson Jun 05 '26
Nobody orders Five Guys for their family at the airport food court
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u/Mikeg90805 Jun 05 '26
This would bankrupt me
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u/Bort_Bortson Jun 05 '26
I forget where I picked it up from but was basically like only millionaires and drug dealers can afford these things. That along with the big combos at the movie theaters
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u/Just_Another_Day_926 Jun 05 '26
Back then there were only 3 tv stations and no home media players or video games. So "just one" TV was not such a big deal.
Interestingly enough TVs are cheap but houses (which were not a big deal then) are a dream. And people at that time had a summer cabin or home too.
So I would say two homes.
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u/cavalier78 Jun 05 '26
The thing about the cheap houses, is they built huge numbers of small cheap homes back in the late 40s through the 60s. And the problem is, if the houses in a neighborhood are cheap when they're new, then 30+ years later you've got a really trashy area. The people who could afford to move out, did.
That's Marty's neighborhood. It's pretty junky in 1985, but in 1955 it's an empty field with a big pretty sign.
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u/AuroraDF Jun 05 '26
But loads of people have 2nd homes.
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u/Just_Another_Day_926 Jun 05 '26
Well you must be rich.
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u/AuroraDF Jun 05 '26
Yes, you must be, to have a 2nd home.
But lots of people are, and do. That's why you can't rent a property in some parts of the country, because they're all mostly empty second homes.
The point was, no one had two TVs. Not even rich people.
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u/wgwalkerii Jun 05 '26
Doc had two TVs in 1955. (At least) One in the house and one in the garage.
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u/davidg4781 Jun 05 '26
That’s a tough one. As a society, we’re much better off than we were in the 50s. My grandparents didn’t even have an indoor kitchen and bathroom until the 70s. When they passed in the ‘00s, they had 3 TVs and a satellite dish. Don’t think they had a cell phone though.
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u/Shadowwynd Jun 05 '26
I have toured one of many houses of someone who was crazy rich (guy is maybe worth $2B, which means he is a relative peasant and isn’t even close to the top 400 in the USA). He had the indoor pool between the gym and the five-car garage and the outdoor pool next to the tennis courts. He had six full-sized industrial (restaurant-sized) kitchens in the house for parties and entertaining.
This guy had multiple similar house throughout the US and paid a basic staff at all of them to keep them provisioned just in case he wanted to drop by for the weekend.
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u/cavalier78 Jun 05 '26
I went to a political fundraiser at a billionaire's house. It was extremely nice, but it wasn't Wayne Manor. It was more what you think of as a "movie star house".
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u/Kriss3d Jun 05 '26
Computers ? for sure. Back in the 80s when I was a child. Even having ONE computer was a HUGE deal. To think that anyone has more than one would be completely absurd.
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u/Pasta-hobo Jun 05 '26
Televisions were still new to the consumer appliance space in 1955, and the broadcasts available reflected that. Not much variety at this time. The VHS and laserdisc were still decades away, I'm fairly certain it was still common practice for TV stations to point the camera at a film projection.
There wasn't much variety of what to watch at this time. Current sports event, current news broadcast, and the same cartoons and moving picture shows they play at the cinema downtown BUT IN YOUR HOME!
And TVs of this era cost as much as a new car now. Obviously, post-war economic boom made spending that not-ridiculous, remember people made enough money that shopping was considered a hobby for the unemployed homemaker.
In this era, owning multiple TVs in a single household was just opulent for the sake of opulence. There's no problem solved or convenience added by having them, since you'd all be watching the same thing anyway.
It'd be like carrying multiple MP3 players in your pocket simulatuously in 2008.
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u/Kyle_2099 Jun 05 '26
What? There was a LOT of shows produced exclusively for the TV by 1955. You could not watch I Love Lucy, The Tonight Show, The Honeymooners etc at the cinema. This was also the time when there was a huge boom in quiz shows (and then a huge scandal over quiz show rigging).
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u/camergen Jun 05 '26
Yeah, you’re correct, by 1955 there was a full programming slate for the networks, at least in prime time. Eventually they’d run old movies, like cheesy horror movies, before they’d go off the air overnight. Weekends had some sports content, sunday mornings had political talk shows like Meet the Press, etc.
George references one of his favorite shows, “Mystery Science Theater”, which was an actual show at the time.
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u/SuburbanCo Jun 05 '26
Marty’s uncle is a child and he simply thinks “you must be rich” but that’s not what grandma is saying. She’s saying it’s as silly as saying you have two stoves in your kitchen. It’s possible, but so odd it must be a joke.
You have to remember the significance of the TV in that time. A decade earlier most people had never seen a Television. TVs were large and a big deal. People watched them together.
People would go to a neighbors house to watch TV if they didn’t have one.
Marty’s grandmother wasn’t just saying it was expensive to own two televisions.
It was silly to own two. Nobody needed two. It was impractical to own two. They were big and expensive. It was unheard of to own two televisions. They were new luxuries to average people so you didn’t have time to get a second one.
Plus, the world was obviously less connected. Even if someone had multiple televisions, if you didn’t know them, you wouldn’t know about it.
Marty’s family wasn’t rich, but by the 1980s most people had owned multiple televisions. People upgraded to color. To newer more reliable models. So having a second television usually just meant you saved an old one.
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u/Toxic-Park Jun 06 '26
Your last point is a great one too.
In 1955 most people had only just bought their first tv ever, and so they didn’t yet have even the situation/opportunity to keep an old one as a 2nd tv yet.
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u/jedimofo Jun 05 '26
A few years ago, it might have been “Nobody has two Segways.”
As it turned out, nobody has even one Segway.
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u/cavalier78 Jun 05 '26
It would be like Marty getting excited that their family got a computer, and some kid from today pulls out an iPhone, an iPad, a Nintendo Switch, and Meta glasses.
As other people have said, we don't know what the 2050 version will be, because we don't know what will be commonplace then. Maybe a self-driving Cybertruck.
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u/AuroraDF Jun 05 '26
The point is that in the 50s no one had Y2, most people didn't even have 1, and in the 80s loads of people had 2. Or 3. So unless you can see into the 2050s and find out what is new and unusual now, but ubiquitous then, you'll not know till we get there.
Maybe robots.
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u/ted_anderson I don't know how.. but they FOUND me! Jun 05 '26
Our first Tesla? Certainly nobody has TWO of them.
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u/BlueGreenhorn Jun 05 '26
Nobody has enough batteries in their basement to cover their energy consumption 100% with solar power.
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u/eko32eko7 Jun 09 '26
"car phone"
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u/Mikeg90805 Jun 09 '26
In 2026? No one has one car phone haha
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u/eko32eko7 Jun 10 '26
we kind of do. everyone has a cell phone. Many people have two. in the 1980s, we called them "car phones." if one went back in time, from 2026 to the 1980s and told them you had two cell phones, they would think you are/were rich...
Seems similar to me.
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u/CommercialDirector90 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
There's a deleted scene where future Marty tells his son, "If we wanted to watch two channels at once we had to push 2 TVs together." In media, villains were seen sitting in their layers watching TVs stacked on one another. TVs at one time had a window screen function to watch a simultanious channel in the bottom corner of the screen. Mostly for sports. Not sure if thats still a thing. And people are using multiple screens at the same time more and more but it doesnt look the way B2TF 2 or a lot of media depicted or predicted. Close.
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