You’ve wandered into the topsy-turvy world of Tulgey Wood, the blog of writer and historian Jim Fanning. Tulgey Wood celebrates artistry and creativity (and sometimes just plain madness): movies, animation, TV, books, comics—and of course Disney, lots and lots of true-blue, through-and-through Disney, including D23 and Disney twenty-three Magazine, and Sketches Magazine and the Walt Disney Collectors Society. Tulgey Wood is so fun, fascinating and full of frolicsome photos and facts, it’s scary. So wander through the wonder of it all, and enjoy.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Happy November 12 (1955)


As every Back to the Future fan knows, November 12, 1955, is the day on which the clock tower was struck by lightning in Hill Valley, California—and Doctor Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) used that (for him) future knowledge to harness the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to send Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back to, well, back to the future. Here for your enjoyment is the flyer from the film, which reproduced the historic Hill Valley Telegraph front page story about the lightning strike on...on what date? I don't know if you can tell from the flyer, but the filmmakers decided not to put a date on the newspaper (even though another use of the newspaper in the film clearly shows the paper prints the date on the front page). Why did the filmmakers decide to replace the date with the words "Published Daily"? My best guess is that this edition wouldn't have published until Monday, November 14 (even if the paper was published on Sunday November 13, the clock tower incident probably happened too late for the story to make a Sunday morning edition) and the filmmakers didn't want to confuse the audience by featuring a date other than November 12...as that's the date the viewer needs to keep in their heads in order to follow the film's story. So Happy November 12...which by the way, in 1955 was also a Saturday, as here in 2011.

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