Release Year: 1985

Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writer: Bob Gale

Stars: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson

Sometimes one of your friends looks through your parents' old photo albums and says, (grossly enough) "Hey, your mom/dad/uncle/great-great aunt Marjorie was a hottie." Or maybe you've checked out your parents' or grandparents' high school yearbooks and fallen kind of in love with one of their classmates—a girl with Farrah Fawcett hair or a dashing boy with a crew cut.

But what if you could actually go back in time and see all sorts of awesome old people while they were still in their prime? Provided, of course, that you remembered to bring enough plutonium for the return journey.

Back to the Future, a sci-fi adventure comedy from Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, works off that very concept. A teenage boy, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), finds himself suddenly thirty years in the past. With the help of Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), a crazy, wild-haired scientist, he has to figure out a way to get (drum roll) back to the future…while also not disrupting the space-time continuum. No big deal.

When this movie hit theaters in 1985, it struck a major chord with just about everyone between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Not because everyone could relate to the time traveling, obviously…but because every kid wonders about those strange, alien beings: old people.

Who are they? What's wrong with them? Were they always such killjoys?

And so, because writer Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis (who also did Forrest Gump and The Polar Express) were able to tap into what America's frizzy-haired 1980's teens wanted to see, they had an insanely huge hit on their hands. Back to the Future was so immediately and universally loved, in fact, that it ended up being the highest grossing movie of the year.

Oh, the things you'd do if you could go back in time. Tell those people not to get on the Titanic. Convince Lincoln that the opera was super-boring. Show up in California with a gold pan circa a few years before everyone else did. Write Harry Potter.

Or…hang out with your parents' younger selves and possibly undo your own birth.

Different strokes for different folks.

Time travel movies have never been in short supply. Mankind has gotten a pretty good grasp on the whole "space" thing, but time still eludes us. And—like just about anything that eludes us—it also fascinates us.

But Back to the Future is a very different sort of time travel movie. Usually, you've got your intense action-y films, like Terminator or Looper. Or your bizarro, deep thinking films like Primer or Twelve Monkeys. Or your ridiculous, off-the-wall comedies like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure or Hot Tub Time Machine.

BTTF is a whole different animal. It's a comedy, yes, but while the concept is a little out there and certain characters aren't exactly big on subtlety (lookin' at you, Christopher Lloyd), the movie isn't totally over-the-top. For the most part, these seem like real people, making real choices and acting… well, sort of like we might act.

What makes BTTF so special is that it chose not to whisk our protagonist away to the Paleolithic Era, or 15th century England, but to a time and place that is totally relatable to all of us. Our own hometown, populated with a bunch of familiar—albeit less wrinkly—faces.

Kids loved this movie because, well, Marty is so dang cool, and it was fun to imagine themselves growing up to fill his shoes. And oldsters loved this movie because it brought back a lot of fond memories…plus, it might even have helped convince their children that parents are actually people. Or were at one point, anyway.

Before this movie came along, sci-fi comedies weren't even really a thing. Ghostbusters edged it out by about a year, but BTTF made serious strides in paving the way for films like Spaceballs, Groundhog Day, Galaxy Quest, Guardians of the Galaxy: pretty much any sci-fi movie that was infused with humor rather than being somber or super-violent.

Oh yeah, and it was basically the only occasion of the DeLorean actually being awesome.