My favorite movie joke of all times

Maybe a bit of overstatement, but I watched this movie exactly 17 billion times (along with the other two) and I have never ceased rolling with laughter. Of course I'm talking about Back to the Future III, which was always a bit light on critical acclaim, but to me was every bit as humorous as the whole series.

Let's analyze the scene about which I'm talking. Marty and the 1955 Doc are excavating the Delorean time machine from the cave, which was sealed by the 1985 Doc in 1885, and has been in storage for 70 years, 2 months, and 13 days. Astounding!

The 1985 Doc explains in his letter from 1885 that the lightning bolt burnt out the time circuit control microchip. 1955 Doc, with no capacity to appreciate the function or importance of microelectronics, is confounded by the tininess of the parts, holding a small chip in his hands with a pair of tweezers and saying "Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem." For someone who has an idea about how big a paradigm change the VLSI revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was, it's humorous indeed to hear a genius spout such rubbish about the physical size of circuitry.

I say, how can anything as small as this control a circuit?
Where do you fit the relays?
I don't even see any vacuum tube sockets, Great Scott!

But for those who are not aware, let me quickly explain that there was no tendency whatsoever for circuits to be miniaturized in the 1950s. Components were still discrete and quite bulky. We must acknowledge that when the only consumers were big businesses, who needed ultra-reliable mainframes, miniaturization was not a very high priority. Only with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs from 1961 to 1972 was there a confluence of big money and big demand for small, portable computers. The pattern of increased transistor density and smaller physical component size was established by the end of the 1960s, and intimated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1971 in his famous "Moore's Law". Flashback to 1955, when tubes were still used in most computers, and transistors only starting to be widely used (most Americans didn't notice the change, but by the late-50s and later most small transistor radios were Japanese-made). Solid-state electronics had not yet been invented, although Doc explains further in his letter that since transistors were invented in 1947, there does exist a crude means of performing the computing required by the burnt-out 1985 time circuit microcontroller. He also includes a schematic that will aid the 1955 Doc in replicating the design, perhaps not trusting his earlier self to be able to grasp it.

We have no doubt that the Doc is brilliant, whether in 1985 or 1955. But his American sensibilities are also very much a product of their times. Doc turns the broken part over and over again, trying to find some way of making sense of it. He's found the problem! Doc finally leans over to Marty and laughs:

Well, THERE'S your problem!

"No wonder this circuit failed; it says made in Japan." He says the word Japan with the same sort of accent as manure.

One of my late grandma's former neighbors, born in the 1950s, will tell you that there was once a time when you could simply look at a label and make certain that something was a steaming pile of garbage. The determining factor was if that label said "Made in Japan." It seems utterly impossible for current audiences to believe, but when Toyota first sold cars on the US market in the late 1950s, they were shockingly terrible. I am assured by my dad that these very early Japanese cars were much, much worse than the Hyundai Excels and Yugos which hit the market in the 1980s. The Toyota Crown was sold in the US from 1957 to 1960, at the pinnacle of Detroit's chrome-and-fin era. A paltry total of 287 were sold stateside, and it is believed that a mere 5 of them still exist today. Although the Japanese had nearly gotten their act together by 1955 on the home islands, in terms of exports they were still laughingstock. This was also a mere 10 years after World War II. Still clinging in the mind of the American public was the resounding defeat of the Japanese nation by the greatest technological force of arms in all of history, culminating in two atomic bombings. Subsequent examination of crude Japanese WWII small arms absolutely confirmed our prejudices that the Japanese were sandal-wearing buffoons who could not build anything with precision or high technology.

Marty: nintendo pwns tektronix lol 

But there's a very, very, VERY important generation gap between Marty McFly from 1985 and Doc in the 1950s. Marty looks over with almost no expression, seemingly expecting it to be a joke. Then after the briefest pause, he says "What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff's made in Japan." The 1980s sensibilities of Marty come colliding 30 years in the past, and the 1955 Doc is left with absolutely no way to reconcile this gap. He looks aside, set adrift by this assertion.

The only word to describe Doc's face is mortified. He gasps one word of response: "Unbelievable."

Unbelievable.

My friends, the makers of BTF III have just summarized 30 years of simultaneous technological change and unforseen cultural upheaval! If you belong to a certain generation called "Greatest" or perhaps even "Baby Boomer" you might be offended by Marty's generalization even to this day. But if you belong to my generation, it's simply hilarious to witness this kind of mindfuck going on in the brain of poor old 1955 Doc. It's so gloriously funny because it makes nationalistic prejudice seem positively infantile, and common sense fall flat on its face. It's even more funny if, like me, you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and your image of the national technology level of popular consumer goods was determined by how superior the 1980s Japanese Nintendo systems were to the 1970s American Atari systems. It's so funny to see this joke played out because because it's simultaneously true, unfair, offensive, and unexpected.

How much does the wiser 1985 Doc's sensibility differ? Well evidently he did use some forward-thinking Japanese-made circuitry in his time machine when he built it decades later. But there's another side joke in Back to the Future II where the Doc is flying the Delorean above Biff's car in 1955, trying to get the almanac from him:

Marty (viewing from binoculars): "There he is, Doc! Let's land on him; we'll cripple his car."
Doc: *slightly scoffing* "Marty, he's in a '46 Ford; we're in a Delorean. He'd rip through us like we were tinfoil."

1946 Ford vs. 1980s Delorean:
Overwrought American steel against computer-designed poorly-made-in-UK flimsiness.
No contest here.

Progress indeed! Who's to be believed? The old farts who say "They don't make 'em like they used to!" or the young pricks who have to have the newest tech? You decide.

I'm stuck in the middle on this one, and I think I always will be.