The more things change, the more they don’t stay the same in an age of inventions and spinoffs

Two recent movies have sent their protagonists back in time, where they try to alter the future.

In “Back to the Future,” Michael J. Fox, playing a teen-ager, is catapulted back to 1955 in a DeLorean roadster jazzed-up by his mad genius friend.

In “Peggy Sue Got Married,” Kathleen Turner simply faints at her 25th high school class reunion and wakes up back in 1960.

Of course Fox’s character hadn’t been born yet in 1955, and Turner’s Peggy Sue was just 18 in 1960; so they have a good chance to meddle with the future. Fox changes his father-to-be from a nerd to a he-man; Turner tries to avert her bad marriage, but fails.

Some reviewers liked both pictures; some didn’t. I enjoyed them both. I had trouble, though, accepting Kathleen Turner--that buoyant, full-blown, sexually magnetic, vibrant, mature young woman--as either a disenchanted 43-year-old mother or a virginal (to begin with) 18-year-old girl.

Both movies derive their charm from the anachronisms that being misplaced in time inevitably engenders. The idea of the time warp is certainly not new to movies. We have seen into the future in dozens of science-fiction movies, and now and then a contemporary has been transported into the past.

In “Berkeley Square” (1933) Leslie Howard went back to 18th-Century London and astounded society with visions of railroads, airplanes and terrible wars.

What “Back to the Future” and “Peggy Sue” made so plain was that we no longer have to go back 200 years to find a world so different from our own.

In 1986 even teen-agers have lived through incredible changes; and we who are 60 or more have lived through the greatest period of change within one lifetime that the world has seen in 6,000 years.

Society has been wrenched and altered not only by such obviously momentous inventions as TV, the jet airplane and the computer, but also by thousands of lesser spinoffs. Thus, we are jarred and amused when young Fox, back in his home town in 1955, goes into a soda fountain and orders a Tab. The soda jerk (is that an outmoded term?) says, “I can’t give you a tab till you order.” Fox says, “I’ll take a Pepsi Free.” The soda jerk says that nothing is free at his fountain.

Fox meets the teen-age girl who is to become his mother. Aside from its rather embarrassing incestuous implications, this acquaintance has its amusing anachronisms. The girl thinks his name is Calvin Klein, because that’s the name she sees on his underwear.

In “Peggy Sue,” Turner is shocked to see that her father has had the bad taste to buy an Edsel. Also, she gives the school’s boy genius some things to shoot for by telling him about computers and panty hose. (He gets rich.)

Reflecting the great social changes that have resulted from our technology, Turner tries to seduce her inhibited boyfriend and does seduce the class poet. Perhaps she got back to 1960 with a supply of the Pill.

Recently there has been a rising awareness of the gadgets, conveniences and products that have made our lives both easier and more complicated over the last five decades.

You may remember that a year or two ago I quoted a couple of paragraphs from a Wellesley magazine article written by Nardi Reeder Campion, class of 1938, listing all the wonders that they didn’t have in ’38.

I hesitated to excerpt more than two paragraphs from Mrs. Campion’s extraordinary article, I said, because I did not want to plagiarize her. She wrote, commending me for my integrity, and noting that her article had been “reprinted far and wide, usually without permission and often without byline. . . .”

Only recently I have received, from four different readers, four slightly different versions of Mrs. Campion’s paper. One says “author unknown,” two give no attribution, and the fourth has a byline that is definitely not Mrs. Campion’s. All have turned up at class reunions.

To refresh your memory, Mrs. Campion’s list noted that her class was before the Pill, computers, television, penicillin, polio shots, antibiotics, Nylon, Dacron, Xerox, Kinsey, radar, fluorescent lights, credit cards and ballpoint pens.

It was before drip dry, ice makers, dishwashers, electric blankets, FM radio, tape recorders, electric typewriters, Muzak, Cheerios, frozen orange juice, instant coffee and McDonald’s.

Neither of the two movies I have cited make life seem attractive 25 or 30 years ago. There is little nostalgic pull. Mostly it seems a dull and comic world, characterized by Edsels and pre-Beatles rock. I was glad to get out of it. But of course we see it only through the eyes of teen-agers.

Coincidentally, Jules Levine writes that someone asked him the other day, “Aren’t you sorry you weren’t born later?”

“After giving it some thought,” he says, “I decided I wasn’t sorry. Though our generation had to live through a terrible depression and a Second World War and Hitler’s holocaust, it was otherwise a truly golden age to which the present doesn’t begin to compare.

“There were F.D.R.’s and Churchill’s memorable speeches, Edward R. Murrow’s innovative broadcast, plays by Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard and George S. Kaufman, the Jack Benny comedy broadcasts, opera’s Gigli, Pinza, Tibbett, Lily Pons and Rise Stevens, movie greats like Garbo, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Barrymore, W. C. Fields, Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr and Irene Dunne, baseball greats like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio, football’s Red Grange, and dozens of great newspapers in every major city instead of just two or three. . . .”

Come back, Joe DiMaggio!