Sorry George Takei, ‘Back to the Future’ Day was a hoax
If you are one of the 2.1-million people who follow George Takei on Facebook, you may have been surprised and delighted to learn that Wednesday June 27, 2012 was so-called Future Day — the day that Doc and good old Marty McFly set the DeLorean’s dials for in “Back to the Future II.”
“We are now a day AFTER the future,” Takei wrote in a note above a photo showing the DeLorean’s dashboard set to go from OCT 26 1985 to JUN 27 2012. “LIKE and SHARE if you get this,” the former “Star Trek” actor suggested.
Takei’s wish is his Facebook followers’ command, and a little more than 61,000 of his Facebook army have liked the post already.
If only it were true.
As many of Takei’s followers have discovered for themselves and posted in the comments section, the actual date of Future Day is Oct. 21 2015.
And, to add insult to injury, it is a hoax that has already gone around the Internet once before.
As Slate’s Future Tense blog discovered, the movie website Total Film accidentally started a similar Future Day rumor back in 2010. The Total Film folks tried to apologize for their mistake with a tongue-in-cheek tweet that showed a Photoshopped image of the DeLorean’s dashboard set to JUL 06 2010. “Here’s proof we totally didn’t Photoshop,” they wrote.
But of course the fake Photoshopped evidence went even more viral than before.
This time around, the Future Day hoax was started by Simple Tap, a mobile checkout app that was promoting a deal on a”Back to the Future”box set on its Facebook page.
“Obviously, it wasn’t Back To The Future day yesterday, folks,” the company wrote on its Facebook page Thursday morning. “It was just our little joke... which seemed to fool a LOT of people. (As you can see here, the real date is actually TOMORROW!) But we really DO have a great deal on the Blu-ray box set.”
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