There's something important I've wanted to get off my chest for 35 years, and I figure today is the day.
There is a scene in "Back to the Future Part III" (1990) in which time-traveling inventor Doc Brown, trapped in the year 1885, shows Marty McFly an enormous whirring, clanking, hissing machine whose purpose is a mystery until it deposits a few dirty ice cubes in a bowl. It's an ice maker! Very charming and funny.
My problem: artificial refrigeration had already been invented and was pretty widespread by 1885. Refrigeration doesn't require electricity; it can be done with steam power. Commercial ice plants were operating in most major cities, including Los Angeles, which couldn't have been far from Doc and Marty's fictional Hill Valley, Calif. (which was also somehow within walking distance of Monument Valley, Arizona, but never mind). If Doc Brown wanted ice, he could have had blocks of it shipped from L.A. on the train he later hijacked to accelerate his DeLorean to 88 mph and travel back to the future.
The only way I can reconcile it is to think of the ice-making scene as a character bit, like how in the first "Back to the Future" movie Doc built an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to feed his dog and cook breakfast. Maybe his Wild West freezer was the same sort of thing: an unnecessarily complicated creation to accomplish something that could have been done much easier (and produced ice that didn't look like mud) but less cinematically or fun.
Otherwise, it's the one piece of the "Back to the Future" trilogy that shatters my suspension of disbelief. Or, as a disappointed Ant Man realized in "Avengers: Endgame," "So 'Back to the Future' is a bunch of bullshit?!"
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