6. Back To The Future
How different Back To The Future could have been if Marty McFly had travelled back to the 50s in a fridge as originally intended. Even ignoring the concerns Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis had about copycat kids getting stuck in fridges (or thinning the gene pool, as others might put it,) we wouldn't have some of the most iconic lines or sequences from the gloriously family-uniting trilogy. Time has been kind to Back To The Future, ironically, and the films have developed into a phenomenon vastly more broad than the three films' running times, and enchanting new fans every time they are replayed in cinemas and on the small screen. There is a timeless quality to each (even with the slightly kitsch vision of the future in the second film,) which makes the frequent talk of remakes even more abhorrent, and there is no dip in quality between the movies, nor any disappointing notes about the climax and conclusion. The films made Michael J Fox, rescued the legacy of DeLorean, and offered pitch-perfect pastiches of both futuristic movies and Westerns, while retaining an all-encompassing commitment to sci-fi that brought the genre to an audience not necessarily reached by other less broadly appealing releases. And the soundtracks are arguably the finest trilogy of soundtracks ever released, They also boast appearances by Huey Lewis & The News and ZZ Top - now those are credentials.
The Uncharacteristic Low Point? Some might say the third film is too self-indulgent with its Western theme, but the second film's darker mid-section is a tiny bit jarring in comparison to the rest of the films. But then it's appropriate to have a dystopian vision of the future to give Doc's warnings about messing with the time continuum some more weight, before he completely rejects them himself for a slightly cornball final revelation.