Basically it's this...

The "dramatic tension" in III was provided largely by the fact that an arrow had pierced Marty's Delorean's fuel line and the damn thing was out of gas. However do we get the Delorean up to 88 mph?

Well, in the Wild West timeline, Doc Brown had arrived in January and Marty had shown up in September of 1885. Presumably when Doc showed up the Delorean had some fuel in the tank. Doc, in January, put the Delorean in a mine to hide it. In September Marty brings the Delorean back. The Delorean that Doc Brown hid is still in the mine. Scavenge the fuel line from the Delorean in the mine, syphon the gas from the tank and you're good to go. No need for chemically treated logs and hijacked trains.

Addendum to the Delorean solution --

Also? The Delorean that's sitting in 1885 with a working fuel pump, and maybe some gas? Is exactly the same Delorean Marty uses to get back to 1885 Himself.

Actually.... (and this won't be whitefonted), there are several points in all three movies when more than one Delorean is present in any particular given timeline.

The really amusing part about that? They're all every last one of them the same Delorean. There's only the one, just propagating itself throught time.

Heh, unnecessarily white-fonted x-post with Miracleman.

That website reminds me that I also forgot to mention Donnie Darko.

That's also a very cool website in general. Thanks, MM.

And glad you loved the movie, Aimee. That's actually what I thought you meant by your comment, but I wasn't sure.

I saw a movie a few months ago which had a flashback sequence to the 80s, and a hilarious visual gag with one character using what must have been a 15 lb. "cutting edge" mobile phone.

Ok, but...isn't there.....yes.

That works. I had to make a tiny Post-It flowchart of my own, comparing the Delorean situation with Marty's, but it works.

But it all balances on a very thin thread, and that's the part that gives me selective amnesia. As many times as I've discussed this, it eludes me. For some reason, it just doesn't work. I think my brother and I's prime example had something to do with Biff.

Oh, and a really cool exploration of time travel and its effects on the subsequent timeline in a book is Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The central conceit of the book will blow your mind.

The Biff problem is in Part II.

Old Biff goes back in time to 1955 and alters the timeline. Now, in 1985, Biff is wealthy, Hill Valley is Vegas on PCP and George McFly is dead.

Having accomplished this, Old Biff gets back in the Delorean and goes back to 2015...but he should go back to a radically different 2015, and Marty and Doc would NOT be able to get back in the Delorean and fix things. Because the entire timeline "changed around them" as Doc explains to Marty in reference to his girlfriend being dumped unceremoniously on the porch in 1985.

The 2015 that Old Biff returns to is a timeline in which Marty was sent overseas to boarding school and Doc Brown was put in an asylum (and likely didn't even invent the time-machine...causing a paradox).

I saw a movie a few months ago which had a flashback sequence to the 80s, and a hilarious visual gag with one character using what must have been a 15 lb. "cutting edge" mobile phone.

That was a big joke in American Psycho as well, along with Nouvelle Cuisine.

The scary part about seeing the original Terminator? Between the scenes with Linda Hamilton and her roommate, and the disco scene, it looks like someone's trying to DO an "80's" scene, when, in fact, it's just an 80's scene. Yes, the fashions were just as bad in the 80's as the 70's, folks, just a different style of bad.

I saw a movie a few months ago which had a flashback sequence to the 80s, and a hilarious visual gag with one character using what must have been a 15 lb. "cutting edge" mobile phone.

X-Files did this too, to a good effect.