Doc Brown himself claims that hoverboards are real
We've all been burned by stories about "real hoverboards" for decades now — but this brand-new "demonstration" of the famed Back to the Future technology comes with a pretty heavy endorsement: Doc Brown himself.
"I'm Christopher Lloyd, and about 25 years ago, I played Doctor Emmett Brown in the film Back to the Future II — a landmark film that, among other things, introduced hoverboards to the world," says Lloyd. Now at the time — as much as we all wanted hoverboards to be real — it was, of course, an impossibility. But I'm proud to announce that thanks to the clever folks with HUVrTech, the technology has caught up with the concept."
Though the HUVrTech video has been available for less than a day, both SlashGear and TechCrunch have declared it a hoax, and it's kind of hard to argue with their conclusions; we've all been burned by stories about "real hoverboards" for decades now, and a real-life version of this technology would presumably be announced with a little more fanfare than a silly, star-studded attempt at a viral video. (It's worth noting that the HUVrTech website has a countdown timer that ends in December 2014, so we might not know what this video is really designed to promote until then.)
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So yes, this purported demonstration of a "real hoverboard" is clearly fake — but if Tony Hawk, Moby, Terrell Owens, and Christopher Lloyd himself are all willing to pretend that hoverboards really exist for the sake of a clever video, maybe we should all fantasize for a little while too. --Scott Meslow
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Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.
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