crooked tongues magazine News Features

"The objective is to take all of the energy and enthusiasm that the fans have for the shoe and movie and to turn that into positive action. So it’s to raise dollars and more importantly to raise awareness for Parkinson’s. With every person that’s worked on this project, I have to admit that I’m quite shocked that this hasn’t gotten out before today really. The fact that this is still something of a secret is quite a surprise — a pleasant surprise."
Mark Parker, CEO, Nike Inc.

"We have funded 260 million dollars into research in the 10 years that we’ve been around, and that sounds like a lot, but it takes billions of dollars to develop new treatments."
Debbie Brooks, co-founder and Vice Chairman of the Michael J. Fox Foundation

"We’ve got a mission to accomplish!"
Doctor Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D.



You might have heard that Nike reissued the MAG on Thursday. There was a little buzz about it over the last 100 hours or so. In fact, that little buzz was actually so vast, that even your mum who couldn’t care less about a limited edition shoe might have spotted it on the ITV news or in that bastion of unbiased opinion, the Daily Mail. It may have been the biggest sneaker event we’ve ever borne witness too, and in an era of brogues, Vibram and CVO shapes, a limited edition moonboot just proved that sneaker obsession is alive and kicking. It just needs a spot of shock and awe to set it off properly. We have no idea how Nike kept the return of the MAG (word to Mark Morrison) on the down low.

This is an era where line art, catalogues and light-fingered folk with factory access let us know everything at least half a year in advance. Nike and their friends in high places managed to organise an incredible press trip, create an eBay store, kit out a theatre, reproduce Doc Brown’s visor, arrange TV appearances, manufacture 1500 pairs of Nike MAGs complete with electronic components and create videos with celebrity cameos and a website to bring it all together without you knowing. Now that’s how it should be done. Trending topics, tech press excitement and social media domination were the outcome before the shoes had even been seen beyond Nike’s closed circle. It was an impressive achievement that we were privileged to have witnessed.

There aren’t too many shoes that can bring jaded collectors out of retirement, get young bucks hyped and capture the interest of the masses too.|The MAG is that design — the one that could turned Zoom-aided basketball designs into must-haves through colourway alone (though from Tinker's responses, now we know why the 'MAG' Hypermax never materialised. This is the shoe that seemed to unite everybody in desire, even if there’s no way they could actually wear a pair without looking ridiculous. For many, Marty’s self-lacing cinematic moment in ‘Back to the Future Part II’ set them on the path of multiple sneaker acquisitions. To own them would bring things full circle — a 22 year old shoe that’s made for a year that hasn’t arrived yet is an appropriately convoluted tie-in to the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy. We’re no strangers to hype, but we’ve never seen anything like this eBay-only (bar some auctions at Nike spaces) release before.

The selling approach and lack of self-lace may have proven controversial, but the charity side and lack of ubiquity to maintain the aura are no bad thing. Old school Nike met new school Nike approaches with this drop and this celluloid sneaker moment stays special as a result.



1. THE OVERVIEW

How was the MAG design process?

Tinker: Mark Parker and I go back a long way — our roles at Nike have changed over the years. I still work for a living and he’s CEO (laughs). What’s really great is that as a creative team, we’ve had a lot of fun. We’ve worked with some great athletes and personalities. This was a little outside the athletic realm. Mark has always been a creative force.

We put together these sketches from a creative meeting with the two Bobs. It’s nice to do a little "what if" so I have a few drawings from the archives. It took us a while. Archives had lost these drawings for years but we finally found them. This really is one of the early sketches. Mark and I talked about what the future would look like in 2015. We thought about how shoes would have wheels that would pop out, we knew a little about the storyline with regards to magnetic levitation — hence the name Nike MAG. So I did a few sketches and Mark and I went down with Pam right away to show them to Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale. We were there when the script was still being written which was really fun for us. There’s been a lot of stories on the Nike MAG over the years.

What went down along the way?

Tinker: There are some pretty funny stories. When we met with Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, we spent a lot of time kicking around other ideas. I think they were excited that we jumped right in, but really this process is about collaboration. Like when we collaborate with great athletes, great teams and great coaches and great trainers, this was an opportunity to collaborate with great creative minds — in this case, Bob and Bob. We went through this process and changed the design. The early sketches are just for the archive because they aren’t how the shoe ended up. There’s a memorandum from Pam (McConnell) about the meeting where we talked about what the shoe could do.

Then the design started to get more organic. We focused on the idea that the shoe was alive. One of the last sketches shows the shoe closer to how it was filmed. I drew a little scene to show it coming to life when Marty McFly put it on. As these shoes lit up in the movie, you might think that it’s easy to light things up. Well we did not have the technology to light those shoes properly. Michael J. Fox had to wear something very heavy, I believe that it was two or three pounds — a battery pack in his back pocket. Behind the scenes you could see it in his back pocket.

What do you get as a designer out of working on a film?

Tinker: Fantasy is a beautiful thing. As a designer it’s like being told that you can do anything. It opens up your mind and gave us a lot of freedom to think about shoes in a totally different way. that’s different to when you work with an athlete. At an elite level you can’t take a lot of risks: the difference between winning or losing can be a hundredth of a second or a millimetre. The reason that we take on the movie projects — and we’ve done a few over the years thanks to Pam McConnell and her Hollywood promo group — we take these projects on because it opens of a sense of fantasy to do things we wouldn’t normally do. Every time we do a project like this, we get ideas from them that we then apply back to real athletic shoes. In the end, there are big similarities working with set designers and writers and working in athletics with athletes. Collaboration is the key word here.



What's with the relaunch?

Tinker: We decided a few years back to make a few pairs of these. The process was arduous to say the least. Tiffany Beers is a fantastic developer, technician and developer at Nike tasked with remaking the shoe. We went back and forth with Mark Parker to make sure that it was recreated as close to the original as possible. One of the fun tasks was making it look like the movie shoe. Mark has a great eye and has been a big part of the creative team in terms of support and getting in creatively. He wanted the fine detail and it’s really difficult to tell the difference between this one and the one from the film. Tiffany and I were going to his office with different versions and he’d see things we couldn’t see. We went through that process with shape, stitching and materials, plus things you don’t normally go into like electronics. We spent a lot of time developing the electronics. It was sampled over and over and over again before we got it right.



What about power lacing?

Tinker: Well, it’s not the year 2015 yet.

Why not wait?

Tinker: One of the primary reasons we embarked on this project a couple of years ago was to help the Michael J. Fox Foundation raise awareness and hopefully improve treatment and find a cure. When you look at it from that perspective, time is of the essence, so we decided to get this shoe out as soon and possible to raise awareness.



2. THE NERDIER BIT

This is the third CT chat with Tinker Hatfield (blame a faulty recorder for the absence of the second conversation with Tinker on the site) and it was conducted alongside Mr. Eugene Kan from Hypebeast during the press day, with footwear innovator Tiffany Beers taking part too. It goes without saying that we would have happily made this last two hours, but some people have lives to lead.

CT: As a futurist, is it tough to look back at past design triumphs when it comes to retrospective moments?

Tinker: The thing about design, and it’s something that I think about, is how do you talk about what you just did and keep moving forward? And I found out that there’s a trick to moving forward, and that’s to look at something that was done earlier. And I’ve done that before. This isn’t the first time that we’ve kind of looked back. It’s a bit of a unique trick and I think writers, artists and other designers do it all the time. The Mini Cooper’s a good example and there are other consumer products where the designers create unique new experiences by reinterpreting older stuff. That isn’t what I always do and with Tiffany we’re supposed to be futurists, which means no connection to the past, but then sometimes there’s a strong allure to go back and each time we do a project there are a thousand ways to do it.

CT: Everything that comes out the Kitchen has a lineage — when we walked out the cinema in late ‘89, that’s all we talked about. The sneaker was the star.

Tinker: Yeah, it was a pretty unique scene. I like to say that I storyboarded that. (laughs)

CT: I heard that.

Tinker: The real change they made was that they put him sitting in the door of the DeLorean, on the door sail, which I didn’t draw, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same scene. I never got a writing credit! (laughs)

CT: Did submitting that cause any trouble at the time?

Tinker: It was interesting, because we went in with a few drawings before we even had an interaction with the two writers, Bob...and Bob. They were like, "That’s cool, but..." so we had a few interactions. Then Mark Parker and I went back to Portland and talked about the experience. That led to this design. Going back and forth was helpful because we started to understand them and where they were headed with the movie, which was complicated. So we were quite happy to be involved with something with a plotline like that. We’ve done things for movies before, but I can never remember ever being in a script conversation. It was partly written and we were having a conversation back and forth about the movie. That is extremely unusual.



CT: That same year you see the Air Trainer SCs or Air Trainer IIIs on Batman’s feet in'‘Batman' so it was a good year for you at the box office.

Tinker: Yeah! It was a good year at the cinema. I’ve never been a real purist. If you look at my work over the years, it’s pretty eclectic. I’ve never been so much of a purist, but I have to say, we were trying to think like collectors and in the world of collectors, accuracy is very important.

Tiffany: It was a fine line. Do we go towards collectors or do we go towards being wearable? Some things were pushed towards collectors and towards being wearable, or more towards the film. We tried to make it a replica.

Tinker: Yeah, it was difficult to make some some of the decisions because it did involve a little compromise here and there. Of course, the power lace thing is yet to be determined and that’s a different conversation, and we spent a lot of time with Mark Parker. He has a collector mentality.

CT: It’s crazy to have a CEO who went to Bowerman’s workshop and worked on say, the V-Series, at design level.

Tinker: It is crazy. And it’s part of the story that we would go with the latest sample and within two seconds he’d go, "Well, that’s not right, it’s too thick up here!"

Tiffany: "That colour’s too warm!"

Tinker: "There’s a few too many millimetres up here."

CT: Any other CEO would be concerned with cost then pushing it to production.

Tinker: Exactly. He’s really into it, very knowledgeable and very meticulous about those things. He helped us, otherwise it wouldn’t be released.

CT: The patents were spotted online early last year — was that part of some tactical viral marketing? We saw the lacing concept there.

Tinker: Well, I will just tell you, I can’t reveal too much. Because in many ways you’re talking about intellectual property. We are futurists. We expect to deliver amazing things in the future, so I’ll leave it at that! (laughs)

CT: Nice hint. With regards to the colourway, one of the MAG’s strongest points is that the colourway is so memorable. At the time, we were all whites and pop colours, the neons. I think it’s as integral as the shoe itself.

Tinker: Yeah, you’ve touched on something that is possibly not written about enough. Colour is almost the hardest thing to do. Get the colour right, for its time and place when you’re trying to design something. I think we have more arguments about colour with all of the shoes that we do. For this one, it seemed to be — and I remember going though the process — some of the earlier sketches were far brighter. As the process went on it started to sink with regards to the aesthetic of the movie and also, the aesthetic of the future. It seemed to me that everything they were designing on the set was really over the top so I thought the counterpoint to that would be that they’ll be muted in comparison. We didn’t know exactly what the hover board was going to look like, but I felt that it should be completely different.



CT: I think that contrast was key to the shoe’s appeal. We need to discuss the speckle though! That speckle preempts the Mowabb by a few years.

Tinker: I come from the world of architecture and this is an old process called Zolatone. It used to come in a can and you could paint the inside of your airstream trailer with it or you could paint a wall or wood trim. It was a 1950s or 1960s kind of thing and that was a little bit of an insider nod in my own mind, with the movie starting in the 1950s.

CT: Yeah, it’s like, 1955.

Tinker: Right, So I thought it would be kind of cool to pick something from that era, but hardly anyone ever knew about and put it on the shoe for 2015. It’s a little inside joke from me.

CT: I’m glad there’s a rationale. Sometimes you ask about a design feature and you just get, "Yeah. It looks cool." And that ruins a conversation.

Tinker: (laughs) I rarely do that. I have to tell you, I’m one of those people that has to have a reason for everything I draw. I rarely do anything that’s just, "whatever." So there reason for that. And it really was one of those old ideas, but it was never on a shoe. So it’s new in that context. You’re right. There’s a lot of stories in this shoe.



CT: In the 'Kitchen, a lot seems to have taken some hints from the MAG. In 2008, the Hyperdunk really had some similarities.

Tinker: You know your history well.

CT: I try.

Tinker: Well, we’ve had to police this a little bit, because when we were working on this, there were a lot of people who wanted to start knocking this thing off.

Tiffany: Left and right!

Tinker: And I swear 10 percent of Tiffany’s time was spent searching the company making sure that somebody wasn’t trying to do this in another shoe. We had to police and keep control of it and not let people be too literal about knocking this idea off. It happens a lot in Nike. One person comes up with an idea and ten people adopt it into their product line. So, we were pretty serious. With Mark Parker’s help we stopped a lot of projects.

Tiffany: Because it was going towards Parkinson’s it was important that it was special.

Tinker: It wouldn’t be right to do this project for profit and gain. We were motivated by the Michael J. Fox Foundation. We didn’t talk much about the Michael J. Fox Foundation at first because we were just trying to get a sample together, but we were talking amongst ourselves about it. But one reason it picked up was because we realised that this was a great reason to raise money for a great cause. It’s a good story and it’s an honest one — it was the primary reason to do it.



CT: Does this come close to where you see shoes in the future? Has it inadvertently guided shoes towards this aesthetic, like a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Tinker: That’s a good question. I don’t know how to answer that, other than with this - I’ve made this statement before, you may have even heard it: every time I sit down to design something - and I’m sure it’s probably true for all designers, technicians and developers — what you design is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done up to that point, right? It all goes in and some comes out at that point. I don’t know what to say other than, I’d been soaking in a lot of stuff prior to this design and somehow when it all came out on the paper, it is what it is. And guess what? When I sit down to design a shoe now this is in my head still. So this has to have an impact on future designs, just as i was influenced by things that were designed before me. So yeah, I would say that you’re right in that we might be predetermining the future by what we’ve done in the past. And again, that sort of fits in with the movie.

CT: Nice tie-in!

WWW.BACK4THEFUTURE.COM