This is heavy. Never in his wildest dreams would Doc Brown have
envisioned Japanese technophiles traipsing around with miniature
replicas of his time machine — let alone making phone calls on them and
taking pictures.
But it’s 2015, and everyone’s jumping on the Back to the Future bandwagon. At first glance, you’d swear Bandai’s creation
is designed to sit on a shelf and look cool, but it’s actually a
practical piece… inasmuch as you can call an iPhone case that’s a
strikingly accurate miniature reproduction of Doc’s DeLorean.
It does clamp around an iPhone and afford some level of
protection, and that’s at least somewhat practical, isn’t it? One thing
it won’t do is unexpectedly whisk your iPhone into the past or future if
you happen to drop it and it manages to reach 88mph before hitting the
ground.
Getting back to practical concerns: how exactly do you take pictures with a DeLorean body shrouding the entire back of your iPhone?
Simple, you just swing aside the hood panel that covers the camera
whenever you need to shoot. Two more panels on the side obscure the
sleep/wake button, volume controls, and ring/silent switch.
Fittingly enough, the flying DeLorean is part of Bandai’s Crazy Case
line-up. They make two other iPhone cases: one styled after Michael
Keaton’s Batmobile from the 1989 Batman movie, the other one after the Tumbler.
They cost about $50 each,
which seems pretty reasonable if you’re a superfan who wants a
conversation starter to carry around and real, genuine practicality
isn’t as much of a concern for you as it clearly is for Bandai’s
designers.
