"Real" hoverboard video: Funny or Die has Christopher Lloyd apologize for hoax.

Back to the Future's Christopher Lloyd Really Is Sorry for That Hoverboard Hoax. Sort Of.

Back to the Future's Christopher Lloyd Really Is Sorry for That Hoverboard Hoax. Sort Of.

Future Tense
The Citizen's Guide to the Future
March 6 2014 10:37 AM

Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd Apologizes for Hoverboard Hoax

Christopher Lloyd is #sorrynotsorry for lying about hoverboards.
Christopher Lloyd is #sorrynotsorry for lying about hoverboards.

Screenshot / funnyordie.com

On Tuesday, tech nerds scratched their heads at an expensively produced viral video purporting to show a “real” hoverboard, with earnest testimonials from Tony Hawk, Moby, Terrell Owens, and even the great Christopher Lloyd. I ripped the hoax for being unfunny and pointless, and for tediously insisting at several points that it was not a hoax, which is just bad form. “Everyone involved in making this video should be ashamed of themselves,” I wrote.

Believe it or not, it seems they listened. Today the humor website Funny Or Die brought Lloyd himself back in to confess and apologize—sort of. In a new video titled “Funny Or Die Is Sorry for Lying About Hoverboards,” Lloyd feigns contrition and pretends that he too was duped by “those rascals over at Funny or Die.”

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I'll give Lloyd credit: He hams it up pretty well, perhaps getting in some implicit digs at people who (like me) were annoyed rather than amused by the stunt. It’s still not clear, though, what the point of the whole thing was.

As my fellow not-impressed blogger Matt Novak at Gizmodo observes, driving traffic to the Funny Or Die Facebook page for a nonfunctional hoverboard giveaway “seems like a rather flimsy reason to go to so much trouble.” Now, not only have we been reminded that all hoverboards are fake, but it looks like we might not even get a new Back to the Future movie out of the deal.

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