Agree. I think the whole premise was a throw-away because there was no initial thoughts that the film would lead to sequels. Bob Zemeckis has said that he would not have pigeon-holed himself with that premise (or with them taking Jennifer) had he planned a sequel. I think they did the best with it by simply changing that quickly and getting on with the story back in the alt-85 timeline, and then ultimately fixing Marty’s future by him deciding not to race in his normal 85 timeline.

Wouldn’t BttF: The Ride at Universal, which had both Doc Brown and Biff Tannen as the stars be the other sequel? They go back to prehistoric times, as well, but in a new, modified DeLorean.

Spielberg sent a memo to the executive upon hearing about the title, and shut him down by calling it a “funny joke”, and leaving the title as it was. It wasn’t really that close to being changed.

People still use voicemail, just not as commonly as other methods. Apple even just went as far as to create real-time vmail transcripts, which I doubt they bother with if it wasn’t used at least occasionally. A better example of this would be Chandler trying to let Joey know about an audition (after previously not finishing a note on the whiteboard about one, which Joey then missed) by writing it on the board, and going all over the city to try to find him to tell him. In present day he could just call, or text Joey’s mobile and see “delivered” (if both using iMessage or RCS). Additionally people print from their phones. In the episode, the document printed by accident, and that was why they were trying to hide it from Rachel. Ross could have easily hit something on his Notes app and accidentally printed or texted a copy that could have led to the same hijinks.