Lu's McFLY V turns Back to the Future's "Johnny B. Goode" into a Spider-Verse comic

A hand slams a chord on a cherry-red guitar with a little "Project 2nd" sticker on the body. A drummer in a white tuxedo leans into his cymbals while a "Directed by LuThe2nd" credit hangs in the air beside him, and a bass player grins over his upright. Seventeen seconds in, the camera finds Marty McFly at the microphone under a paper banner of cartoon fish, and the gym floor at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance starts to move.

This is "McFLY V - Johnny B. Goode", a 57-second fan animation posted on X on Monday 12 October by Lu (@LuThe2nd), an Orlando-based AI storyteller who runs his work under the name Project 2nd. He made it on Higgsfield, and it restages the most famous musical scene in Back to the Future as if Sony's Spider-Verse animators had got hold of it. We never knew we wanted that, and now we can't think of a better way to have started the day.

Nostalgia on two fronts

The fun here comes from two kinds of nostalgia landing at once. One is the 1985 film itself, with its school dance, its white-tux house band and a 1958 Chuck Berry song played to a 1955 crowd. The other is the animated Spider-Man films, whose comic-book look Lu borrows for nearly every frame of the clip.

The colors are striking. Magentas, cyans and hot oranges flood the stage, faces carry hard rim light, and the curtains behind the band are painted in loose blue streaks, so the whole palette looks as if it jumped straight off a comic-book page. The character movement has the same animated Spider-flick swagger, from the bass player's grin to Marty's lean into the mic, and through all of it he is still recognizably Michael J. Fox's Marty, pinstripe jacket, red tie and all, playing what the film calls a song from the future.

Lu fills the room with his own jokes too. A "Vote for LuThe2nd" campaign banner hangs over the dance floor while couples jive beneath it, and the film closes on a Project 2nd Studio end card.

Where it slips

The one letdown is the sync. The singing doesn't always sit on Marty's lips, and the playing on screen doesn't always match the music, from the guitar to the piano. One viewer replying to the post spotted the same thing: "None of the hand movements match the tempo or the notes being played." It is easy to forgive, because the short has oodles of style and pizazz to carry it past those moments.

Not every reply was friendly, and that split is familiar for fan work made with AI. A few people asked what the point was or objected to the director credit, while others praised the performance and the drummer close-ups.

A series that is finding its audience

McFLY V is the fifth entry in a run of Back to the Future fan animations that Lu has been putting out every few days. The fourth, set to "The Power of Love", was his breakout, and this one is the follow-up.

• Date: 2 Oct 2026. Episode: McFLY III, a skatepark scene set to Lupe Fiasco's "Daydreamin'"; Reach on X: About 1,400 impressions
• Date: 8 Oct 2026. Episode: McFLY IV, Doc, Marty and Jennifer to "The Power of Love"; Reach on X: About 73,800 impressions and 2,400 likes
• Date: 12 Oct 2026. Episode: McFLY V, "Johnny B. Goode" at the dance; Reach on X: About 5,100 impressions and 190 likes by Tuesday morning

Those numbers belong to a maker with about 1,100 followers, whose original posts usually draw around 1,500 impressions. V is running at roughly three times that, while IV went far past it. Lu presents himself as a learner rather than a hype account, and when a critic pushed back on IV he answered: "Learning as much as I can. But I agree a real directors input would make things better."

For this one he credits only the platform, Higgsfield, which hosts several video models, and he doesn't say which model or how many generations went into it. His earlier posts name Midjourney for stills and Seedance 2.5 for animation, both used through Higgsfield. The clip has around 50 cuts, so it was assembled from many short generations rather than made in one pass.

In practice, for anyone making work this week, the lesson is the series. Lu picked one film everyone knows, gave himself a recognizable visual style, and kept shipping short episodes under one title, and the audience found him on episode four. Each new episode now has a reason to be watched.

Watch it

Watch McFLY V on Lu's X post at x.com/LuThe2nd/status/2109713340993827183, and follow @LuThe2nd for the next episode.

Fan animation and frames by Lu (@LuThe2nd) / Project 2nd, made on Higgsfield and shared on X. Back to the Future and its characters belong to their owners, and this is an unofficial fan work. The frames are used here with credit. If you are the maker and want any of it taken down, message @the__generated on X and it comes down.

Your Voice

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