When Chris posted Doc Brown’s Open Letter to Marty McFly, I was inspired, NAY, determined to share with you, my fellow nerds, 7 things that have always bothered me about one of our all time favorite movies. However, when looking closer at Back to the Future… I found a little more than 7 so please enjoy the following…
7(ish) Things I’ve Always Wondered about: Back To The Future
- Next up: a nickels worth of “FREE” advice. Seems to me that advice just cost him a tardy.
1: Im not even going to ask the obvious question of what a 17 year old is doing at the 70 year old scientists house at 8AM on a school-day, no that would be too easy. The first question is and must be, what kind of experiment is Doc running to see if his clocks are all running precisely 25 minutes slow? None, if you ask me. I think he was just trying to mess with Marty. I mean, great, all of your clocks are slow. Did your entire garage/apartment/lab travel 25 minutes into the future? Or did you painstakingly put each clock into the Delorean one at time? No. I’ll tell you what you did, you took every clock in your garage/apartment/lab and turned them 25 minutes back. Like a dick. You knew all along that would make 4 tardys in a row for Marty. Didn’t you!?By the way what happens after 4 tardys in a row?
Side-note:
- LAZY!
Why Does original George McFly have his shit together enough to Dye his hair? Yet new and improved George lets the gray loose like an old fart. Perhaps its a discovered self confidence that comes with punching your wife’s attempted rapist. But I chalk it up to pure laziness.
2: Marty agrees to meet his pal Doc in the parking lot of the Twin Pines mall at 1:30 in the morning. Now, a question I have been asking for 24 years must be addressed. How does Doc get in contact with Libyans? The 1985 equivalent of craigslist aka the Sunday classifieds in the Hill Valley Gazette? “Libyan terrorist sect seeks scientist with knowledge of physics and a love of laughter to build us a large nuclear device. You supply the smarts we supply the plutonium, and laughs ; ) No fatties: replies without pics will be deleted” I invite you all to write your own versions in the comments section. Flip it around if you like. Wide eyed scientist seeking plutonium…
- I said “NO FATTIES!”
3: OK, so I buy Emmit L Brown as a scientist with a wonderful imagination and the deep knowledge of general sciences and temporal theory necessary to create time travel in his garage/apartment/lab. That brings us to the explanation of the time vehicle and what dates one could travel to, if so inclined. Doc claims Nov 5, 1955 is a red letter date in Science, then, has a pause and laughingly remembers falling off the toilet and coming up with the Flux Capacitor… Seems like he knew exactly what happened. Nice acting “oh my god now I remember how great I am, inventing time travel and all.” Dick.
- I almost forgot to tell you how fucking awesome I am!
Side note:
Jump to Doc is lying dead: Thanks again, Terrorists. Marty is on the run. In the only available vehicle (that just happens to be a time traveling DeLorean) As you can see from the provided still, Marty makes no attempt to avoid hitting the photo developing booth, 87 miles per hour right past Doc’s lifeless body. Lucky for him, he goes back in time just quick enough for it to turn into an old harmless albeit frightening scarecrow. Nice “accidental” Time travel there Marty.
- Turn Right? Nahhh.
4: In 1955 Marty sets in motion a chain of events that will forever alter his family. Nov 5, 1955 is not only the day that Doc had a vision of the Flux Capacitor, but also the day that George and Loraine were to meet and fall in love. However, with Marty in 1955, he tries to save his dad from being hit by his grandfather’s car only to wind up under it himself. Something to wonder: Mr Baines says “another one of these damned kids jumped in front of my car.” Does that mean that guys were always in the tree peeping at Leah Thompson? (A plausible theory, she was über hot in the 80’s and known to take her top off. See:”All the Right Moves” ’83) Or was Mr Baines a closeted alcoholic that often ran over teenage boys? I think the latter is the more likely.
- Ah, the days of the drinking lunch.
5: Biff just tells George to go away so he can rape the shit out of his future wife…. Yes Folks RAPE. Last I checked, rape was one of those “horrible” crimes. You know the kind we put people in jail for long long periods of time. Now, I’m no science guy, but in the future Im not going to let the guy who attempted to rape my wife hang around and wax my BMW Let alone my kids super sweet 4×4. The rapist is spending as much time AWAY from my wife and 3 kids as possible.
- Hey, Let’s hang out in 30 years, I’ll wax your car!
6: Upon his return to 1985 Marty wakes up on a seemingly average Saturday morning only to find everything has changed. Marty asks “What are you wearing dave?” and Dave says “Its a suit Marty, I always wear a suit to the office” Really Dave? well its Saturday. No one goes to the office on a Saturday. Where are you really going Dave? And why did you look at your brother like you were better than him just because he fell asleep in his clothes again. Who are you anyway? You still live at home and share the car with your parents.
- What are you wearing, asshole?
7: Apparently Biff is no longer mid-level management requiring “reports” to be written by George McFly only to be retyped by Biff. I mean do you realize what would happen to Biff if he handed in a report in George’s handwriting? Me either. Well, apparently the 300 bucks damage to his car caused by Marty’s trip to 1955 and subsequent skateboard chase through Hill Valley square, made him so enraged and upset, he started his own auto detailing company to stop these cutthroat price gouging car detailers. In this new 1985, Biff has spent the last 30 years trying to pass the savings onto you! Who cares if he tried to rape someone once? Obviously not George, thanks to the 2nd coat of wax on his 84 BMW 535i.
- Passing the savings onto you!
Bonus observations:
-Yes he is a scientist but i still maintain there is no way to connect a 1985 video camera to a 1955 television.
-Who unplugs the juke box when Biff walks in, only to plug it in as soon as Marty books it out of Lou’s? Isn’t that the best time to run outside and watch some shit go down? not stand inside and listen to the rest of “Mr. Sandman.”
-Marty now has to make out with his mother to save his future, Just before Biff returns to the story to rape Lorraine. I guess 300 bucks damage to his car means “time for a rapin’”
-Biff’s friends don’t wanna mess with no reefer addicts, and quite frankly neither do I.
-If I’m Doc Brown, I’m not chancing Marty returning to the future in an 84 (I mean 82, as Rob points out in the comments DeLorean shut down in 83) DeLorean hitting a cable at the precise moment a bolt of lightning hits a metal rod. I’m making a really, really long cable. side note, i was bored so i timed it, the DeLorean takes 45.3 seconds to get to 61 mph.
-Upon his return to 1985 Marty has about 200 feet to go from 88 to 0 on slick pavement… He’s not merely putting the front end of the Delorean through the Movie theatre/church of christ, the Delorean would be imbedded in the distant hills behind the town square….
Final side note:
I would also like to see the 2 off camera mental breaks George McFly suffered In 1966 and 1977 respectively when the Planet Vulcan appeared in Star Trek and Darth Vader showed up on screen in Star Wars. Wouldn’t you be confused after Darth Vader came down from the planet Vulcan and said he would melt George’s brain if he didn’t ask Lorraine out to the enchantment under the sea dance, If I were George I would sue the pants of Gene Rodenberry and George Lucas.
- Get out of my head, Rodenberry!
{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
In 1985 no one likes an oil-slicked silverfox.
Why must you ruin good movies for me?
Great list! BTTF is my favorite movie of all time despite (or, perhaps, in part because) of all the wacky plot holes.
Re: The Libyans, I assumed that Doc was, at one time, working for the government or some big research lab that would have had ties to terrorists. And maybe he got out for moral reasons, but not before ripping off said terrorists. And hiding, poorly, in the same town in which he’s lived his whole life.
Re: Date rape. In 1955, much like drinking and driving, it wasn’t as big of a deal. Loraine proved herself to be a little loose whatwith a history of parking and a flask in her pocket. And therefore was “asking for it”.
Re: George and his alien encounters. George ACTUALLY believed that Darth Vader from Planet Vulcan was a real alien. Therefore, he would have thought that George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry were also visited, hence their inspiration. He may be “successful” in the future, but he’s always been pretty nutty.
-Yes he is a scientist but i still maintain there is no way to connect a 1985 video camera to a 1955 television.
This bothers me more than any other plot hole. There is NO WAY there’s an a/v input back there.
re: video camera and tv
actually, NTSC signalling IS that backwards so the lack of an input is the only thing stopping you. An RF modulator for your camcorder OR modifying the TV yourself to have a physical connector are all you need. Relatively simple electronics either way.
the conclusion i draw from this is that Doc Brown is a dick. and that crispin glover is hot, gray hair or not.
Re: Connecting an ’85 Camcorder to ’55 Television. That’s the only science/tech in the movie that isn’t pure fantasy. You’re just scaling a 75 Ohms to 300 Ohms. If Doc Brown is capable of disrupting the space-time continuum he can certainly improvise a coaxial connection.
Ray, SamKane, you guys are why I love nerds. I think he wouldn’t have time. He didn’t even have time to construct the Town square model to scale or paint it.
If Doc Brown is capable of disrupting the space-time continuum he can certainly improvise a coaxial connection.
Good point. I’m officially sated.
He didn’t have time to scale or paint the model because they had already formulated a plan with a hard deadline. But when they hooked the camera up to the TV, they didn’t yet have that deadline. Marty was just trying to prove who he was at that point.
If a man can build a time machine. He can hook up a camcorder to a 1955 TV.
Anyone who hooked up their Vic20 or Atari 2600 knows the tech involved.
To add to the geekery, if Marty came back to the future in a 1984 Delorean then he definitely changed the future for more than his family and their immediate contacts. Deloreans were only produced from 1981-1983.
My observation is this: Why is it that you can find “Back to the Future” playing somewhere, anytime on cable? Is it a conspiracy or something?
To add to the TV-camcorder discussion, I would say it’s likely that a 1985 camcorder would have come with a coax-to-U-shaped prong thingy adapter to accommodate older TVs (as late as the early ’80s some TVs only had those two screws as antenna inputs), and that those would be easy to wire into a ’50s TV. More critically, Doc Brown is a packrat and probably still had that 1950s TV in his house in 1985, and if he was using the camcorder in 1985 to document his time-travel experiments (which we know he was), he may have already tackled this connection issue in the ’80s and left the wiring attached to the camera. Now, he probably had a newer TV in the house as well, but being a weirdo who sets all his clocks back 25 minutes for the fuck of it and makes a robot feed his dog, I could see him insisting on using his old TV to watch his video footage.
My big question is: why is that guitar in the opening scene so tiny?
“My big question is: why is that guitar in the opening scene so tiny?”
Michael J. Fox is a tiny, tiny little man.
possible reason for the 25 minute-slow clocks thing
This. Is. Hilarious.
Holy hell that was superb! I’m off to retweet the bejesus out of this…
But first, as an uber-geektastic fan as well, a few further observations:
+ Who crashes their sweet 50s convertible into a truck of manure and doesn’t think to at least close their yapper during the process? How Biff ends up spitting dung out of his mouth is beyond me.
+ Not sure how Claudia Wells lost her role as the O.G. Jennifer Parker before being replaced by Elizabeth Shue in parts II and III…unless time travel somehow also involves a girlfriend upgrade? Girlfriend 2.0!
Time-Space Continuum? I love you.
+Speaking of things that would realistically stop a speeding DeLorean, how in sam hill does a rickety-ass old barn halt that futuristic auto when Marty first travels to 1955? Old Man Peabody obviously be rockin some hardcore hay…
Killer post fellas – gotta love some Back to the Future Thursday action!
Great post man. Back to the Future Part II is probably even worse in the continuity department. I’ll add you on Twitter now. Loved you on Singled Out.
That was great. That final side note made me laugh out loud. Just the mental picture of George McFly’s reaction…holy crap.
Classic.
Biff’s! Raping High Prices Since ’55!
I’ve always wondered about the awkward family conversations in the years following this movie. Marty’s childhood memories are of an alternate timeline. What will he and the Mcflys talk about?
Marty: Remember when we were on welfare?
you left out “why does marty only give himself like 5 minutes to save doc brown when he gets back to ’85?”
You missed the biggest plot hole of all:
Why don’t Marty’s parents recognize him in 1985 as the crazy guy who hooked them up thirty years ago? I mean, they named him after him, you’d think they would remember what he looked like, right?
Side note: I wonder if they really did go easy on him when Marty set fire to the living room rug…
I’m no corrections officer, but surely there would be enough lag between a parole hearing and a felon’s release to bake a cake! why would Mrs. McF spend the time baking a cake for Uncle Jailbird Joey knowing full well that it would just sit there for days or weeks while paperwork is processed?!
share the car with you’re parents. (please fix that)
at the end, right before doc goes to the future, he takes a right down the street and u-turns and goes past the camera to the left then time travels probably in like 5 seconds. there is no way he got up to 80 something that fast. every previous time we see the car speed up it takes like 20 seconds.
In the second movie when Doc is hovering above Marty during a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightning hits the DeLorean and Doc travels to the old west. Two questions 1.) The DeLorean has to be going 88 miles per hour to travel in time. How does it leap? 2.) Why did doc have 1885 and not 1985 put into the car?
How about the fact that the clock tower’s time had to be precise down to the nanosecond to know when the bolt of lightning would strike, yet there is not even a second hand on the clock.
The one thing I’ve always wondered about Back to the Future is this: George and Loraine McFly and Biff must have awfully short memories. I don’t know about you, but I’d be kind of curious when my son grew up and became the spitting image of a) the guy that brought me together with my spouse or b) the guy who caused me to end up in a pile of shit and whom I later chased around the school (twice) trying to kill or badly maim, especially since I saw him twice at the same instant (BttF2).
wow…..
too many “notices” to read but a lot of your notices caught my notice back in the 80′s so here’s the excuses I mentally wrote into the BTTF pics to keep me sleeping soundly thru 1990:
1) Doc Brown – Terrorist – Love Connection
I always felt it was a given that Doc Brown was the type scientist who was poo pooed in the U.S. of A but lauded overseas like Tom Waits Big In Japan, that plus the Lybians of the 80′s basically being like North Korea today, they would totally keep a rollerdex of all Nuke-Fluent scientists, and the Doc would be like getting the Hyundai instead of the Honda
2) Old Cool George McFly’s hair, he’s distinguished and using all that brain power now, so he greyed, as opposed to uncool 80s george who never maxed his potential and as a result was simple and non-greyed. I reference my uncle and dad for proof of that one, yeah sorry dad.
3) George McFly’s silent scream, (over Star Trek and Star Wars “trumping” him on Vulcan and Vader) I also took it as a given that he released those names and places into the lexicon before Lucas and Roddenberry, prompting both of those cats to either have their own brain-plosions or possibly they both joined him and ruled the (literary) Galaxy.
4) The 25 minute off clocks at Doc Brown’s place:
Finally it seemed totally plausible to me that the first test of the flux-capacitor was not the delorian but in fact Doc’s lab and everything attacted to it and that the doc created (wait for it) a static time bubble (!) within which he moved the whole house out of sync with the normal flow of time resulting in all the clocks being 25 minutes late.
5) finally, why would a 17 year old hang out with a kooky elderly scientist? simple the doc was on the ganj(at least), I thought everybody could see that.
You talk about Dave giving Marty a smart answer to the “What are you wearing, Dave?” question, but don’t mention that obviously Marty is supposed to know that Dave always wears a suit. So, where’s the “alternate-future” Marty that is supposed to know that? Did he just disappear the second Marty zipped back into the future, a la “far-future” Biff in BTTF 2? If that’s the case, wouldn’t “original-future” Marty have disappeared instead, with “alternate-future” Marty being the only Marty left? This makes a lot more sense in my head.
i never noticed the photo developing booth
THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE, LOL!
Well, all I gotta say is that 1955 Hill Valley was much kinder to black people than the rest of the world. “Refer addicts” huh, ok. Those were kind words, that scenario probably would have played out a lil’ different. Oh, and Chuck Berry stole his most popular song, the song that pretty much defined Rock ‘n’ Roll from Marty McFly. Damn, a brother can’t have nothin’ (yea you read right nohtin’!).
At least there was less physical mistakes in all those movies put together than in the new “Star Trek” movie. Lets talk about all the mistakes from it, if so we would be here a long time and I am not talking just about going back in time.
this is one of my favorite movies as a kid, i still watch it about 2 times a year. i wish i came up with this post, its pretty damn hilarious if you are a fan of the movie.
All worshiping aside, what I really want to know is… when is the movie gonna come out on Blu Ray?
Oh, almost forgot!!!! The fact that Marty’s older brother “can’t keep up with all…” of his sister’s boyfriends,really? No amount of messin’ with the past made her any hotter. Just say’n, sorry
Hey Nerdist, if you like Back to the Future it’s playing in Ventura on Thursday:
http://www.regencymovies.com/movieRunDetail.php?movieRunId=7414&movieId=81&theaterId=14
why would he spy on lorane at like 10 am?
1. doc is a scientist. much smarter than you. he’s doing time experiments. he loves marty and isnt fucking with him
1a. your 1st guess was right. it’s his self-confidence. not his laziness. the guy wrote a fucking book.
2. there were things such as letters and telephones before the internet, shithead. doc’s connections run deep.
3. doc was not bragging. he is simply in awe of the history of the moment. mankind is about to travel through time for the first time ever and he is remembering the date in which he embarked on his journey to get to where he is now. have some respect. doc invented the time machine to help mankind, he is a renaissance man.
3a. marty knew the only way to get out of there was to go 88mph to travel through time. doc told him before. marty was his mumbling in frustration of wanting the car to go faster. he knew, so he didnt care what was in front of him. moron.
4. u were right the first time. she’s hot and teenagers were always being peeping toms. you’re stretching.
5. biff was so taken by his attacker his whole personality changed. george was the dominate one now and nothing was going to change that.
6. he’s a hard working guy who works on saturday. unlike us, who are cyber-arguing about a time travel movie made 24 years ago.
7. again, a permanent personality change made biff a bitch. like you
I love BTF and those are very valid points but as a fan I’ve done some research.
Marty is the Doc’s assistant, hired for a nice sum of money and free beer. The doc’s pro free beer and under aged drinking and we all know Dave doesn’t mean office ,as in working, he is talking about the room where he does cocaine for eight hours out of the day with his office mates, and, of course, he needs a suit for that.
Brilliant Mr. H. Brilliant
that’s brilliant.. I’ll be linking this to my own site if that’s okay…
greg
I’m with AlanPinkerton – Why didn’t they recognize Marty – http://flowercast.net/2008/11/14/the-mcflys/
There’s one thing that’s always bothered me about the movie. When McFly and Lorraine are getting further away from meeting, the picture of the McFly kids begins to fade, starting with the oldest child. I think there’s a logic problem with that. Sure, if McFly and Lorraine don’t get together, all three kids wouldn’t exist, but shouldn’t Marty have faded first, since the possibility of two people never meeting having three kids is so much more unlikely than two people never meeting having one kid? Of course, if Marty disappeared from the picture first, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. But still…
those terrorists are scary * sucks thumb*
As far as why they didn’t recognize Marty? I think George did, In fact, I think he was very suspicious that Calvin Klein blew through Hill Valley for a passionate night in the late 60′s with Lorraine, and resented her ever since, hence them only having 3 kids.
Which would only be meaningful if they also went out and found all the existing Deloreans and crushed them into cubes when they closed down the production plant. Existing cars don’t cease to exist once they stop producing new ones. He could have bought it used, or bought it back in 82 and been working on it for two years. Or is there a deleted scene of them on a Delorean car lot I missed?
See, I always assumed this was a classic 50′s cranky dad joke that purposefully doesn’t make sense. It’s actually one of my favorite lines.
Yup, it’s official… my childhood has been molested by bears.
“No. I’ll tell you what you did, you took every clock in your garage/apartment/lab and turned them 25 minutes back. Like a dick.”
LOL, amazing!
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