Category Archives: Series

I feel like I’ve missed things I wanted to talk about in the previous entries. Mainly because I was so focused on certain bits that I forgot about others. SO, hopefully, I can hit on some of those points here and still keep it simple. I understand the irony in that since my entries have been… extensive. But hey, this is my blog! I can write whatever I want!

I was exposed to Back to the Future part II and III extensively throughout my younger days. One cable network like TBS, USA, or SYFY would frequently run a double feature of both films during holiday weekends or something to that. And it felt like they did it ALL the time. Like the equivalent of how often TNT ran the Beastmater back in the 90s. If that one goes over your head, it’s understandable.

I mentioned last time how elements of part II influenced me as a youth in some ways. This film, however, was largely dismissed by me at that time since it didn’t wow me with the fantasy/science fiction of it all. But as time passes and I mature, I find myself enjoying this entry more and more. And I think because it feels like a refreshing idea. The irony of that statement is the conceit that history repeats itself as this film, the entire trilogy, really likes to imply.

The reason I believe it feels refreshing is because most time-travel tales seem to avoid the old West. Granted, there have been a few but they are very few and far between. Plus, this allows the film to go back to basics and tell a story about someone misplaced in time trying to get home. Sure, it was fun to see a potential future where… I don’t know… maybe Al Gore won the election in 2000. Would that have been our future in 15 years? Doubtful but fun to consider.

The old West was a setting I wasn’t too keen on as a kid. My father would watch old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies when I was a kid. And like most kids my age, if the movie was old, in black & white or didn’t feature a kid or some silly shit I could connect with, then I wasn’t interested. Eventually, my perspective changed and I think that’s clear what happened here.

And I respect Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale for taking a chance, considering the Western genre was effectively dead in Hollywood. Granted, there were a number of them in the 80s, but very few of them were box-office gold. So getting a green-light on a straight Western could have been difficult. Here, they created the opportunity to make a Western in the traditional sense but with a modern sensibility.

The Western influence isn’t just surface level either. While Marty does utilize the moniker Clint Eastwood in the past, the location of the film set and even the Hill Valley clock itself were used in the 1985 film Pale Rider, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. A film that was ironically dethroned from the box-office by the original Back to the Future. Another interesting connection to that film is Jeffrey Weissman, who replaced Crispin Glover as George McFly, was also in Pale Rider.

I also love that Clint Eastwood was a good sport about all of this. It was said he was tickled by the use of his name in the film. And the fact it was mocked for not being a tough guy name is a pretty funny joke. Fun fact for those who might not be aware, but during the scene at the drive-in when Marty comments that Clint Eastwood never wore clothes like that, Doc responds with, “Clint who?” To the left of Marty are posters for Tarantula and Revenge of the Creature, two of his first films, both of which he was uncredited. On the drive-in marquee, you can see the top-billed title as Francis in the Navy, Eastwood’s first credited role.

The cast variation in this film is another aspect that makes me appreciate this film more as well. As mentioned, part II feels like a light retread of the original film. Same cast, similar beats. Nothing to help make it stand apart outside of settings. In part III, there are the main four cast members that carry over. Mostly everyone else is a fresh face. The additions of Dub Taylor, Pat Buttram, and Harry Carey Jr. were pure perfection as they encapsulate those Western archetypes so perfectly. Dub Taylor was one of those faces I felt like I saw all the time in the 80s. Does anyone remember Soggy Bottom U.S.A.? (Don’t you do that, Sooner!) Also, Pat Buttram is one of those voices I enjoy doing.

I truly love Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton. While the film series up to this point never dwells on Doc’s lack of a love life, when he meets her, it’s love at first sight in all the best ways. Doc had never given much thought to it and now it suddenly overwhelms him to the point he can’t think rationally. It’s the perfect conflict for the character and perfectly allows Doc to be the focal point of the story for once. Another fun fact I learned very recently was that the character of Clara Clayton is, in part, based on Mark Twain’s own daughter Clara who almost perished in a similar fashion.

While I am aware that Tom Wilson has spent decades trying to shed the “Biff” image, I would hope he found some joy in getting to portray three different members of the Tannen family. Granted, there are similarities in each role, but I feel like he adds a little something to each that allows them to stand apart. Biff is a proto-typical dumb jock bully. Griff seemed like a bully on crank or speed. While Mad Dog is just a straight-up murderer. I never understood why they removed the scene of Mad Dog killing Marshall Strickland. The film doesn’t stumble for it, but it’s odd when his deputy is seen doing the arrests at the end. And for what exactly? I think they were gonna rob a train or they did… I don’t remember. It just plays out oddly. 

A casting choice that didn’t pan out which would have been a fun addition was that of former President Ronald Reagan. Apparently, he was offered the role of the mayor of 1885 Hill Valley. Obviously, he turned it down but couldn’t find any reason as to why. He could have actually acted in a good movie for once. I kid… or do I?

I mentioned Alan Silvestri’s score in the last film being a retread of the original film’s score. And I stand by that since here he really brings some additional flavor to the score. He found a balance of using the original score while incorporating newer, more Western-themed elements into it. The intense nature of the music during the train sequence sticks with me. You hear the adventurous elements. The Western elements. The romantic elements. You can even hear how the music is paced like the sound of a train at times. Then those familiar Back to the Future notes come in to round it all out. It’s blended together so well. He’s a memorable composer for a reason. I sometimes think I should have majored in music studies.

Now, I want to talk about this McFly problem in this movie that I don’t think the filmmakers really thought about. I know it’s a goddamn movie but just follow me. So, in the second film, we see Marty’s kids that both resemble him. Fine. That makes sense. In this film, we are led to believe that Seamus McFly married a woman who looks exactly like Lorraine Baines which raises some serious questions. Now, in saying this, I have to make it aware that the role of Seamus was meant for Crispin Glover, and it would have been a parallel to Marty’s parents. Fine I get that. But Lorraine is a dead ringer for Maggie… I’ve heard Bob Gale dismiss this by saying that maybe the McFly’s have a type. But this would imply they keep it in the family! At least I would read it that way. I don’t know. I would have preferred new actors.

I didn’t mention it in the last episode, but I’ve always been a bit conflicted with the addition of Marty having some personality flaw about being called a chicken. Now, I’ve read in various articles that this inclusion was to give Marty a bit more depth since he seemed somewhat flawless in the original film, although “flawless” is not the term I would use to describe him. He seemed very confident and capable, traits his father lacked, which begs the question of where Marty picked up these traits. But at no point did he ever come off like a hot head in the first film. So to rectify this in my own head, perhaps due to his meddling in the timeline, this new personality quirk arises thus changing his possible future. Had nothing changed in the first film and Doc still went to the future, maybe Doc never returns with a message about his kids. Which makes more sense anyway.

Hey, did you know that Michael J. Fox almost died in this movie? It seems he lost consciousness while being hanged. You know, something that seems very likely to happen. Oh and what the fuck is up with that kid at the end of the flick? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I posted a GIF below. I have heard that he apparently needed to pee really badly. Still though… that’s a very bizarre way of indicating such a thing.

Back to the Future II and III were the first films I remember in my lifetime to have been shot back-to-back. And while others have attempted the same, I would argue that these two films are the only ones to stick the landing, despite having flaws. I say that because they both feel more connected and the first entry almost feels like the odd one out, if that makes sense. By the time the movie ends, every plot thread that was introduced was tied up in some form. If someone were to ask me what the best movie trilogy of all-time is, I couldn’t give you a straight answer because that’s subjective. But you can’t tell me this trilogy wouldn’t be in the top 5 of that debate.

One final thing that I feel has added to that is the lack of more movies. I would love nothing more than to see one more adventure with Marty, Doc, and the DeLorean. While we have gotten the further adventures through an animated series and even a Telltale game series (which was amazing BTW), it’s not the same as the big screen. And look, I have no grand concept for a sequel that has to be done. Honestly, I’m not even sure where to go from here outside of starting from scratch. But that’s not happening anytime soon since Zemeckis and Gale own the rights to the franchise. Not sure how they negotiated that deal, but that would never happen today. So in a time where every franchise under the sun has been remade, rebooted, or requeled, it’s nice to have one franchise that has remained intact for 40 years. Because the moment they are gone, the reboot will begin. Mark my words.

As mentioned in the blog about Back to the Future, some of us in the world had to wait four years before getting the promised sequel. As a five-year-old, I had no idea what it would even be about or why it would take another four years. Sure, we knew we were going to the future but why? Turns out there were a lot of questions and concerns that caused some issues for this highly anticipated sequel.

At this point in time, Hollywood was run by people who actually took chances. They were run on the basis of a good idea rather than a known brand. Universal had made some moderate hits during the 70s but were still struggling financially. Luckily a little film called Jaws came along and became the biggest success the studio had ever had to date. That success helped the studio coast into the 80s bringing in more hits like E.T. and The Breakfast Club but also some surprising bombs like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Lynch’s Dune. So, when a sure thing came along, the studio decided to give it a bit more attention. Jaws sequels were fairly successful. What else could be sequelized?

Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale had a wealth of opportunities before them, so they were not thinking about a sequel to Back to the Future. In fact, the ending of the first movie was meant to be a final joke, not a setup to a sequel. But Universal was eager to take Marty and Doc on more adventures and decided to push forward with a sequel, with or without its creators. Upon hearing this Zemeckis and Gale decided to stay involved with the production and even promised Universal two movies. Universal excitedly agreed and pre-production began on Back to the Future part II AND III. We’ll come back to the latter.

It seems the entire cast from the original film was committed to making the sequel long before any scripts were written. All except one actor: Crispin Glover. Various reports seem to indicate that Glover has taken umbridge with the original film’s ending, a point I bookmarked in the last episode. As I said, the messaging at the end of the original film was on brand for the 80s: money equals happiness. Now I know it might not be that cut and dry since you could easily argue that on the surface they seem more successful, but at the end of the day, they still live in the same house and the two oldest kids are still living at home, despite having better jobs. Those are just two simple observations.

During contract negotiations, Glover’s agent asked for fair compensation compared to other actors and script approval. It seems that Glover felt he was being low-balled compared to the other actors saying his offer of $125,000 was half of what Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson were being paid. So in a twist of irony, he demanded $1,000,000. Since the producers were not going to cave to those demands, work began to lessen George McFly’s presence in the film which ultimately led to the character being recast. However, even though the role was recast, unused footage from the previous film was used that featured Crispin Glover, and the stand-in actor, Jeffrey Weissman, was dressed in prosthetics to make him resemble Crispin Glover.

Now, who made these calls? According to writer Bob Gale, these were studio decisions that were out of his control. Yet, Crispin Glover insists that all of this was a personal attack perpetrated by Bob Gale. What’s true? I haven’t a clue. Crispin Glover kind of comes off arrogant at times, as if he’s a true artist and he’s misunderstood or whatever. But on the same token, you have a story from the stand-in Jeffrey Weissman who claims that the bit where George was hanging upside down was not a tactic to hide the fact it was a different actor, but in fact a planned punishment for Glover, due to his behavior in the first flick. I’m not sure what behavior they speak of, outside of one or two minor eccentricities that I’ve read about.

In any case, this all led to a lawsuit that was settled out of court for $765,000 by Universal. Furthermore, it prompted the Screen Actors Guild to create new rules regarding the use of an actor’s likeness. It’s really disappointing that this occurred at all, since having Crispin Glover in the film would have significantly changed the narrative. He was killed off in the script because of this nonsense. So, what would that story have been? I did read about some of the ideas that were pitched. One involved a trip to the 60s where Marty would have encountered his parents as hippies. Could have been interesting but then another encounter would have caused more issues when we all think too much about these films.

I also feel bad for Jeffrey Weissman since, as he tells it, everyone on the set treated him like an outsider. Lea Thompson even referred to him as “The Imposter.” The man was hired for a job just like the rest of the cast. He didn’t steal this role from anyone, so to be treated in this way is ridiculous. So much so that he assisted Crispin Glover in his lawsuit. I don’t know. The guy could be a creep.

So with all of that out of the way, let’s really get into the flick. My excitement for this flick was through the roof, especially after seeing a trailer. The future they presented was a far cry from all the dystopian futures we had been given so many times before. Flying cars, electronic clothing, hologram advertisements, Max Headroom-themed AI bots running the service industry… it’s everything we could have hoped for and more. Unfortunately, our future got fucked along the way, and we haven’t quite gotten to all of these things yet. But I maintain hope in the face of oligarchy. Moving on.

The biggest selling point for a kid my age was the hoverboard. Holy cow! What an invention! I wanted one SO badly and was somehow convinced that they existed at one time in the past but had been pulled from store shelves due to safety concerns. At one point, I thought I made that up in my head because I could find nothing to support this. Fortunately I came across a behind-the-scenes special that featured Bob Zemeckis saying, “they’ve been around for years, it’s just that parent groups haven’t let toy manufacturers make them. But we got our hands on some and put them in the movie.” I was a kid. I didn’t know adults lied so much. In any case, I was obsessed. So much so that the hoverboard became my choice of transportation for the main character of my first comic series. Of course, that comic was littered with references to other things I was into at the time, so it was inevitable.

Like with many things I love growing up, I eventually begin hearing negative comments regarding said thing I love, and that I assumed everyone else loved too. But people had opinions and upon hearing them, it was hard to argue. One issue this film had going in was how to deal with Jennifer. Bob Zemeckis stated that had he known they would go on to do a sequel, they would have not included Jennifer going with them at the end of the first film. And that’s all well and good, but that still doesn’t change the fact that Doc took Marty to the future to change a future event. Like… it doesn’t make sense. It’s like finding out you’re going to be hit by a car in a month, so you travel to the future to push yourself out of the way versus taking that knowledge and not being present in the spot in which you were going to be hit. You’ve taken extra steps for no reason.

Plus, when Doc puts Jennifer to sleep, he claims it’s because she is asking too many questions about the future and no one should know that much about their futures. Even though Marty learns quite a bit about his future while there. It’s a bit of a head scratcher when you really start to think about it and, luckily, I can just let it be while watching. Because going to the future was just a gateway to exploring the future and creating our plot centered around an almanac.

And that’s the part I really dig out of this movie. Where the first film ponders what it would be like to meet your parents as teenagers, this film posits the dangers of time travel, while complicating it in the process. In the first movie, the DeLorean was just a device to help the plot along. Had they not made the time machine so damn cool, I guarantee this film would not have been a franchise. It’s all that damn DeLorean’s fault. We’re not just doing the first movie again, even though they repeat several beats from the first film. I feel as though I’m praising and criticizing at the same time. It’s exhausting sometimes.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, I felt as though the time travel mechanics followed a loose interpretation of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, meaning that everything happened as it should and no paradoxes exist. That would then make sense why there are no paradoxes, despite all of us seeing them. However, in this film, we seem to be leaning on the multiverse theory. And you better thank your lucky fucking stars that Zemeckis and Gale own the rights to this franchise because with EVERYONE trying to do multiverse stories right now, Universal would have jumped into the frey with Back to the Multiverse of whatever. The two Martys could have really met!!

Back in 1989, I had never considered the idea of a multiverse in the scope of how we would view it today. Like, I understood that if you change the past, you change the future. But for whatever reason, I never viewed this concept as multiversal. Now, I see it as clearly as the sky outside. And upon my first viewing, I never expected Doc and Marty to wind up in an alternate version of their timeline.

So, I was very intrigued by this concept. However, as I have aged, I see some inconsistencies with the way it is presented. Like how was Biff able to return to the current 2015 after having changed the past. He should have wound up in an alternate timeline, just like Doc and Marty. Meaning that the DeLorean would have been lost to them in time… and that would have stopped the movie OR given them a harder path to traverse, but ultimately it would have been better for it. I don’t know that for a fact. Just wishful thinking.

Funny enough, Carl Sagan, who some may know as one of the world’s greatest and probably best-known astrophysicists and others as the pseudonym Doc uses in the past, considered this film to be the greatest time-travel movie ever made, due to its accuracy in handling multiple timelines. I guess Carl Sagan had a time machine of his own.

Another element I enjoy is getting to revisit the first film from a different perspective. While some movies like Avengers: Endgame play with the idea, I feel like here it’s much more in-depth. We see new scenes and interactions with characters we already knew. We see the complications of new Marty being seen by Biff’s gang and then going after original Marty while he’s on stage, leading new Marty to save original Marty before a universe-ending paradox occurs. I find it to be a lot of fun.

While on the subject of different perspectives, in this film we see Doc wearing a brown coat and hat while interacting with his younger self when he’s working on the “weather experiment.” It is said that if you go back to the scene in the original movie, a man with a brown coat and hat can be seen in the background. This is all one big coincidence, BUT one could argue that we saw Doc Brown from 1985 there in the original movie, meaning that the time travel rules go back to Novikov’s Self-Consistency Principle which contradicts everything in the movie.

Hey look, it’s little Elijah Wood in his first film role! Claudia Wells is replaced by the wonderful Elizabeth Shue. It’s a minor bit of recasting that I was ok with. Granted, the reasoning behind it was not good as Well’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer. But Elizabeth Shue feels like she has more comedic range which works better for the character in this film. Alan Silvestri is back with the score, although I don’t feel like he does much different here from the original, which feels intentional in some aspects. Did you know that tunnel that Biff drove through when Marty was trying to steal the almanac back was the same tunnel that led to ToonTown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?… Now you do.

I say that because an early draft of this film combined a number of the ideas of both part II and III. Eventually, they were separated to give the studio two sequels as opposed to one. In separating the ideas, the plan was to film both movies back to back over the course of 11 months. Zemeckis apparently became frustrated with Universal’s marketing department for this film since they did not express to movie-goers that this would be one of two movies. Audiences were apparently pissed when “To Be Concluded…” appeared across the screen before showing a trailer for the next film. This led to a significant drop-off in the film’s second week. Was all of the good will towards the original film now soured by this lack of proper marketing?