Chicago Cubs’ World Series Win Has Ruined A ‘Back To The Future 2’ Joke Forever, Admits Writer Bob Gale
While a large proportion of the city of Chicago will be celebrating the Chicago Cubs’ World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians for a good while yet, there is one man who is slightly mournful that the baseball side have finally ended their hoodoo.
Screenwriter Bob Gale admitted as much to The Hollywood Reporter, revealing that the Chicago Cubs’ triumph has now forever ruined a joke in Back To The Future: Part II that poked fun at their inability to win the World Series.
In the 1989 time-traveling action adventure Back To The Future: Part II Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels to the year 2015 from the 1980s, where he is informed that the Chicago Cubs actually won the 2015 World Series. Unfortunately Bob Gale and Back To The Future: Part II’s director Robert Zemeckis were just one year off their prediction, but what’s even more harrowing for Gale is that the joke regarding the Cubs has now peaked.
‘Back to the Future 2’ was one year off from predicting the Chicago @Cubs winning the #WorldSeries. pic.twitter.com/tb1hvkA5g6
— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 3, 2016
On Thursday he revealed the origins for the gag, explaining, “We wanted to come up with something that would motivate Marty [McFly] to go get a sports almanac and think about using the information from his 30-year time-traveling trips to make money. So, we tried to think of the most ridiculous and unbelievable sports event that we could think of, and that was the Cubs winning the World Series.”
In the scene in question, Marty McFly is told by a stranger on the street that the Cubs were a 100:1 shot, while the random individual then tells Marty that he wishes he could go back to the beginning of the baseball season and put some money on them winning.
Gale continued, “Of course this year they weren’t a 100:1 shot, and I don’t think they were even a 100:1 shot last year. So Bob [Zemeckis] and I have been talking about this since last year, of course, when it looked like our prediction might actually come true in the right year.”
This then led Gale to ask, “So the question now is: so, they’ve won, is the joke ever going to be funny again? It’s not an unusual event now.” But while Bob Gale is still undecided over whether people will ever laugh at the line in the same way again he did find solace in the fact that the joke in the film is actually being discussed at the same time as the Cubs’ triumph, which proves just how endearing Back To The Future: Part II still is.
Speaking about his reaction to the Cubs’ win, Gale admitted, “It was mixed emotions because I was thinking if the Cubs lose, people will still laugh at the joke and if the Cubs win, then we made an almost accurate prediction. The best part of it is that it was a gag that was so memorable, here we are still talking about it and that’s gratifying, that Back To The Future means so much to so many people.”
‘Back to the Future II’ writer happy #chicagocubs won World Series — even if history-making result ruined his gag! https://t.co/OzF3c6mmDa pic.twitter.com/Oel4eZfcgg
— Yahoo Movies (@YahooMovies) November 4, 2016
Even the fact that Bob Gale, who hails from St. Louis, Missouri, is a fan of the Cubs’ great-rivals the St. Louis Cardinals didn’t stop the screenwriter from admitting that the Chicago Cubs’ 4-3 World Series victory, which was secured in overtime on Wednesday evening, was “pretty astounding.”
Some Back To The Future fans have looked to prove that Bob Gale and the team behind Part II were actually correct with their prediction because of the 1994 baseball strike, which meant that no team won the World Series that year. The official Twitter account for the Back To The Future franchise even wrote, “The space-time continuum was disrupted by the 1994 baseball strike, causing this alternate reality where the @Cubs win in 2016, not 2015.”
[Featured Image by Scott Olson/Getty Images]
