Thirty Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Back To The Future’ For Its 30th Anniversary

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years since Back to the Future came to the theaters and made us wish we had a crazy, mad scientist as a best bud.

At London Comic Con on Sunday, the cast of the original Back to the Future (which spawned two equally awesome sequels) talked about the film ahead of its 30^th anniversary, People reported. Among those sitting on the panel — “Doc” himself, Christopher Lloyd; the original Jennifer, or Marty’s girlfriend, Claudia Wells; and Marty’s rather frisky mom, Lorraine, played by Lea Thompson.

The #BackToTheFuture cast reunited, and the trilogy is going Back to the Big Screen! http://t.co/WCCy2sfGGc pic.twitter.com/ZOvJiogBYI

— Yahoo Movies (@YahooMovies) July 17, 2015

But the man who will forever be Marty McFly to many, Michael J. Fox, crushed many dreams when he revealed during the panel that it would require tons of cash to get him back into the DeLorean — simply because he wasn’t very fond of the car, Hollywood Reporter added. More on that later.

All this time later, Back to the Future has earned its rightful spot among the echelon of classic movies, due both to its amazing story and its memorable characters, Marty primary among them, Fox said at the panel, according to Contact Music.

And what makes him so appealing? Curiosity.

“He’s just a cipher for the audience to take in what’s happening and see their feelings reflected back…Marty was just everyman. Marty was every kid. He was just supposed to represent everyone’s reaction to what was happening.”

For those of you who’ve seen Back to the Future a hundred times over the past 30 years, you probably don’t think there’s much new to learn about the classic film. But you’d be wrong. In honor of its 30^th anniversary, here are 30 things you probably didn’t know about Doc, Marty, Biff, and the rest of the gang (thanks to Mental Floss, IGN, and Shortlist).

1. Michael waged a constant battle against the DeLorean. Every time the car door opened, it painfully smacked the actor, so much so that he said the film’s gag reel “would be like 30 seconds of ‘whack, whack!'” Often times, his hand would smash into the flux capacitor, drawing blood.
2. If not for Back to the Future — the biggest money maker in 1985 — Fox may have been working on a fish dock or in the military.
3. Every major studio rejected the script — 40 times.
4. Columbia thought Back to the Future wasn’t sexy enough, but Disney was disgusted with Lorraine’s lust for her son Marty back in 1955. They called it incest.
5. Marty and Doc first hooked up three years before the film, when he snuck into the scientist’s lab and got a job. They became friends because Doc was just happy someone finally thought he was cool.
6. Early on in the drafting of the script, the time machine was going to be a fridge.
7. Princess Diana attended the film premiere.
8. Ronald Reagan turned down a role to play Hill Valley’s mayor in Back to the Future III, but later quoted the film in his State of the Union: (“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”)
9. Take a look at Back to the Future II again — that little kid playing the arcade game in Cafe 80s is Elijah Wood, in his first film.
10. John DeLorean was very grateful that his car was included in the movie; he wrote screenwriter/producer Bob Gale a letter to say thank you for “keeping my dream alive.”
11. Marty originally traveled to 1967 and was arrested for not having a draft card.
12. Richard Nixon attended Hill Valley High School, in real life where it’s actually Whittier High.
13. Back in the early 1990s, there was actually a Back to the Future cartoon. Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) provided the voice of Doc.
14. The kernel of the idea for the film came to Gale when he saw his father’s yearbook and realized his dad was a nerd. He then wondered what it would’ve been like to be his friend in high school. And the rest is history…
15. Apparently, studio execs weren’t too fond of the word “Future” in the title, and wanted to name the film “Spaceman From Pluto” instead.
16. Ever wonder why Back to the Future II and III have a different Jennifer than the original? The actress, Claudia Wells, left the film to care for her sick mom.
17. In real life, Crispin Glover (the dorky dad) is three years Fox’s junior.
18. It took only 10 weeks to film Back to the Future.
19. Imagine what the movie would’ve been like with these actors, all of whom were considered for the iconic roles: Tim Robbins as Biff; Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell or Eric Stoltz as Marty; and John Lithgow, Dudley Moore, or Jeff Goldblum as Doc.
20. During filming, Crispin lost his voice and had to mouth his lines. His voice was dubbed later.
21. Doc hunched because he’s 6’1″ and Michael is famously short at 5’5″; filmmakers wanted them to be similar in size.
22. The rules that H.G. Wells used in his book The Time Machine were applied to Back to the Future, namely the rule that the DeLorean could travel through time, and not space.
23. Originally, Doc had worked on the Manhattan Project and a nuclear explosion sent Marty to the past. This plot twist ended up being too pricey.
24. Biff was named after a studio exec Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis didn’t like. They gave him the exec’s last name.
25. Albert Einsten and conductor Leopold Stokowski inspired Doc’s character
26. Crispin didn’t like the original ending, so he made his own (check out his reasoning here).
27. At the end of Back to the Future, Doc brings Marty and Jennifer along in the DeLorean on a mission to save their kids. That was supposed to be a joke.
28. In the original video version of the flick, the “To Be Continued” at the end was not included, but was added to later versions. No one ever intended to make a sequel.
29. Huey Lewis plays a judge at the band auditions (the guy who tells Marty he’s “too darn loud”). He also sang two songs on the soundtrack.
30. Fox said his kids have never seen Back to the Future. For shame.

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