Back to the Future: A Plothole Ridden Masterpiece

[Music] [Laughter] hello welcome to the culture cave we are here talking about back to the future there's no preamble we're just going into it anthony how the devil are you i'm doing well back the future is one of my favorite films of all time i'll keep this pace the whole time i'll slow it down now one of my favorites of all time conrad thank you um is it fair to say that most of the people who love these movies are going to be our age that's my first question to you i wasn't born when this film came out that's true nor was i actually 1985. elia twinkle in my father's eye at that point hi we're we're geriatric millennials though we sort of fit into that broadly fit into that age range that would have grown up with this kind of stuff um oh okay i'll tell you what let me let me phrase this to you another way um on a scale of one to ten how upsetting is it to you that if this was made today marty mcfly would travel back to the year 1992. i mean that is very upsetting considering i was born in 91 so i'm almost there almost what's even more upsetting is that the future was seven years ago well we'll get into that in a later episode but yeah him and austin powers both going back to 1992. there's this weird rule i guess in time travel movies where they have to go back 30 years i'm not sure why they chose that i think it's basically 30 years puts you right smack bang in the middle of like your parents teenage years so i suppose that's why it's like give you give your parents 10 years to finish uh secondary school and then get a family started and then you're like 17 18 whenever your time comes around to go back in time i think that's why the 30 years is there because you can almost guarantee most people's parents would be adolescents yeah no that's a good point and this is um as i said 85 is when back to the future was was made and this was smack bang in the era of i'm gonna say children's films this isn't really a children's film but like i i don't mean to do it a disservice when i call it that but um this was smack bang in the era when every kids movie had an inventor father figure in it and that's something that somewhere along the way as a society we lost so you had honey i shrunk the kids yeah his dad's his dad rick moranis is obviously an inventor that he had gremlins his dad's a rubbish inventor in that and then you also had this isn't a father figure but i included it anyway short round in the goonies yeah that counts that counts i feel like we've lost that we don't have inventors in movies anymore well i i know what you mean but this one is a little different for me this is a little bit different because after all in the word strickland you know doc brown is big trouble the other ones you know they're actually very fatherly father figures whereas doc brown's a real bad boy you know rick moranis almost kills his family he doesn't almost sort of shatter the space-time continuum so he's not as bad as doc brown but there's there's a there's an argument to be had there doc brown is a bad man the guy literally stole from terrorists the uh the heady days of 1985 when the libyans was like shorthand for villains when you watch this now it's like what what's wrong with libya i don't understand it's usually the like you've got the russians you've got the germans different stages of when they're the bad guys but then all of a sudden in 1985 the libyans i i don't think i've seen that in any other film this was maybe at the height of like the reagan era kind of fear of the middle east oh definitely was yeah i don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for this movie but ronald reagan loved it he did obviously he was the president the time this film was made so they were sort of questioning us a little bit i suppose him being the president yeah i mean you know look at what we ended up with is all i'll say in response to that we thought it couldn't get any worse with ronald reagan and we were wrong but yeah so just to give a little bit of background before we dive right into it robert zemeckis and bob gale wrote this together with steven spielberg kind of pitching in some ideas he's not credited as a producer on this one but those two they were young bright-eyed and bushy-tailed they needed to they needed a hit because they'd made a bunch of terrible movies before this uh robert zemeckis had directed i think romancing the stone which have you ever seen that it's like a michael douglas bad id oh it's not bad but average indiana jones movie no i've never seen it i i immediately thought of that film what's the what's the one with like macaulay culkin where he becomes a cartoon that's the one i thought uh oh the pagemaster yeah i don't know why i thought of that film when you say it that's a very different movie um but but yeah no i i want to say it's michael douglas and kim cattrall in romancing the stone and he's basically a poor man's indiana jones so that's what robert zemeckis was up to before this and like this is them swinging for the fences this is them going for it to be honest like they could have just you know they could have played it safe they could have made something a little bit more generic but they were like no we're gonna make a bloody time travel movie we're gonna make a time travel movie where the main storyline is incredibly reliant on someone not being disgusted with incest and it bloody works it does but i think the strength of this movie and where the first and third one have that in common and the second one less so is that they are basically really fun fish out of water period movies where you get to know this essentially the same cast of characters but they kind of move them all around and put them in sort of slightly different characters in different settings each time and that's that's the fun of it and they they really nail that formula first time out and then they just use it again every other every or subsequent movie yeah i mean like it's it's it's it's a fantastic ensemble cast and uh i i love how like you say like the same cast of characters it really is because as you go to different times they just have the same actors playing the same characters which is is an interesting choice because it makes the present day 85 whenever they're all already done up if you fall for that if you fall for that makeup then you must think that the cg on those younger ones is unbelievable he'll be i'm real you see crispin glover in 1955's like have they done that that's the most amazing it must be some kind of computer graphics that they've applied there and and a lot of those characters then like they are the word iconic gets thrown around far too much these days in my opinion but i think there's at least two characters in this movie that i would call absolutely iconic characters first we meet him early in the movie it's dr emmett brown played by christopher lloyd and his crazy white hair never ages a day in any of these movies i think in this one they put him in sort of very very mild prosthetics to make him look older in 85 than he looks in 55. it's just like just a slight wrinkling around the eyes and they like by the second movie they've corrected that we'll we'll get to that next week but um it is funny because it's just because he looks no different my question to you on the introduction of doc brown is and i know you're a fan of looking at the granular details of these movies so this one this one i'm curious what you're thinking on it is he sends einstein on the first successful test to the time machine we know it's we know it's the first successful one because he says as much and the implication there is that he was fairly confident that this time it would work because he's sending einstein yeah yeah and that also then following on from that implies that he has done other tests so my question to you is how many animals did doc brown kill off-screen before this successful test run do you want a real answer because i i would love to i'd love to sit here and imagine with you like him sending a budgie back in time or yeah what was the order was it budgie dog oh no dog was einstein so it has to be worse than dog so it's like i don't know ant mouse yeah budgie canary yeah canary down down the coal mine i honestly i don't think that he sent any backs uh already but what i will say earlier on uh whenever marty was around his house uh finding you know we all pay it pay visits to 50 60 year old scientists before before we go to school they don't pay much time uh establishing why this 17 year old boy is spending time with this 50 year old event there's no time at all you know even rick and morty when they remade it made it his granddad like this this is though there's no relation whatsoever here but basically from that moment when he's wrote on the phone to dock in his own house doc says that all the clocks in his house are 25 minutes slow it worked it worked now this is my question to you what experiment was he doing if he hadn't sent any dog back in time before why are his clocks in his in his house slow surely it should be the one that he has is slow i don't understand what's going on this is this is an example of a bit of writing in this show where they're just like let's set up that there's something to do with time going on yeah and they have no idea what that would actually really be you know that question that he asked you say that but like by the end of the third movie the the whole shape and scale of a time machine has just been thrown out the [ __ ] window so wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me at all if they retroactively in the third movie were like oh his whole house is a time machine at this point and that that's right that's why all the clocks are 25 minutes but also the plutonium was in his his apartment that's not safe did he steal two boxes of it because he was away doing oh yeah that's a good point he was away doing experiments why did he not have the plutonium with him it's just so because he but at that point he'd been away for ages because the dog food was piling up listen doc what's going on i agree with strickland i talked about it before he is bad news that's one thing that i actually do find funny uh you know breaking kayfabe here for a minute what the hell is strickland talking to marty about when he says he's bad news throughout the three films we never get any inkling of why this man thinks doc brown is bad news no i mean but you know i mean put yourself in his position you're a teacher at a school you know that this 17 year old boy is kind of he's he's from you know not a very successful family his mind is is liable to wander and then he starts hanging out with this like crazy old man on the edge of town like as a you know you're a teacher you've got to pull that young man back into the fold somehow you've got to say like listen this is not going to end well yeah but i don't do it in like in a trophy way where it implies that like he's going out with the doctor like this is the thing if you just took this part of the film where he's like stay away from him he's bad news and just apply that to any teen romance where like the girl's been told stay away from that boy he's a bad boy you know like george costanza and seinfeld so what you're saying is that doc brown should have turned up in like a leather jacket on a motorbike instead of a delorean like yeah that'd been great marty goes back in time then oh before he does go back in time conrad the date he goes back in time is very very important because the reason why he's able to go back in time to this date is because dr brown remembers it randomly puts it in the machine why did he randomly have that in his mind because that's the date he invented time travel why would he not remember why he knows the date before he puts it in well i've written you a poem conrad what uh what a wonderful way to kick off this new format go on then let's let's see this poem on time travel okay remember remember the 5th of november time travel plutonium and dock he will remember the 5th of november as it's essential to the plot [Music] lovely i like i like i like the i like the irregular meter of that as well like i thought it was going to be um it's not a limerick i can't remember what the what the structure was literally the exact replica of the remember remember the fifth of november gone powder treason and plot come on come right um no i mean i recognized it i'm just saying that was like um like the sort of transformers or the opposite of the transformers theme song you know the bit at the end of it when they're like autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the decepticons we didn't need that many syllables in that short space of time gotta get it across i gotta get it across you know who is a better poem writer than me scrambling it down while watching a film conrad if you know if someone wants to step up to the plate be my guest that was wonderful and what a way to introduce us to an era when poetry was was very popular the 1950s in the 50s we meet my two favorite characters in this movie we meet them at the same time for me the other the other brilliant character in this movie apart from doc brown is biff tannen he is an all-time great [ __ ] tom wilson i i don't know that tom wilson has ever played another role apart from this to be honest pretty sure he was the pe teacher in john apatos freaks and geeks oh i never watched that that show um but i mean that would have been that would certainly be very on brand casting yeah did you but he's yeah he's one of the biggest dicks in movies ever and i think where this character goes or where the tannen legacy goes is interesting because in this he goes from like he can sort of run the gamut of comedic bruiser all the way to legitimately menacing but my word by the end of this series of movies the tannins have become something much more much more like kind of machiavellian and evil i mean it is true but i also like like we all know where he goes into the third we'll talk about that when we get there but i like the idea of like a wet old west bad guys lineage eventually ending up the jocks in high school who will sexually abuse the women because let's let's not let's not beat around a bush here biff is very very ready to severely sexually abuse uh lorraine at the end of this film if it wasn't for my boy george george mcfly there would be some horrible horrible trauma there yeah absolutely and well let's talk about him then crispin glover is an actor who always plays the weirdest [ __ ] guys like he just he has the mannerisms and voice and face of a man who always just has to play weirdos he's he's very weird in this he's very weird on friday the 13th part four um he has a very he has a very kind of like bird-like way of moving where he's always kind of like like kind of darting about the screen um like his bones are hollow i i do like him i do like george mcfly um i don't think he's up there with biff and doc brown though i'm gonna say oh really uh okay well fair enough that's your opinion man uh i personally really love him i get me a milk chocolate iconic that is good you are my density absolutely iconic that doesn't it doesn't make any sense that that line always annoys me because it's like he he's an educated boy he knows the word destiny no he's he's he's nervous conrad see the cora not everyone's a hunk like you right you you don't have the problem talking to the ladies some people like george mcfly get very hot under the collar having to talk to someone like i've been called out here yeah if i was talking to lorraine i would have simply walked in dipped my comb into a a cup of coca-cola comb my hair back elbowed the [ __ ] jukebox and we'd have been off to the races i mean george mcfly you know he's the closest thing to an intel this film has unfortunately oh no poor george or fortunately i should say he does actually end up getting the girl because the fella who was gonna take his girl was in fact him and that girl's son so he's lucky that he had him on his side because see if steve might be fly was not or calvin klein i should say was not related to either lorraine or uh well supposed to just either just lorraine there's no chance job if george and flies getting in there no chance no i mean it's already pretty unconvincing to be honest like that the way that leia thompson is with with uh with marty mcfly it's like come on that ship has sailed but i mean credit credit to george he swings it back around so one thing i wanted to i mean we kind of have to talk about this before we before we kind of get into some interesting trivia about this movie um the end of this movie i split it into two sections i think the the sort of uh the the delorean racing to to catch the lightning strike at city hall is um one of the most i genuinely mean this probably sounds like a joke when i say this but it's one of the most tense endings to an action adventure movie i've ever seen because so much goes wrong it's just like things are constantly breaking and you know it's doc brown's fault really like he should be every problem that happens is really as a result of him failing to plan properly and prepare but it is just like moment after moment of something going wrong and and the audience just being like ah for [ __ ] sake he's gonna miss it yeah all set to the the cutaway tunes of the dance as well so it's like sort of really interesting the way that they reprieve you from that i've i'm a huge lover of these films and i think the last 20 minutes of this one is one of the reasons for me that the whole trilogy is iconic i think the way it all gets sewn together at the end of this film is just unbelievable the tension is high as you say um and obviously the the payoff is huge as well if if they need a way to get a car through time doc and mario you are your fellas because that's basically the layout of these three films give them a piece of paper or a picture which can change tell them that they have to find a weird way to go through time yeah and you've got you've got back the future right i i'm telling you they break away from the formula a bit in the second one it's not coincidence that that's the worst movie in the trilogy because like they they like when they go off when they go off book they struggle but stick to shake this formula conrad as good as the ending is i think there's also that tension involved in is he going to get his parents together and that's the really that's the really interesting side of the tension for me because the whole build-up of uh you know him sitting in the car with his mom and he sees his mom drinking and like you know she kisses him and says it feels like i'm kissing my brother and then like you know he he gets out of the car biff jumps in he's gonna do his horrible horrible things which is really dark to be honest with you um and then and then george mcfly comes and knocks his lights out the the the classic moment in this movie i mean this is the movie that repopularized johnny b good for more than one generation of people i think like i mean i i can't speak for people when they were going to watch this movie in 1985 maybe maybe chuck berry was still well known at that point but um i i certainly think it's fair to say that that song can attribute a lot of its longevity to this movie um and it's a wonder that that's the case because his guitar solo in that song is [ __ ] awful it really like it's what i know it's supposed to be but it's like even before it gets bad even before the rest of the band are like what the [ __ ] is he doing like when people are still jamming along so i'm like he's already left the key behind i don't know what key he's playing in well to be honest with you i actually really liked that he was playing it at least he was playing it right and he didn't leave the key behind they left it behind because he's the one who said to them watch me for the change he's saying he's like jazz they just don't understand yeah well blues riff blues griffin b i think he says or something like that what i will say is what should his hands play in that right although it wasn't the best rendition of it every other film would show the hands and then cut to the head and it added as if as if it's the star playing but it's not at least he bloody did it you know i mean at least he did it and that's what i love about it oh well it wasn't him singing though it wasn't him singing fair enough fair enough okay yes so that uh that that basically concludes the movie then they played johnny b good the the picture restores itself everyone's happy jump back to the future biff's are a coward now uh christman glover and um and leia thompson are very much in love or george and lorraine i should say are very much in love his brother and sister are successful now they don't fix the brother that always annoys me the the lorraine's brother um you know that they're like he's in jail oh yeah joey better you saw these bars kids and for the rest of the movie series it's he's just still in jail no matter what they do like they don't fix his his jail time which always seems quite sad to me which you know for the all the reagan love uh as well as well as the uh insinuation that you know once a criminal always a criminal you know i don't know i don't know what's the message of these films conrad but uh i'll tell you what the message isn't consistent time travel because uh already now now i'm gonna blow the top uh in in parts two and three when we get to them but part one there's already a couple of things to notice about what is going on so they're trying to have their cake and eat it too as the saying goes right what they're trying to do is they're trying to insinuate they're going back in time for the first time um and therefore they they've screwed up the whole george and lorraine's uh relationship so they have to fix it right we know that marty hasn't been back in time before and we know that the past of the universe wasn't the same because the mole changes from twin pine mole to lone pine mall because he knocks down one of the pine trees right so we know it's a different 85 because obviously his dad's published author we know that and yet they're still trying to have their cake and eat it too by throwing in stuff like mayor goldy wilson getting the idea to be mayor from marty you can't do it he didn't get the idea from marty and so you're you're saying that like stuff like that because he was already mayor in the original 1985 what's the point in showing us marty was responsible for yeah that is a good point but i mean you know maybe he just made him do it earlier or something he just convinced him to to run sooner than he would have look yes but i don't like fine content you got a logical hit on you we've talked before about films show us things because they want us to think something yeah this film wanted us to think that mayor goldie wilson got the idea from marty to run for mayor they wanted us to think that i don't care about thinking any more deeply about it as well as that the clock tower now doc brown put a bloody weather thing on the top to make it get hit by lightning but the clock tower already needed repaired that's a yeah that's true so i don't know what caused that all right okay so there's a lot more stuff like that all right there's there's two more the first one is is that first of all the the photos fading right the way these photos fade is absolutely ridiculous to me it implies that if marty just stopped seeing the beginning when his brother's head disappeared from the photo if he just stopped trying and went back to 85 does his brother just exist with no head no he's like in like a he he would exist in like a liminal space he'd be like a ghost like he sort of be semi-see-through but still there yeah like like how does that work like either you've got to exist or you're not you're not gonna like just like oh my god we're slowly ruining the future you know he's he's gonna have no head when we get there he's only gonna be a pair of shoes it doesn't make any sense whatsoever yeah he'd be like he'd be like the dad in uh onward like he could just be yeah it'd be a pair of just a set of legs that walks around yeah and the worst one conrad the worst one at the beginning of the film we see marty mcfly being towed around by a pickup truck on a skateboard yeah yep how did that skateboard exist if marty mcfly hadn't invented skateboards yet uh yeah that but i mean again like maybe it's just implying that he's seizing the rightful credit of inventing the skateboard from i don't know who invented skateboard some calvin klein kelvin yeah kelvin klein invented the skateboard i can tell you this right now as someone who has skateboarded in his past that thing would handle like absolute [ __ ] as well like there's no way that you could get hit some of the moves that he was hitting on that on that what was essentially a plank of wood with with like a single set of wheels underneath it there's no way no way in a million legend right connor there's this there's my there's my round over with let's get on to the trivia lovely yeah let's head in some trivia then so first off it's a very popular uh bit of trivia about this i'm sure a lot of people listening already know it but i i have to do my due diligence and say it eric stoltz initially cast to play marty mcfly because michael j fox was unavailable they do cut he eric staltz is kind of like a squint and they could be the same person version of michael j fox yeah um and there is uh test footage of the diner scene with the the great shot of like uh marty's face coming around george mcfly with eric stoltz uh filming that and it does you know it looks okay i don't think it would have been as good a movie but honestly michael j fox isn't the reason that i love these movies so i'm prepared to accept that eric saltz could have done a good job with this yeah yeah he probably could have you can't you can't really have a youtube video about back to future one without mentioning that though so we've mentioned it also um as well as that apparently he was like method acting and everyone had to call him marty so whenever everyone said oh we had to fire eric they all were like who's eric that's great it's like like the jared leto of his day just like method acting in entirely inappropriate situations next bit of trivia everyone knows this but i'm gonna mention it anyway well most people think oh the delorean that's an irish car do you know where in the the fair emerald isle the delorean was assembled belfast it was it was done murray in belfast you know how i know that go on how because my father worked at the factory did he really go [ __ ] hell that's knocked all the other youtube videos into a cocktail not only did we know that but we knew somebody worked on that worked in the bloody factory connor i've got a bit i've got a bit of trivia for you go on apparently when doc brown refers to 1.21 gigawatts that's actually just uh a pronunciation that was around at the time of gigawatt it's uh it's not actually with a j it's with a g and therefore that does confirm that even though doc brown's a bit of a legend he is one of those losers who says jiff yeah but i mean well actually now that's interesting because that theory wasn't posited until i'm gonna say the year 2015. i don't actually know when it was posited so has this doc brown gone forward to the year 2015 already at this point in this movie heard that knob called them gifs internalize that to then call it a gigawatt and then gone back to 85 to the start of this movie that's the real question because otherwise where's that pronunciation come from that's like that's not something you just come up with on your own well i think i think in like romance languages um it is pronounced with a soft g so they still say gigawatt maybe okay but you know you know let's not take it away dr brown is a bit of a loser there um yeah what an idiot yeah terrible scientist okay um last bit trivia for me before we wrap up then uh this is uh heavily citation needed because this came from wikipedia and i you can't trust anything on there even though it has a citation um originally george mcfly uh this is in uh bob gale and rob zemeckis's early script so it never really even got to the point of production but originally george mcfly was going to grow up to become a boxer after his knockout punch on biff not a famous writer as he does in this can you imagine crispin glover trying to portray a boxer like he's like a hundred pounds soaking wet i mean that is one of the most laughable things i've ever heard in my life like as if you're like 18 years old or 17 years old you'd hit you knocks one person out and then all of a sudden that makes up for not being training since you were five you know what i mean yeah yeah well yeah he's like um he's like a saiyan you know he just he goes around trying to punch people after this and every time he gets beaten up he gets a bit stronger and that's how he that's how he gets into gets into boxing yeah that's gonna do it for us uh this week on back to future one we are doing back to the future two next week and then back to future three the week after that uh so join us for that give the video a like subscribe all that good stuff get involved in the comments let us know how you feel about back to the future everyone's gonna be saying they love it so you know just just agree with that i would say to hedge your bets um and yeah next week we're going where there are no roads apparently doc said they don't have roads there so we'll see that's that's all that's all i'm gonna say bye

Channel: The Culture Cave

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Keywords: back to the future, podcast, ai podcast, lex podcast, back to the future 2, back to the future plot, back to the future part 1, back to the future movie, plot of back to the future, making of back to the future, back to the future movie plot, back to the future franchise, back to the future movie scene, lea thompson back to the future, back to the future in 10 seconds, back to the future: episode 4 | retro media talk, wtf happened to back to the future

Id: Y72jvi7y6B8

Length: 28min 4sec (1684 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022