‘Back to the Future’ Couldn’t Be Made Today Because People Would Get the Wrong Idea About Doc and Marty, Screenwriter Claims
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, meaning that it’s been four whole decades since the world was first introduced to Marty McFly and his mad scientist/insurance fraudster pal Doc Brown. The beloved film and its two sequels have subsequently become a bedrock of modern pop-culture, inspiring a recent stage musical, a Saturday morning cartoon series and a whole lot of real-life hoverboards that do absolutely nothing.
To celebrate the occasion, co-screenwriter Bob Gale and star Lea Thompson spoke with The Guardian about the film’s legacy, and argued the movie just couldn’t be made today for various reasons.
Thompson pointed out that “if you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different. The phones would be different but it wouldn’t be like the strange difference between the ‘80s and the ‘50s and how different the world was.”
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She makes a good point. Would dial-up modems and the baffling popularity of “The Macarena” be as big a shock to a teenager today as the squeaky-clean 1950s were to Marty?
Gale had a slightly different explanation for why Back to the Future wouldn’t fly in 2025. “Oh man, the film wouldn’t even be made today,” the writer explained. “We’d go into the studio, and they’d say, ‘What’s the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc?’ They’d start interpreting pedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.”
Wait, that’s the reason you couldn’t make Back to the Future today? Because modern studio executives just wouldn’t accept the premise that an elderly scientist, who lives in a garage behind a Burger King, has a platonic teen buddy who he hangs out with and occasionally lures into shopping mall parking lots in the middle of the night?
Perhaps Gale is right, seeing as how there have been a lot of jokes about the Marty-Doc “friendship” over the years, including the disgusting proto-Rick and Morty short “The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti” and the parody trailer Brokeback to the Future.
Not to mention how John Mulaney had an entire bit about how weird it is in retrospect that we all went along with the idea that a lazy 17-year-old is best friends with a “disgraced nuclear physicist” in a movie that provides zero explanation for this particular plot point.
These jokes could be the reason that Gale went out of his way to explain the origin of Marty and Doc’s friendship in a Back to the Future comic book. The story “When Marty Met Emmett” reveals that Marty became Doc’s intern after trying to get his hands on some guitar amplifier tubes. This is at least somewhat better than the original screenplay’s deleted backstory, which involved Doc hiring Marty to clean his garage and compensating the minor with “free beer.”
Incidentally, the stuff about Marty nearly hooking up with his own mother multiple times might also raise some eyebrows today.
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