Happy 25th Anniversary, “Back to the Future!”
While most of you were prepping your grills, preparing potato salad, and icing down your coolers this past Saturday, Rob Cosgrove was parked in front of a big screen gearing up for a thrill ride – just as he was 25 years ago.
A lot has changed since then. He now watches flicks on his own 96″HD Projection screen. And he now owns his very own 1985 DeLorean with a licence plate that reads “BK2FTR.” And although this time he already knew the ending before it happened, the excited emotion he felt 25 years ago is still there.
So, in honor of the 25th anniversary of “Back to the Future” being released, we thought that you might enjoy some fun facts relating to one of our favorite movies of all time. How well do you remember?
- The device in Doc Brown’s lab that Marty plugs his guitar into is labeled “CRM-114”, which was the name of the message decoder on the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the serial number of the Jupiter explorer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), both directed by Stanley Kubrick.
- The Twin Pines Mall is, in fact, the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry, California.
- The device originally considered for use as the time travel machine was a refrigerator. Director Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that the idea was scrapped because he and Steven Spielberg did not want children to start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside.
- Einstein arrives from the world’s first time-travel excursion at 1:21am, and the DeLorean requires 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to travel through time.
- The time machine has been through several variations. In the first draft of the screenplay the time machine was a laser device that was housed in a room. At the end of the first draft the device was attached to a refrigerator and taken to an atomic bomb test. In the third draft of the film the time machine was a DeLorean, but in order to send Marty back to the future the vehicle had to drive the DeLorean into an an atomic bomb test.
- The radio in Marty’s room plays “Back in Time”, by Huey Lewis and the News, who wrote and performed some songs for the film.
- The “Mr. Fusion Home Energy Converter”, which is sitting on the DeLorean when Doc returns from the future, is made from (among other things) a Krups coffee grinder.
- The script never called for Marty to repeatedly bang his head on the gull-wing door of the DeLorean, this was improvised during filming as the door mechanism became faulty.
“Back to the Future” is recognized as being one of the greatest time traveling classics of all time. Rob was so enthralled with the movie as a lover of all things fast, futuristic, and full of gadgets; that he went out and bought a DeLorean of his very own. Here he is showing it off: 
I know for a fact that this car has been seen at well over 88 miles per hour, although no word as to whether it’s traveled in time. But in the words of Dr. Emmett Brown, “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious [BLEEP].”
Facts courtesy of Science Fiction Cinema [http://www.sciflicks.com/].
