Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are firing
up the time circuits and setting the destination
for Well, for a few different years, actually.
We are tackling one of the absolute giants of
cinema history. It really is a giant. It's hard
to overstate the impact of this one. It's the
kind of franchise that, you know, it just sits
in the collective DNA of pop culture. Totally.
Even if you haven't seen it in 20 years, you
know the visual language, you know the car, you
know the vest. The flaming tire tracks. Exactly.
But, and I want to be really clear about this
right off the bat, because I know you listening
are sophisticated. We aren't just doing a nostalgia
trip where we quote lines. about roads and 1
.21 gigawatts. We aren't here to just relive
the greatest hits. Those are important metrics
and we will probably touch on them. But the goal
here is different. It is. The stack of sources
we have for today is fascinating because it reveals
this massive expanded universe that I think most
casual fans and maybe even some hardcore fans
completely missed. Yeah, I think that's fair
to say. We're going to unpack the three films,
obviously, but we're also looking at like a secret
short film that deals with a nuclear apocalypse.
Which is surprisingly dark. I mean, it actually
reframes the entire optimistic tone of the series
into something, I don't know, something bordering
on dystopia. Surprisingly dark is the perfect
way to put it. And we have an animated series
that actually launched the career of one of the
world's most famous science educators. Which
is just a wild piece of trivia. And a video game
that the creators basically call Part 4 and the
ironclad, almost aggressive refusal by the creators
to ever, ever reboot the series. That refusal
is a story in itself. I mean, think about it
in a world where everything gets remade, where
we are just drowning in reboots and legacy equals
back to the future stands almost entirely alone.
It's a fortress. It is. It's a fortress against
that trend. So our mission today is to explore
how this 1985 sci -fi comedy became such a cultural
juggernaut, unpack those complex timelines established
in all that non -movie media, and really understand
why the franchise is protected so fiercely. Right.
We want to understand the mechanics, the philosophy,
and sort of the hidden corners of Hill Valley.
And to do that... We're looking at a wide range
of materials. Yeah, we have the production notes
on the original trilogy, a bunch of deep analytical
essays on timeline theory, details on the 1991
animated series. The telltale video game script,
which is a story in itself. That 2015 short film
starring Christopher Lloyd, which is, as you
said, a wild ride, and even the stage musical.
So let's fire up the flux capacitor and see what
happens when we hit 88 miles per hour. Let's
do it. Okay, so let's start with the phenomenon
itself. Back to the Future, 1985. It wasn't just
a hit. It was the highest grossing film of that
year. An absolute smash. But looking back at
the production notes in our stack, it really
wasn't a guaranteed success. I mean, not at all.
It was actually rejected by almost every major
studio. That's right. And the reasons are kind
of funny in hindsight. It was seen as too soft
for the teen comedies of the era, you know, which
were all very raunchy like Borky's. Right. The
R -rated comedies. Exactly. But then. it was
seen as too edgy for Disney because of the whole
mother -son dynamic. Edible undertones, yeah.
So it sat in this weird middle ground. But when
it landed, it was lightning in a bottle. And
I think when you really look at the plot mechanics,
you start to see why it resonated so deeply.
It's not just a time travel movie about visiting
history. Right, usually time travel movies are
about, like, let's go kill Hitler or let's go
see the dinosaurs, these huge historical events.
Exactly. But here, the stakes are... existential
and deeply personal. It's not just, oh, no, I
might change who won the war. It's, oh, no, I
might cease to exist. The fading photograph.
That is such a brilliant visual device. It's
perfect storytelling. When Marty McFly goes back
to November 5, 1955, and he accidentally interferes
with his parents' first meeting, he creates a
variation of the grandfather paradox or, you
know, a father paradox, I guess. He threatens
his own existence. Precisely. The entire narrative
drive is purely personal. It's about survival.
And I think that's why it works so well. We all
wonder what our parents were like before they
were mom and dad. It's this universal curiosity.
But Marty actually gets to see it and he realizes
they were kind of, well, they were kind of losers.
He realizes they were flawed human beings. And
this leads to the most interesting part of the
first film's resolution, which I think gets overlooked
a lot. How so? We all remember Marty getting
his parents back together, you know, playing
Johnny B. Goode, ensuring he is born. But the
deep dive here. is noticing that he doesn't just
put things back to the way they were. He engineers
a better reality. This is a point of debate in
some of the essays we read. I mean, is that ethical?
He essentially rewrites his parents' personalities.
It creates a fascinating philosophical question,
right? Is the George McFly at the end of the
movie the same man as the one at the start? But
the film's core philosophy is that the future
isn't fixed. So when Marty returns to 1985, he
finds a vastly improved situation. His father,
George, isn't a pushover anymore. He's a confident,
published science fiction author. He has self
-respect. Which is a huge upgrade from just getting
bullied by Biff his whole life. Oh, a massive
upgrade. And speaking of Biff, the source material
notes a really interesting detail about his fate
in this new timeline. He's been softened. Softened,
right. He's an auto -detailer now. He's an auto
-detailer working for George, essentially. He's
still around, but he's not the monster he was.
The power dynamic. Which suggests that by standing
up for yourself just once, that one punch in
1955, you can alter the entire trajectory of
a human life. It's the ultimate wish fulfillment.
You go back, you fix your parents, you get the
truck you always wanted. And the bully who tormented
you is now waxing your car. It's the perfect
American ending. It absolutely is. And, you know,
on a technical note, because we love giving credit
where it's due, the first film actually won an
Academy Award. Oh, really? For what? Sound editing.
It's easy to overlook that with all the pop culture
focus, but technically, the sound design of the
DeLorean, the time displacement cracks, the skateboard
chase, it was a marvel of audio engineering.
That's a great little nugget. Okay, so that's
the first movie. Perfect structure. Huge hit.
Then we get to 1989. Back to the Future Part
2. And here's where it gets really interesting.
Significantly more complicated. This is where
the complexity just ramps up to 11. The writers,
Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, they've admitted
they never planned a sequel. To be continued
at the end was a joke. I always wondered about
that. So when they had to write one, they had
to invent a whole new set of rules. Because the
first movie was a simple loop, right? Go back,
fix it, come home. Very linear. Very linear.
But Part 2 introduces this concept of interconnected...
shifting timelines. It feels messier. It is messier,
but intentionally so. The plot mechanics here
are incredibly ambitious for a mainstream blockbuster.
First, you have the trip to 2015, which is its
own spectacle of flying cars and hoverboards.
Yeah, the fun future part. But then you have
the creation of an alternate dystopian 1985,
the 1985A timeline. The Casino Biv timeline.
This is the part that always scares me a little.
It shows how fragile reality is. Me too. It's
genuinely unsettling. It's the butterfly effects,
completely weaponized. Old Biv Tannen from 2015
gets his hands on the sports almanac. From the
future. And gives it to his younger self in 1955.
And this introduces the central moral conflict
of the sequel. The danger of profiting from time
travel. And Doc Brown is very, very explicit
about this, right? He warns Marty not to use
the almanac. Oh, he delivers a very stern lecture
about it. I didn't invent the time machine for
financial gain. He throws the almanac in the
trash, which, you know, ironically is how Biff
finds it. Of course. But that theme is so crucial.
When Biff uses that knowledge for financial gain,
it doesn't just make him rich. It rots the entire
core of the town. It turns Hill Valley into this
corrupt wasteland. George McFly is murdered.
Biff is this grotesque tycoon. Crime is everywhere.
It's horrible. It's a warning about the misuse
of foreknowledge. It basically says that taking
shortcuts leads to corruption. And structurally,
it forces the movie to explain a new theory of
time travel. The famous chalkboard scene. Yes,
where Doc draws the line and then the skewed
tangent that branches off of it. This is the
branching timeline theory. In the first movie,
we operated on the ripple effect, changes ripple
forward, and overwrite the present. Like the
fading photograph. Exactly. In part two, they
argue that a significant enough change creates
a split. You aren't just changing your future.
You are physically traveling down a different
leg of what Doc calls the trousers of time. Which
explains why Marty and Doc didn't just fade away
instantly when Biff gave himself the book. They
were stranded in the wrong branch. Precisely.
They were outside of the new timeline looking
in. And the only way to fix it isn't to change
1985A. It's to go back to the point of divergence.
to 1955. Which leads to the third act, which
I think is just a stroke of absolute genius.
They revisit the events of the first movie from
a completely different angle. That was groundbreaking
at the time, seeing the first movie's scenes
happening in the background, like Marty seeing
himself on stage playing Johnny B. Goode. While
the part two Marty is in the rafters trying to
get the almanac back from Biff's goons, it's
so layered. It created this dense, layered narrative
that rewarded people for paying attention. It
turned the franchise into a puzzle box. You really
have to know the first movie by heart to fully
appreciate the second one. And then, just when
you think you finally understand all the rules,
lightning strikes again. Literally. The ending
of Part 2 is one of the all -time great cliffhangers.
The DeLorean is struck by lightning, Doc is zapped
back to 1885, and Marty is stranded in 1955 all
over again. Which sets up Part 3, 1990. We go
from a sci -fi dystopia to... A Western. A total
genre shift. A complete 180. And a lot of critics
at the time found this jarring, but looking at
our analysis, it makes perfect sense for the
characters. It strips away all the technology.
No hoverboards, no Mr. Fusion, no digital circuits.
Just steam and iron. Just steam, iron, and grit.
And this is where the character arcs really culminate.
Marty has to go back to the Old West to save
Doc from Mad Dog Tan and Biff's ancestor. But
the emotional core here, it really shifts to
Doc Brown. Yeah, for two movies, Doc has been
the exposition machine. He is. He's the eccentric
scientist solely focused on the mission and the
rules of time. The timeline must be preserved.
Don't interact with your past self. All of that.
But in part three, he breaks his own rules big
time. He falls in love. Clara Clayton. Clara
Clayton. A schoolteacher who is supposed to die
by falling into that ravine. Doc saves her, which
is a huge change to history. He chooses a person
over the rules. It's a beautiful evolution of
his character. He realizes that a life without
connection isn't worth living, even if you have
a time machine. Exactly. And let's talk about
that ending. Because for a trilogy about a car,
and let's face it, the DeLorean is a character
in its own right, the fate of the car is pretty
definitive. It is. The DeLorean is completely
destroyed. It's smashed by a modern train when
Marty finally gets back to 1985. It just, it
explodes into a thousand pieces. I remember watching
that as a kid and being absolutely devastated.
Me too. I was like, no, not the car. But it's
a necessary death. It symbolizes that Marty has
grown up. He doesn't need the crutch of the time
machine anymore to fix his life. He avoids the
car accident with needles at the end, using his
own judgment, not time travel. That's a great
point. The image is symbolic. The time for that
specific adventure is over. But it's not the
end of time travel itself. No. And this is the
moment that always makes me smile. Doc shows
up in the steam locomotive time machine, a massive
flying train. With Clara and their two sons?
Jules and Vern. appropriately named. And he delivers
the franchise's final thematic lesson. The whole
point of the trilogy. Your future is whatever
you make it. Exactly. So make it a good one.
It moves away from the idea that time is a puzzle
to be solved and lands on the idea that the future
is an open road of possibility. It's such an
optimistic humanist ending. I love that. But
as our sources show, the end card on part three
wasn't really the end, was it? Not even close.
There are these lost timelines that most people
don't know about or have completely forgotten.
The universe kept expanding. That's right. The
story continued in ways that are fascinatingly
weird. If you thought a flying train was out
there, wait until you see what happened next.
So let's talk about the animated series. I feel
like this is a fever dream for some people, but
it was real. It ran for two seasons on CBS in
the early 90s. 1991 to 1992. And what's fascinating
here is its relationship to the official canon.
The creator, Bob Gale, has stated that this series
takes place in its own alternate timeline. Okay,
so it's not strictly fitting into the movie timeline.
No, it branches off from it. It's a what if scenario
where the Brown family, instead of traveling
forever, they decide to stay in Hill Valley.
And it shits the focus, right? It's not just
the Marty and Doc show anymore. Not at all. It's
really about the Brown family. It's like a time
traveling sitcom with Doc, Clara and the kids,
Jules and Vern. They live in a farmhouse in Hill
Valley, but they're constantly jumping around
time. It's much more episodic and frankly, educational.
And the tech got a big upgrade. The DeLorean
is back. I thought it was destroyed. It is. In
this timeline, the DeLorean was rebuilt. But
because it's a cartoon, the laws of physics are
looser. How so? Well, for one, it has voice -activated
circuits. But the big one is that it can fold
into a suitcase. A suitcase. A suitcase. You
push a button, and the entire car collapses into
a briefcase. So Doc can carry it around. It's
delightful cartoon logic. That is amazing. But
it's not just that. The car can also travel through
space and time now. They go to asteroid belts.
They visit other planets. It totally broke the
boundaries of just Earth history. Space and time.
Okay. And there's a real -world connection here
that just blew my mind when I read it in our
sources. The assistant. Yes. This is one of my
favorite trivia nuggets from this whole deep
dive. The show had these live action bookends
with Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as
Doc Brown doing little science experiments. And
his assistant was this guy in a lab coat who
would set up the experiments. And that guy was?
Bill Nye. The science guy. No way. Yes. Before
the bow tie became iconic. Before he even had
his own sea. This was actually Bill Nye's debut
television appearance. On a nationally broadcast
show, he was acting as Doc Brown's silent assistant,
doing visual gags. So in a very real way, Back
to the Future gave us Bill Nye the Science Guy.
It did. It's like a pivot point in science education
history happened on a Saturday morning cartoon.
That is incredible. OK, so moving from animation
to video games, we have to talk about Back to
the Future, the game. This came out in 2010 from
Telltale Games. And this isn't just some generic
tie in where you run around collecting coins.
Telltale is known for narrative heavy games.
And Bob Gale, the co -creator of the movies,
was heavily involved. He has actually said this
game is the closest thing to what a fourth film
could be like. That's incredibly high praise.
So if this is effectively part four, what's the
plot? Where do they go this time? It's set in
1986, shortly after the third movie. Doc has
gone missing in the time stream, and a version
of the DeLorean reappears without him. Marty
has to travel back to 1931. The prohibition era.
Gangsters. Exactly. He has to save a younger
version of Doc Brown, who was just a teenager
in 1931, and he's in trouble with the mob. And
what's significant is that it explores the history
of Hill Valley and the McFly family in ways the
movies never did. Like what? We get to see Kid
Cannon, Biff's father. We see the origins of
the town's hierarchy, the speakeasies. It really
fleshes out the world. And does it play with
the timeline mechanics like part two did? Oh,
heavily. Yeah. There's a section where Morty
returns to the 1980s, but he's messed something
up in the past. He lands in a timeline called
Citizen Brown. Citizen Brown? That sounds ominous.
It is. In this timeline, Doc Brown never became
a wacky, free -thinking inventor. He became a
socially conscious civic leader who runs Hill
Valley like a perfectly ordered, almost sterile
surveillance state. Wow. It's this utopia where
everyone is happy, but no one has free will.
It actually pits Marty against Doc in a philosophical
battle. Is order worth the loss of freedom? That
is surprisingly deep for a video game, and the
cast list on this is incredible. It is. You have
Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as Doc Brown,
which gives it that instant legitimacy. And the
guy voicing Marty, a guy named A .J. Locascio,
does an uncanny Michael J. Fox impression. But
the real Michael J. Fox is in it too, right?
He is. In the final episodes, Michael J. Fox
makes a cameo voicing future versions of Marty
and even a McFly ancestor named William McFly.
The fact that he came back for this... even in
a small role, shows the commitment of the original
actors to this lore. They really treat it with
respect. That's awesome. It really bridges the
gap between the movies and the modern era. But
OK, let's unpack this next source because we
are about to enter what I'm calling the darkest
timeline. This is a deep cut. I'd wager most
people listening have never seen this. There
is a short film released in 2015 for the 30th
anniversary Blu -ray set called Doc Brown Saves
the World. And when you say it's dark. You are
not kidding. No. For a short film included as
a bonus feature, the plot is surprisingly catastrophic.
It's basically a horror movie set up disguised
as a comedy. It starts with Doc Brown in some
undisclosed, like, bunker location. He's recording
a video message for Marty. And what does he reveal?
He reveals that the future Marty visited in part
two. the one with the flying cars and the dehydration
machines. It was all a trap. He reveals that
on October 21, 2045, a nuclear holocaust occurred.
Hold on. I need to pause you there. You're telling
me that the official canon written by the original
creators states that the charming, slightly goofy
world of Back to the Future ends in a nuclear
firestorm. That feels so tonally wrong. It's
definitely jarring. But when you look at the
source material, it's actually a really scathing
piece of social satire. It's not a war that ends
the world. It's convenience. Convenience. Yeah.
Doc Brown's message is that the gadgets we all
coveted in part two, the hydrators, the self
-lacing shoes. They essentially infantilize the
human race. So it's a WALL -E scenario. He became
too lazy to survive. Precisely. And it's grimly
logical. Doc explains that because everything
was automated, people stopped moving. They became
obese and wasteful. Then you have the hoverboards.
Those led to hovercars. And because people were
just floating around in hovercars, they started
throwing trash out the windows. Which created,
what did the source call it? The great trash
storm of 2021. The great trash storm of 2021.
I think we missed that one in the real world,
thankfully. We dodged a bullet there. Yeah. So
to solve the trash problem, they mass manufactured
100 million Mr. Fusion units. Remember, Mr. Fusion
is that device on the back of the car that turns
garbage into energy. Right. It's a home energy
reactor. It's nuclear powered. Exactly. Tiny
nuclear reactors in every home and car. And this
is where the villain steps in. Griff Tannen.
Biff's grandson? The guy with the bionic implants
from 2015? Very same. The short explains that
Griff founded a company called GriffTech, and
he created a social network called ThingMeme.
ThingMeme. You can't make this stuff up. It sounds
like a parody of Facebook and Instagram. It is.
ThingMeme was a scam. It supposedly allowed inanimate
objects to post selfies, but it actually gave
Griff access to hack every single connected object
on Earth. And on the 30th anniversary of his
arrest in 2015, he uploaded a virus. And this
is the part that makes me laugh every single
time I read the source material, even though
the stakes are literally global annihilation.
What was the virus designed to do? The virus
was intended to flash the word butthead on every
screen and device in the world. Butthead. The
classic Tannen insult. But the virus had a glitch.
It short -circuited the 100 million Mr. Fusion
units. They all detonated at once. Nuclear holocaust.
All because Griff Tannen wanted to prank the
world with the word butthead. That is, it's dark,
but it's also hilarious. It's the ultimate butterfly
effect of stupidity. It's peek back to the future
logic. The highest possible stakes, the most
absurd possible cause. The writers are basically
twisting the knife, saying you wanted the cool
future. Well, the cool future makes you fat,
lazy, and eventually dead. So how does Doc fix
it? What's the point of the message? He travels
back in time to erase the inventions. He ensures
the hoverboard and the self -lacing shoes are
never invented. That's why we don't have them
in our real 2015. He effectively prevents the
cool future to save us from the nuclear butthead
apocalypse. So when people complain online, where
is my hoverboard? The canonical answer is Doc
Brown took it away to save your life. Exactly.
We should be thankful we are still walking on
the ground. That actually makes me feel better
about still tying my own shoelaces. Speaking
of 2015, let's talk about when the real world
actually caught up to the movie. October 21,
2015. Back to the future day. This was a massive
cultural moment. It's rare for a movie date to
cross over into real life with this much intensity.
Usually dates in sci -fi, you know, they pass
without a blip. But this was different. It felt
like every single brand wanted a piece of this.
It wasn't just fans posting online. It was corporate
America. They absolutely did. Pepsi released
Pepsi Perfect. The Soda Marty orders in the cafe
80s. It came in that futuristic cylinder bottle.
It sold out instantly online. And Nike, they
had the biggest shoe to fill, literally. Nike
actually made the mag shoes. For decades, these
were the holy grail of sneakers for so many people.
They created a version with actual working power
laces. That's incredible. But, and this ties
back to the goodwill of the franchise, they didn't
just sell them for profit. They auctioned them
off to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation
for Parkinson's Research. That's fantastic. So,
life imitated art for a really good cause. And
Universal got in on the joke, too. They released
a fake trailer for Jaws 19. Jaws 19. This time
it's really, really personal. They poked fun
at the idea of endless sequels, which is deeply
ironic given this franchise's whole stance on
sequels. Yeah, that's a good point. And USA Today
even recreated the movie's front page, wrapping
their actual newspaper in the fictional one from
the film. They even replaced the little blue
dot in their logo with a drone camera, just like
in the movie. And Toyota got involved too, right?
With the truck. Toyota went big. They recreated
Marty's dream truck, that black Toyota Tacoma
4x4. They made a concept version that looked
exactly like the one in the movie. And they did
a commercial with Michael J. Fox and Christopher
Lloyd sitting in a diner discussing hydrogen
fuel, using Mr. Fusion as the comparison point.
It wasn't just commercials, though. People actually
went back to the movies. They did. Our sources
say nearly 2 ,000 theaters worldwide re -screened
the trilogy. It earned $4 .8 million in a single
day. Wow. Think about that. A 30 -year -old movie
making nearly $5 million on a random Wednesday
in October. It just shows that this isn't a movie
people like. It's a movie people love. And the
civic pride. I read that the town of Reston,
Virginia actually changed its name. They did.
They temporarily changed their name to Hill Valley
for their film festival. The map changed. The
signs changed. It's a testament to how this fictional
town feels like a real place to people. Now,
with all this hype and all this money on the
table, I mean, five million dollars in one day.
The big question, the question every fan has
asked for decades is, will there be a part four?
And this is where we get to the core of the franchise's
integrity. If you look at the sources, the answer
from the creators is a definitive, aggressive
no. It's not just no, it's absolutely not don't
ask again. It's more than a blockade. It's practically
a restraining order filed by Robert Zemeckis
against the entire film industry. He and Bob
Gale control the rights with an iron fist, and
they have stated... repeatedly that as long as
they are alive there will be no reboot no remake
no part four and they are not subtle about it
bob gail the co -writer has the most colorful
way of putting it he really does he was asked
about doing a sequel or a reboot without michael
j fox given michael's health condition with parkinson's
disease and gail said making another movie without
michael j fox would be Quote, like saying, I'm
going to cook you a steak dinner and I'm going
to hold the beef. Hold the beef. That's such
a great analogy. You can't have the meal without
the main ingredient. He's saying that the franchise
isn't the car. It's not the time travel. It's
the chemistry between Michael J. Fox and Christopher
Lloyd. You cannot swap that out. It's irreplaceable.
And as recently as February 2025, which is very
current in our source, Stackgale's response to
questions about part four was simply, F you.
Wow. OK. So he's really tired of being asked
that question. I think it's safe to say the door
is closed, locked, and welded shut. But Christopher
Lloyd had a slightly different take. He seemed
a little more open to it. A little. In 2015,
Lloyd said he'd consider it if, and it's a huge
if, the original cast returned and the story
was truly worth telling. But given the creator's
stance and the reality of the situation, I think
we have to accept that the Telltale game and
the comics remain the closest things to a canonical
continuation. So no movie. But that doesn't mean
the legacy is dead. As we've seen, the franchise
has found all these other ways to stay alive
without diluting the film trilogy. Far from it.
That no reboot rule has actually forced the franchise
to be creative in other mediums. Like the musical.
We mentioned it earlier. Back to the Future,
the musical. It premiered in Manchester in 2020,
then went to the West End and Broadway in 2023.
And crucially, it was adapted by Zemeckis and
Gale themselves. So it has that authentic DNA.
Totally. It features the hits like... The Power
of Love and Johnny B. Goode, but with new songs,
too. It allows a new generation to experience
the story live without trying to replace the
film. And for a long time, there was The Ride.
I still miss this ride so much. Back to the future.
The Ride. For a generation of fans, this was
the sequel. It opened in 1991 at Universal Studios.
It was a simulator ride where you chased Biff
through time. You went through the Ice Age. You
went through the future to stop him from changing
history. It was a major part of the lore for
decades. Until it was replaced by The Simpsons.
Right. But for a long time, that was the only
place to get new footage of Doc Brown. And finally,
the comics. This seems to be where the deep lore
nerds really live. IDW Publishing has done a
lot of heavy lifting here. They've filled in
narrative gaps that the movies just hinted at.
They have story arcs like Biff to the Future,
which details Biff's rise to power with the Almanac.
It explains exactly how he took over Hill Valley.
And they adapted the game. Yes. The Citizen Brown
storyline adapts the game. And they even did
stories about how Marty and Doc first met. which
is a huge question the movies never answer. Why
is this teenager hanging out with a disgraced
nuclear physicist? The comics give us the backstory.
And did I see something about Transformers in
the notes? You did. There's a crossover comic
series, Transformers Back to the Future. The
DeLorean literally transforms into an Autobot.
His name is Gigawatt. Gigawatt, of course it
is. It's the mashup you didn't know you needed.
But it shows that while the films are sacred,
the brand is willing to have some fun in other
sandboxes. So let's summarize where we've been
today. We've gone from the really personal existential
stakes of the first film to the complex timelines
of the second, the Western conclusion of the
third. And then we plunged into this massive
expanded world of animation, games, and nuclear
preventing short films. It really highlights
that the core of this franchise isn't just the
time travel gimmick. It's the characters. The
reason the creators refused to reboot it, the
reason they say hold the beef, is because that
chemistry between Doc and Marty is so unique.
You just can't manufacture that again. The lightning
in the bottle. Exactly. And by refusing to make
a part four. They've preserved that original
trilogy as this perfect standalone artifact.
It hasn't been diluted by a subpar modern sequel.
It hasn't been content farmed into oblivion.
Which brings us to our final thought for you,
the listener. We live in an era of cinematic
universes where every movie is just a commercial
for the next three movies. Back to the Future
is practically the only major franchise that
has just said, no more. We told our story. We
are done. So here's the question for you to mull
over. Is Back to the Future actually more valuable
to us because it refuses to give us a part four?
Does its scarcity make it better? It's the one
toy on the shelf that you can't buy a new version
of. Exactly. Or, if we look at Doc Brown Saves
the World, maybe we should just be grateful.
Did we actually dodge a bullet by not getting
the hoverboard future we all wanted? Maybe the
fact that we don't have hoverboards means we
saved the world from Griff Tannen's butthead
virus. I think I'm okay with regular shoes if
it means no nuclear apocalypse. I'll tie my own
laces. Thank you very much. I agree. Sometimes
the future is better left unwritten. Thanks for
taking this deep dive with us. See you in the
future. Or the past.