Back to the Future was such a popular 1980s movie series that it spawned an excellent Saturday morning cartoon in the 1990s. However, if you watch the premiere episode, one humorous oversight nearly ruins it all.
Of course, the movies starring Michael J. Fox are still so hugely popular that Back to the Future: The Musical premiered on Broadway this summer.
Before I explain the episode to see if you can spot the error, here’s a quick intro to the animated series because it’s a little bit different from the films.
Back to the Future: the animated series
The animated series mostly centers around Doc Brown’s life with his wife and two kids – named Jules and Verne after the famous French author (which is noted in Back to the Future Part III).
Marty — who is mostly a supporting character in the series — is back being a student at Hill Valley High and usually hangs out in his spare time with Doc and his family who are living in the Hill Valley area. Most of the episodes involve Brown and his kids getting caught up in time travel adventures, which sometimes include Marty.
The show lasted for two seasons, 1991-92, and a running joke in the show is that no matter which time period they go to, an ancestor of Biff is almost always the main bad guy. Biff ends each episode with a post-credits comment, usually a joke, that you start to look forward to the more episodes you watch.
The best part of each episode might be actor Christopher Lloyd himself appearing in the live-action segment of the show that lasts a couple minutes. Each one of those segments basically show Doc Brown doing a science experiment that often involves Bill Nye. This predated Nye’s own show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which began airing in 1993.
As far as the cartoon itself, it also features the Delorean again. Apparently, Doc built a new one and this one can fold up into a suitcase and be carried around, though it’s obviously extremely heavy! Even so, they still use their time travel locomotive train from the third film as well.
Here’s what happens in the episode
In the premiere episode of the series, titled “Brothers,” Marty is studying for a Civil War exam while Doc’s kids — Jules and Verne — are getting into a typical brotherly fight. It ultimately leads to Verne getting upset and hopping into the Delorean and driving off. As if a kid driving a car is not problematic enough, he keeps his foot on the gas until it goes 88 miles per hour, which is the required speed to travel through time.
Thanks to Marty using a sophisticated computer to study the Civil War, the Delorean was set by a computer hologram teacher loudly proclaiming the date of Feb. 11, 1864 (apparently, the Delorean can now change on voice command). Though, all of this was unbeknownst to Marty, who started to not pay attention and instead began playing his guitar. So, when Verne travels to the Civil War, no one is actually aware of the time period that Verne is in.
Moments later they realize what happened. Where did Verne go, though? After a computer history search, they spot Verne in a Civil War picture dated February 1864. So now they know where Verne is. In order to save him, they set the time-traveling train’s designation date to Feb 1, 1864. Long story short, after some troubles, they save Verne and bring him back to present day – errr, 1991.
So, did you spot the error? To be more accurate, it’s an extremely obvious oversight.
Feel free to re-read the above description of the episode before I reveal the answer.
The obvious oversight
Of course, the show needs to create an adventure, hence the return to the Civil War period. However, there’s just a far easier solution.
Keep in mind, the episode sometimes pops up on YouTube and no matter how many comments it gets, no one points out the error, so if it goes over your head then you’re not alone.
In the episode, once the characters realized that Verne took off in the Delorean a few minutes earlier, they searched for what time period he ended up in. However, instead of trying to find where he went in the past so that they can take the train back in time and get him, all they needed to do was just travel back a half hour in the past and stop Verne from hopping into the Delorean.
If the argument is that the time cannot change on the Delorean, then just travel back one day.
The oversight of the writers, or more accurately the inability to come up with a better method to force the characters back to the Civil War, is extremely humorous. Sure, it’s just a cartoon but it’s rather important — especially in a premiere episode — to not have such an oversight.
I like to think they knew how blatantly obvious this was but decided to go with it anyway, though no other episode in the series makes such an error so maybe they really did outthink themselves. If not, then choosing this as the first episode is certainly questionable.
It hasn’t hurt its popularity though, nor should it. The show, which originally aired on CBS, was then re-aired on Fox over a decade later and also aired in the U.K. and in France.
Although the series doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, there are multiple ways to watch it. You can buy the DVD’s, or you can watch it here.
However, the best way to watch it is to travel back in time to 11am on Saturday morning Sept. 14, 1991 and tune in to CBS to catch the premiere.
Published: Aug 29, 2023 04:33 pm