Static Thoughts - Back to the Future Animated Show

Last week the world celebrated ‘Back to the Future Day,’ a general celebration of the classic film trilogy that coincided with the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly were supposed to appear in the future in the 2^nd film.  It was a fun time had by all that mainly consisted of people meme-ing the film online and celebrating how much the movies still rock, and with good reason.  Aside from a few questionable aspects with Marty stealing rock ‘n’ roll music in the first film the Back to the Future trilogy is one of the best film trilogies of all time, a wonderfully written and super engaging sci-fi comedy series that was instantly beloved and remains a cultural touchstone to this day.  

Back to the Future was such a massive hit that even Ronald Reagan quoted in his 1986 state of the union address.  With a  hit that big it’s only logical that there would be some kind of extended universe material to continue the adventures of dweeby Marty McFly and crazy Doc Brown, especially given that the 3^rd film gave Doc a wife, kids, and a flying time travelling train car.  Well, in 1991 some cruel madmen decide to tell us what future Doc Brown and family did make for themselves and the abomination that is the Back to the Future animated series was birthed into the world. 

Let me make one thing very clear from the start; Back to the Future, the animated series, isn’t terrible because it’s a poorly animated cash-in product with very little effort behind it.  That’s certainly true of what the show is but that’s not what makes it so terrible, it’s terrible because it’s one of the darkest children’s shows you’ll ever run across.  The basic set-up of the show is pretty much what you’d expect from a kid’s show about time travel with Doc Brown acting as the relative voice of reason and logic while his 2 sons and Marty get up to shenanigans throughout history.  Each episode is also bookended by live action segments featuring Christopher Lloyd teaching the audience about a scientific principal. 

From the outside this might seem like a pretty decent set-up for an animated show.  The show had a pretty good voice cast including Thomas F. Wilson, the actor who played Biff in the films, reprising his role though for some reason they had Dan Castellaneta play Doc Brown in the animated segments even though Christopher Lloyd was in the live action scenes.  Additionally, time travel has been a consistently good subject for animation, mainly because most people’s idea of history is already a pretty exaggerated caricature of real life anyway so the jump to a legitimate cartoon visualization of previous eras isn’t that big a leap to make.  Additionally, there’s so much space in the past to explore that it basically guarantees every episode will be unique even if most time travel animated shows are more or less just rip-offs of Mr. Peabody & Sherman.  Where things get really terrible is everything else.

Some of the issues are just weird, one-off dark moments that for some reason pop-up throughout the show.  For instance, in the first episode Doc’s son Jules is sent back to the Civil War where he’s shanghaied into a confederate regiment and then brutally killed in a battle.  Doc and the gang eventually reverse this but it’s weird the show makes an explicit point that Jules was dead for most of the episode prior to Doc and the gang reversing his fate.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg too, though most of the very disturbing additional darkness tends to revolve around Doc’s sons.  For instance, later in the series they enter their father’s mind Inception­-style and dredge up repressed memories of the time he almost drowned, then they completely alter his life history to avoid the incident so that he’ll be willing to take them fishing. 

Then, in the very next episode, they “prank” their dad by making him think he’s losing his intelligence causing him to fall into a deep depression and identity crisis that leads to him abandoning his family.  I get the sense these instances are meant to be humorous but they’re just really cruel and off-putting, especially since it’s children doing them.  The boys never seem to realize their horrible acts of inhuman cruelty and abuse are actually wrong outside of their own inconveniences.  They go through the whole show under the impression that it’s totally acceptable to pick through history and mold people into whoever you want them to be and that it’s fine for a “prank” to include psychological torment or poisoning.  Though to be fair Doc does sort of get his revenge when he makes them watch the dinosaurs get obliterated in episode 3 in one of the cruelest scenes ever committed to children’s animation.

Of course, all this is just the one-off darkness that comes from single episode occurrences, where things get really messed up is in the overall universe the show creates.  The problem with trying to do a time travel series out of Back to the Future is that it’s a franchise built around 3 central characters, Doc Brown, Marty, and Biff Tannon, so even if there’s an episode where only Doc and his kids are travelling through time the show has to contrive a reason for Biff and Marty to be somehow involved.  This leads to the curious and kind of terrifying fact that the McFly and Tannon families are constantly at odds with each other, two families locked in eternal struggle, constantly being born and reborn throughout history to feud for all time.  

Back to the Future has always played a little fast and loose with the nature of time but the show comes down hard and firm that the McFlys and the Tannons are essentially destined to be enemies, as if every Tannon in history has no choice but to be a villainous thug and every McFly a scrappy underdog looking for his courage.  Even in alternate timelines crafted by temporal meddling history clings to this truth.  In the dinosaur episode I mentioned Brown and sons monkey with the past and accidentally end up preventing the extinction of the dinosaurs at first.  Upon returning to the present they find a world ruled by giant lizards but the evil dinosaur cop who menaces them through the nightmarish dino-future is named “Bifficus Rex” and even sounds like Biff.  Meaning that in the Back to the Future universe personal choice and the progression of history are meaningless illusions, we’re all fated to reenact the same lives and decisions of our forbearers forever and ever, regardless of how much time travel changing you do. 

Even though the ‘90s was crammed full of animated shows based on movies it’s not surprising the Back to the Future series didn’t stand the test of time and was quickly flushed down the memory hole.  If you take out the shockingly dark world dynamics and the frankly sociopathic behavior of the various characters there’s just not much to the show to set it apart from any other low-end kid’s show.  The biggest contribution it actually has to television history is that it featured the first main stream television appearance of Bill Nye, after first coming to TV on Seattle’s Almost Live show.  On Back to the Future Bill served as Doc Brown’s mute assistant during the ending sequences where the two would demonstrate some scientific principal in a “fun” experiment.  These portions actually proved the most popular part of the show, probably because they weren’t about the crushing weight of predestination or manipulating people using mad science, so when they eventually cancelled the series after two seasons they decided to give Bill his own show doing science for kids.  That became Bill Nye The Science Guy and the rest, was history. 


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