This Fake 'Back to the Future' Prequel Trailer Answers One Burning Question About Doc
Just how did Emmett Brown steal that plutonium from Libyan terrorists anyway?
The inimitable 1980s time travel classic Back to the Future is, for all intents and purposes, an awesome movie. There’s no denying that. But there’s also no denying the fact that it glosses over a whole bunch of legitimate details to get into alternate history hijinks for Marty and Doc’s quest.
Why are Marty and Doc — a 60-year-old scientist and a high school student — such best buds? And how did Doc manage to steal the plutonium from those Libyans that allowed him to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electrical power to activate the flux capacitor, the thing that makes time travel possible? Without it he couldn’t set into motion the convoluted but highly entertaining chain of events that spanned three films and hundreds of years.
A new fan edit trailer for a fake prequel to Back to the Future called 1.21 Gigawatts tries to answer one of the mysteries of the first movie — and though its tone is kind of misplaced — it’s all in good, ironic fun.
Check it out below:
The potentially shady past of Doc Brown is kind of hilarious. How did he become this bumbling and disgraced nuclear physicist hiding out in a messy garage in back of a Burger King? Well, it’s because he made some poor decisions — by agreeing to make a bomb for terrorists — that got him caught up in an action thriller filled with international espionage, national defense agents, and Swiss bank accounts.
The trailer, created by Vimeo user Tyler Hopkins, is comprised of classic BttF clips with other random clips from other movies edited in, including My Favorite Martian, Camp Nowhere, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Dennis the Menace, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Sum of All Fears, Syriana, Iron Man, Dazed and Confused, and Munich.
This has got to be the only time Dennis the Menace and Zero Dark Thirty were ever mentioned in the same sentence.
Fans of this trailer shouldn’t get their hopes up: Director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale ruled out any sequels or remakes when they signed up to make the original in 1985. The contract they signed with Universal Studios gave them final say on any potential BttF-related movies as long as they live. So as much as we’d love to see Doc Brown kicking it in 2042, Back to the Future is a thing of the past. But that’s not a bad thing.
