Back to the Future corrections

Become a moviemistakes.com member and get access to loads of extra features!

Back to the Future (1985) - 97 corrections

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, Michael J. Fox, Thomas F. Wilson

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "make changes" when viewing mistakes, and click "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

This is also for the other two.When the doc sends Einstein back in time, you see that it is covered in ice, but in the other time travels there is no ice nor is it the slightest bit cold [The correction is wrong. Doc did not send Einstein back in time. He sent him to the future. Only then the car gets covered in ice, such as seen at the end of the film when Marty returns to 1985.]

In the scene when the clocks are chiming, Doc says to Marty all of the clocks are 25 minutes slow, but in the opening scene with the clocks, there are two that are set at 8:10 (one on the coffee maker and and a small black clock next to the TV). The rest are set at 7:55. [Doc probably means all the clocks involved in his experiment, not all the clocks in the house.] Corrected by Xofer

When Doc is attempting to hook the cable to the clock, in 1955, he has on shoes with Velcro. Velcro had not been invented yet. [Utter nonsense. George de Mestral was granted a worldwide patent for Velcro in Switzerland in 1951, and the US patent followed in January 1952. It was an instant hit and all sorts of Velcro products flew off the shelves, including Velcro shoes.]

Whilst George McFly is pegging out the laundry, Marty is explaining his plan as to how he can make Lorraine fall in love with him. At the start of the scene, both of Marty's breast pocket flaps are untucked. After putting the bag down, one tucks itself in, then they return to normal when Marty says "let's go over the plan again". [If you look carefully, when Marty bends over, it causes the pocket to go in, and when he stands up again, the pocket wrightens itself because the material is being pulled up.]

In the opening scene of the enchantment under the sea dance, If you look at the sax player's fingers, they aren't moving the slightest bit, yet he is playing loud and clear. [The sax player is holding the sax with two hands, so if the submitter was only looking at the top hand, they wouldn't have seen that the bottom hand was moving when the top one wasn't.]

In the clock tower scene at the end of the movie, just as the Doc is about to jump off the clock tower and slide down the cable, the clock above his head changes to 10:04. This shouldn't happen until Marty hits the wire with the DeLorean. (Please note: This is not the same mistake as the one where the the clock changes split seconds before Doc looks up at it-it is the scene when he is about to jump off the tower and slide down the wire). [Although the clock showed 10:04, the clock doesn't show a second hand. There are therefore 60 seconds to play with after the clock changes until the clock hands would move again to 10:05. During this period, Doc can slide down the cable, detach and replug in the cable and allow for the DeLorean to come down the street and hit the cable when the lightning strikes, all still as the clock hands show 10:04.]

When George and Marty are at the gas station getting ready to confront Lorraine about the dance, George's hair is messy and ungroomed, when the shot changes to him walking away, his hair is nice and combed. [Just before Marty and George go into the cafe, Marty says "can you take care of that?", and he is looking at George's hair, as George is running his hand through it. We can therefore assume that Marty was talking about George's hair, so just before they go into the cafe, George combs his hair.]

At The End of the movie, when Marty and Jennifer are in the DeLorean with Doc, Marty says "You don't have enough road to get up to 88 miles an hour". But only a few hours ago, minutes to the viewer even, after Doc dropped Marty off at home, we see the DeLorean back out of the driveway and speed off, and we hear and see the sound and light of him going into the future down the same stretch of road. Marty is either not good with depth perception or the Doc must've driven through someone's house to get up to 88 miles an hour. [When Doc Brown goes into the future by himself, we see the DeLorean pull out of the driveway and race down the street, out of view, before it turns around and races past again and vanish into the future. Doc has apparently gone far enough down the street before turning around to give himself enough room to accelerate. After he comes back to pick up Marty and Jennifer, he only pulls out of the driveway rather than driving further down the street as he had before, prompting Marty's comment.]

Anyone else find it ironic that Einstein the dog was the world's first time traveler, while the real Einstein was the one who said that time travel is impossible? [Part of the "strange" world that Einstein explained in 1905 in his theory of relativity is that time and space are joined in our universe as a four-dimensional fabric known as space-time. Stranger yet is the concept that both space and time warp as mass or speed is increased. Einstein actually proved that time travel was theoretically possible, then spent the rest of his life trying to disprove it.]

When Doc is trying to fix the wire on the clock tower, its caught under the tree and doesn't reach. Yet then he twists it up twice and slides down it to fix the part on the ground. If it wouldn't reach when it was stuck under the tree, how on earth would it fit if it's wrapped twice around the arm on the clock? [In the initial attempt, the wire is caught under the tree but still attached to another wire (the one the Delorean will hit). Doc then breaks that connection, so the wire moves and the connector at the end of it gets stuck to the tree. Even though the wire is still under the tree, he has more wire to wrap around the arm of the clock.]

At the beginning of the movie the spilt second after the Amp blows up and Marty is jolted back, you can see the cable that is hooked to him. [This is probably just the cable that connects the guitar with the amp. Also, the speaker blows up, not the amp.]

In the beginning of the film Doc's address is 1646. When Marty is at Doc's house in 1955 his address is 1640. [ In the present Doc is living in his garage not his house. The garage is further down the street from where his house was, so the number is higher. Why? His house burned down. You can read about it during the opening scene, when we pan through Doc's garage.]

When Marty first goes to Doc Brown's house in 1955, Doc mocks Marty's claim that he has come back in time from 1985. When Marty tells him Ronald Reagan is President in 1985, Doc mocks him again and says "I suppose Jane Whyman is First Lady." Ronald Reagan divorced Jane Whyman in the late 1940s and married Nancy Davis in 1952. The fact was well known to anyone who kept track of movie stars so if Doc knew who Reagan was married to the first time, he would know in 1955 that Reagan had been married to Nancy Davis for three years by the time of the scene. [He's mocking Marty. He is saying that it would be about as believable for Jane Whyman to be first lady with Ronald Reagan as it would be for Ronald Reagan to become president in the first place.] Corrected by wolfchild

If Marty had made such an impression on his parents which is how he was supposed to have got his name, surely they would have called their 1st son Marty and not Marty who was their 3rd child? [His older brother could have gotten a family name. Which would trump an old friend's name.]

If Marty's family is so much more successful after his trip back in time, why do they still live in the same small house? [It could be a nice neighborhood. A larger house might have had a high property tax. Just because they moved up in the wealth sector doesn't mean they would have moved far above the upper-middle class level.]

In this movie when you go back in time you would get there at the exact time you on the time machine. At the end of the movie when Marty figures out he has all the time he needs he sets the time machine to 1:24 or some other hour with 24 as the minutes. When Marty gets back to 1985 he crashes into the movie theater, drives down the road, and says hi to the homeless guy. After all that Marty looks up at clock and you see that time just went from 23 to 24 minutes. Wouldn't it already be a few seconds after 24 minutes? [Not all clocks are synchronized. The clock in town might have been set a few seconds behind the clock in the DeLorean.]

There is simply no way a VW bus (driven by the terrorists) would be able to keep up in a race with a DeLorean (driven by Marty). [ Marty has to keep going around the tight corners in the parking lot, therefore slowing his speed considerably. It's only when he has a straight stretch in front of him that he has enough room to really get up to speed, and get away.]

When George walks in to Lou's, he orders a chocolate milk. How could Lou have made a chocolate milk in less than three seconds? [Some soda shops have milk machines (I had one at the cafeteria in the dorms at college), one side is regular milk, the other is chocolate. Lou probably made the batch of chocolate milk that morning, and all he had to do was push a lever and fill the glass.]

Near the end when Marty gets locked in the trunk he says the keys are there with him. Why would the keys be in the trunk?. [It was an accident. Similar to locking your keys inside your car. My parents have done this several times with their older cars.]

Wouldn't Marty's parents and Biff Tannen be amazed and freaked out that their son Marty is identical to Calvin, the kid that played a major part in all their lives, and who they would definitely remember? [It's 30 years later, I doubt they remember a guy who they only knew for a few days back when they were teenagers well enough to recognise him as Marty.]