A-List: Back to the Future - Quotes
By J. Don Birnam
October 19, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
So, if you’re a fan of Marty, Doc Brown, Biff, and Lorraine, buckle up in your DeLorean, as this week we celebrate Future Day with three A-List columns devoted to the trilogy - a fanboy’s paradise.
We will start simply enough, by revisiting some of the best quotes from the trilogy, as we did for Casablanca a few weeks back. The rules are simple, and any and all quotes from the trilogy are fair play. It is fitting, however, to make this the first column of the three, as this is essentially an ode to the first movie of the series. While all three are great, it is the first one that gave us so many recognizable and sufficiently witty dialogue.
5. Why don’t you make like a tree, and get out of here?
Biff Tannen, the central antagonist throughout the trilogy, provides his fair share of memorable BTTF moments. Your classic high school bully butthead (a word he also uses repeatedly), the writing behind the character is incredibly simplistic and linear to the point of brilliance. Biff wants to get his way always, and is willing to do whatever to get it. Most of what he’s willing to do, of course, is bully other people.
When we first encounter Biff, he’s an overweight, overbearing boss to Marty’s dad George, but it is as a teenage bully that we most remember him across the movies. The quirk of making the character seem not very smart by butchering basic idioms is nothing novel, but it worked perfectly in the movie thanks to Thomas Wilson’s cocky delivery, followed by his self-assured snicker and smirk. Throughout the movies, then, Biff becomes a character of memorable misquotes, none of which detract from the looming threat he poses in every chapter, particularly as Buford Tannen in the third movie, set back in 1885.
In the sequel, when old Biff (the one from 2015) encounters his younger self to hand off the fateful sports almanac, he smacks himself over the head (oh, the symbolism!) with his cane, and proclaims “it’s leave, make a like a tree and leave, you idiot!”
I guess Biff never ceased being a big bully, even in 2015. Some things never change.
4. Whoa, this is heavy.
Marty, a consummate teenager from his time, likes his teenage speak. Like my generation liked “cool,” or the current generation’s “LOL” or endless use of smileys, “heavy,” I suppose, was big among teenagers in the 1980s. The brilliance of this quote, and why it deserves to be on this list, is that it singlehandedly captures the hysterical exchange between Marty and the Doc Brown of 1955, and the intelligent commentary on evolving times that Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale inserted in the movie.
In other parts of the movie, like when Marty asks for a “Pepsi Free” at the Hill Valley diner, or when he casually mentions owning two TV sets, the movie reminds us of how much times changed in 30 years. But it is in the exchanges between Doc and Marty as they plot to find a way to get Marty back to the future that the writers use the most fast-paced back and forth lines to convey amazement at how our world has changed.
Doc is incredulous that Ronald Reagan is President in 1985, panicked that plutonium may be available in “every corner drug store” in 1985, and resigned to the fact that his 1985 self is wearing a radiation suit “because of all the fallout from the atomic wars.”
Yet it is when Doc finally reacts to Marty assessing as “heavy” the various problems their plans face that the brilliance of the entire concept of the movie is revealed. As any fan of the movie worth his weight in plutonium knows, the movie is, at bottom, an allegory for the disconnect between teenagers and his parents. What teenager, the movie posits, hasn’t been unfairly treated by a parent for engaging in the same behavior that the parent may have engaged in when he or she was a teenager? And, more interestingly, what would happen if that teenager could meet the teenage version of his or her parents?
In Doc’s eventual reactions to Marty’s heavy, “heavy, there’s that word again, what is there some problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull in the future?” several of the movie’s key concepts are nicely found. First and foremost, Doc and Marty do not always understand each other, much in the same way that Marty and his parents are hopelessly speaking past each other. But Doc’s “sciency” outlook, his searching and inquisitive mind, and his tender bond with Marty (the centerpiece of the movie’s character arcs), are also revealed.
Pretty cool, no?
3. Roads? Where we are going, we don’t need roads.
The reason I like this quote so much is because of the behind-the-scenes story about it. The line is delivered by Doc to Marty and Jennifer at the end of the film, after Marty returns to 1985 and Doc departs on a sight-seeing adventure from as-of-then unspecified point in the future. All of a sudden, Doc returns, in a tizzy, and explains to Marty and Jennifer that they must go back to the future with him, because something has to be done about their kids. As they prepare to get to the DeLorean’s needed 88 miles per hour, Marty asks Doc if he has enough space on the road to accelerate to that amount. Doc then responds with the classic line, and the first movie ends on that hilarious note of Doc wit, with the DeLorean taking off from the street and into the sky, and flying away in a burst of electricity.
Little did Zemeckis and Gale know when they wrote this line, however, that it would affect the course of the entire rest of the trilogy. When they penned the first BTTF, they did not know that it would become such a classic, the highest-grossing movie of 1985. As they explain it (and, from seeing Doc’s delivery, it is undoubtedly true), they threw that line in as a joke, an off-hand remark about an extremely futuristic society (Doc does not at this point say how many years into the future he’s travelled).
But as the film’s popularity overwhelmed even its creators, the desire for a sequel became overpowering. The writers were then forced to pick up from that line as they ventured into the additional adventures of Doc Brown and Marty, and the use of a flying DeLorean proved to be a pivotal plot point that even provided the narrative transition from the second to the third film.
2. 1.21 Jigawatts!?!
Another quirky line and another quirky reason to place it on the list. The DeLorean time machine operates, as you know, on gasoline. But the “flux capacitor,” the central invention that Doc Brown came up with to permit time travel, requires 1.21 “jigawatts” of electricity - the equivalent of a nuclear reaction - to function.
The line is funny and a BTFF classic for a few reasons. First, it reflects the times in several hilarious ways. The script as written, of course, called for 1.21 gigawatts, with “giga” being the now well-known prefix meaning billion (which we now use commonly in computer speak, for the space of our hard drives and memories). But, back then, the term was not commonly used, and so neither the writers nor the actors knew exactly how to pronounce it. 1.21 jigawatts thus is classic BTTF lore in those ways: a quirky line, an accident of the past, a product of its time hopelessly trapped in the past (now) in a movie about the future (then).
More important, the expression keys off to many of the best moments in the movie. The first one is when Doc Brown explains the functioning of the DeLorean to Marty, and the need for that much energy. The exaggerated amount leads to a hilarious explanation by Doc regarding Libyan terrorists (another dated reference), it introduces Doc’s funny 1955 line about plutonium available at corner stores, and it is a key component of Doc’s wild explanation about how he can get the DeLorean back to the future - by striking the wire attached to the clock tower at precisely 10:04 p.m., at precisely 88 miles per hour, sending 1.21 jigawatts into the flux capacitor, and the time vehicle back to 1985.
Everything should be fine.
1. Great Scott!!
But it is without a doubt Doc’s trademark exclamation that deserves the top spot in a movie of top quotes. According to Wikipedia, “Great Scott” is an “interjection of surprise, amazement or dismay.” I would add to that, perhaps, bewilderment.
Of the quotes on the list today, this is perhaps the one that does make its way successfully into the sequels (in fact, it is the last line in the brilliant ending to Part II), and it is no wonder. Christopher Lloyd’s delivery of it, normally as a gasp, sucking for air as he utters the words, are a large part of what make it so memorable. Doc uses it sparingly but forcefully enough to elicit a chuckle every time. When he finds out that Marty’s siblings are being erased, when he encounters his own tombstone in Part III, when he is trying to save his contraption to take Marty back to the future in Part I, etc. The quote is as endearing as it is funny, and it rounds out nicely the overall feel of light-hearted but creative fun that the movie is all about.
What is most interesting about the Wikipedia entry for the expression is that it explains that it went into disuse in the first half of the 20th Century (its usage by Doc, then, is also a telling sign about the character - a nostalgic, brilliant scientist who adores the past but is somehow impossibly curious about the future). Well, when Zemeckis and Gale penned it into the Back to the Future script, when Christopher Lloyd delivered it, and when the movie became such a cultural landmark of the 1980s, they all assured that the expression would live forever.
Great Scott, indeed.