Rather than being a precognitive reference to the third film’s casting of Mary Steenburgen, it’s actually apparently a nod to Mary Radford, who was the PA to the film’s second unit director Frank Marshall.
Crew Shoutout (I)As Marty and Jennifer cross the square after his failed audition, the license plate on a green car that they walk past reads ‘FOR MARY’. A bit harsh, given that it’s his song they’re covering, but there you go.ĩ. Yep, that’s Huey “Power Of Love” Lewis with the megaphone, judging Marty’s band The Pinheads as being “too darn loud” to perform at the school dance (a line that Lewis himself purportedly suggested). Later in the film, we’ll discover that this building is actually the garage of the Doc’s original mansion (located at 1640), which a newspaper article in the opening scene told us had been burned down and the land sold off – to be replaced with the Burger King that we see as Marty skates off. It’s not immediately apparent at this point in the film, but check out the number on the front of the Doc’s shack: 1646.
We don’t think there’s any deliberate reference on the part of the filmmakers (they probably just had it lying around somewhere), it’s just pretty neat. The badge that Marty wears on his denim jacket reads ‘Art in Revolution’, and the black and red design suggests that it’s somehow connected to an exhibition of Soviet art and design that took place at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1971. It’s one of those codes that has cropped up in various places as a geeky nod ever since, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nineto Men In Black III. Strangelove (and in the novel, Red Alert, that loosely inspired that film), and was also re-used by Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange (as ‘Serum 114’) and Eyes Wide Shut. This is the name of a device from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.
The sticker on the amp Marty plugs into reads ‘CRM 114’. (It’s up to you if you want to stick the films on while you read through, although you’ll get extra kudos if you know them well enough to recognize exactly which scenes we’re talking about as we go along…)Ī fairly blatant nod here, although easy to miss if you don’t know what it means. So if you immediately recognize the reference we’ve made in the number we’ve chosen, you might want to join us as we go chronologically through all three films and pick out as many easter eggs and other nerdy things worth spotting as we can find. If you’ve watched the films more than once, chances are you’ll have noticed plenty of them – but we’re not sure anybody’s gone through and put together quite so comprehensive a list of them in one go as we’ve done here. Barely a scene goes by, in any of the three films, that doesn’t contain something worth keeping an eye out for, or that rewards repeated viewings – whether it’s a nod to something recognizable from popular culture, a clever easter egg relating to the ongoing story and characters, or even just a little piece of in-joke trivia.
Look out for a cameo appearance from ZZ Top.Aside from being just generally one of the greatest movie trilogies ever made, the Back To The Future films are especially notable for just how densely packed they are, both at script level and then again in production. Using the special effects intelligently, Zemeckis stages a spectacular steam-train finale and neatly ties up the trilogy's loose ends. The inimitable Fox is again on cracking form as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd's romance with Mary Steenburgen is surprisingly touching. And once more Gale and Zemeckis have come up with an ingenious plot and a clutch of in-jokes, including the casting of western favourites Dub Taylor, Harry Carey Jr and Pat Buttram as a trio of old timers in the saloon.
As before, the plot revolves around the need to tinker with time and the problem of how to power the trusty DeLorean car so that Fox can get back to the present. Shot back-to-back with Part II, the film is set predominantly in the Old West and offers Michael J Fox the chance to indulge in all the sharpshooting situations that made Saturday matinée western serials such a treat for millions of children (including, one suspects, Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale). Director Robert Zemeckis's blockbusting trilogy went slightly off the rails with the second segment, but it got right back on track (literally) with this concluding instalment.