Corrected entry: After Marty gets off the stage after playing "Johnny B Goode" he runs into his future parents. His father thanks him for all his good advice. His mother asks him if they are ever going to see him again. Wouldn't they just assume that Marty will be back in school on Monday? (01:30:20)
Corrected entry: In the beginning, Doc and Marty meet at the Twin Pine Mall, and we learn that Doc has built a time machine, which runs on plutonium. He has a heavy case filled with several containers of plutonium, one of which he inserts into the DeLorean. Doc is then killed and Marty flees to 1955. When he goes back to 1985, he plans to get there ten minutes early in order to prevent Doc's death. However, the car runs out of gas and Marty has to run to the Lone Pine Mall on foot, thus getting there too late. He is devastated that Doc is dead. Why? There is more plutonium two feet from him, in the truck. He can just take some, put it in the car, and come back ten minutes early again--or thirty minutes, or an hour, or a day, or whatever he wants.
Correction: True, but this solution probably wouldn't occur to him moments after he saw Doc murdered, so it is conceivable that he would grieve for a while and then hit on the idea if Doc hadn't been wearing body armor.
Corrected entry: Just before Marty starts playing Johnny B Goode on stage, he tells the band members to watch for changes and other guidance advice to start the song. When the song starts, ALL the band members (who have never heard this song before) suddenly play all the chord changes perfectly and even the drums are perfect like the real song. In reality, never hearing that song before, the band would not have had this song perfected like that - every note and instrument sound.
Correction: This is, of course, done intentionally to make the song sound like it actually is. It's highly unlikely but not impossible that these musicians put it all together just as the actual song sounds. You also have to keep in mind that the idea is given that Chuck Berry came up with the song hearing it through the telephone, so that's why the actual song sounds the same, as he is just mimicking what he heard.
Besides which, if this posting were valid, every movie musical in history would be riddled with similar errors.
Corrected entry: After Marty returns to the present, he wakes up in his room that is identical to the beginning of the movie, however the rest of the house i.e the living has changed and is more modern.
Correction: That merely tells us that Marty was more or less the same in both timelines, having similar tastes.
Which wouldn't happen. Because with loving, successful and self confident parents, there's no way a kid turns up just the same as with goofy, drunk, and pushovers parents.
Unlikely, but not impossible and therefore, not a mistake.
Corrected entry: When Marty first enters Lou's cafe in 1955, Lou is visibly angry at Marty just because he won't order something right away. However, he doesn't seem to care that one of his paying customers, George McFly, is being harassed by Biff and his gang and told never to come in there again. You would think Lou would tell Biff and Co. to knock it off or else be asked to leave.
Corrected entry: 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?
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the film, when Marty gets to the Doc's place he is wearing a watch, so he could easily know about the right hour in spite that the clocks are wrong.
Correction: 3 possibilities from the top of my head: 1. He wears the watch but never checks it, it's just a fashion statement for some people, next to that he just entered a home with a wall full of clocks, no need to check your watch as well. 2. The watch isn't working (it's digital). 3. The watch could be on the wrong time as well.
Corrected entry: The camera that Doc Brown used was a JVC GR-C1, (produced in March 1984) (Also, this particular camcorder was the first built in camera also to feature a tape deck built in).
Correction: A perfectly legitimate camera for someone to have in the year 1985.
Corrected entry: At the end of the movie when Marty's alarm goes off, it is 10:27 am. His brother and sister are at the dining room table eating breakfast. They are both dressed in business attire. It doesn't make sense that two business persons would be eating breakfast at home at 10:30am.
Correction: It's also Saturday. Dave may have had a weekend business meeting, so it wouldn't have required him to come in at his regular time.
Corrected entry: When Doc is on the clock tower in 1955 during the storm, a closeup of his feet is shown. He is wearing shoes with velcro straps in this shot. Velcro did not yet exist in 1955, and Doc had not yet traveled into the future.
Correction: The concept behind Velcro was conceived in 1941, the idea was submitted for a patent in 1951, and the patent was granted in 1955. Not impossible that Dr. Emmett Brown, a member of a wealthy family and fellow inventor, could acquire some.
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the movie, when Lorraine is telling her children about the dance, she turned to George and said it was the same night as the terrible storm. At the courthouse, the storm was fierce - wind, thunder, and lightning. At the dance, however, it was a pleasant evening. No evidence of a storm whatsoever.
Correction: "Same night" doesn't mean "at the exact same time". The dance and the storm both happened the same evening.
Correction: The school is some distance away from the courthouse, and the storm simply hadn't arrived there yet.
Corrected entry: When Marty is trying to prove his futureness to Doc, he says that his sister was in the class of 1984 and then shows Doc a picture. Whenever the picture is shown however, the shirt says class of '81.
Correction: There's a vertical fold in her sweatshirt causing the '4' to be compressed so it looks like a '1' if you don't look too closely.
Corrected entry: This one is tricky but important in view of Doc's concern about doing anything that will alter the future. The lightning rod on the clock tower would have been connected to ground with a thick cable. Doc would have had to disconnect this cable to allow the current from the lightning to flow into his cable instead and hence to the time machine. We now know that a lightning strike is a result of a complex interaction of electric potentials between charges in a cloud and charges in the ground below. By disconnecting this grounding cable this interaction would have been disrupted, causing the lightning to strike at a different time or strike a different object on the ground.
Correction: If you touch a lightning rod while lightning strikes it, you will still get electrocuted. So, just like the energy would travel into your body, it traveled through Doc's cable. No need to disconnect the ground. If grounding a power source kept it from charging any thing else, no electrical appliance would ever function.
Corrected entry: When older Lorraine is talking about when she first met Marty's dad, the words VODKA on the vodka bottle are reversed therefore the shot was flipped.
Correction: "VODKA" (at the bottom of the label) is not spelled backwards. I think you're confusing it with the brand of vodka, POPOV. Only the last few letters are visible in the shot. ("-OV").
Corrected entry: When Doc is having the DeLorean do the burn out to get the car up to speed, the car is spinning its wheels up to 65 mph and Doc releases the brake. Now the car takes off, but the car would lose most of the speed the tires had built up as it is starting from essentially a dead stop even though the speedometer still shows 65 mph. Think of it this way, the back tires may be moving at 65 mph but the front tires are not. There is no physically possible way for a car to jump from 0 to 65 mph instantaneously using only its tires no matter how fast they were rotating. Even an F/A-18 needs a catapult to get that kind of speed so quickly. (00:21:35)
Correction: If the speedometer was hooked up in such a way as to show 65MPH as the speed before the brake was released, it would still show it afterward. The car was never going 65, true, but the tires were telling the speedometer it was. For whatever reason this is how Doc wired it all together. The tires wouldn't slow down suddenly just because the brake was let up, they'd continue to skid until the car's speed matched their own.
Corrected entry: When Loraine tries to kiss Marty in the car and he pulls away, she asks if something is wrong, but instead of calling him "Calvin" (as in Calvin Klein) she calls him "Marty."
Correction: When Marty first met her, and she thought his name was Calvin Klein, he told her his friends called him Marty. She referred to him as Calvin and then Marty in the scene in Doc's garage, and she calls him Marty in their last scene before he goes back to 1985. Clearly she's getting used to calling him Marty.
Corrected entry: When Marty is plugging his guitar in to the mega amp, the amplifier end of the cable is stereo (like you would use for headphones) and the guitar end is the correct mono connector.
Corrected entry: When Doc is on the clock tower attempting to reconnect the cable, he pulls it and disconnects the other end (indicating the cable has just enough slack to touch the ground from point A and then be inches short of point B). Doc then connects the cable and then ties the cable around the clock hands. The other end of the cable is only held by a fallen branch, if he were to really propel down the cable, he would have gone completely vertical down. When he lands, the cable would have been shorter due to him tying it to the clock hands. Also a shock of 1.21 gigawatts would have landed him in the hospital if not the funeral home.
Correction: Several "mistakes" in one entry, that alone should have gotten this entry rejected. The cable is more than long enough in a more or less straight shot from one end to the other. The branch is keeping from being a straight shot. That's why, even though it's wrapped arond the clock hand, it's still long enough after Doc disentangles it form the branch. If all of Doc's weight, and whatever more leverage he gained by pulling against the clock hand, wasn't enough to move the branch, him rapelling down the cable wouldn't have moved it either. It was stuck in place. The jolt he got wasn't a full 1.21 gigawatts either. The cable was surely insulated and he was wearing gloves, also certainly insulated, if I remember that small bit correctly.
Corrected entry: "Back to the Future" was originally going to be called "Space Zombies from Pluto."
Correction: Untrue. There was an MCA entertainment exec, noted for his often odd studio notes, who suggested (during post-production) that this should be the title of the film (as this is the title of the comic young Peabody shows to his folks when Marty arrives in 1955). But it was never given serious consideration and was certainly never a used title.
Corrected entry: The license plate of the time machine is spinning on the road in the middle of the fire tracks - further down the track than where Doc and Marty stand. But the car (and therefore the license plate) was never there. It had already 'jumped'. Otherwise the license plate had to pass through Marty.
Correction: Having just watched the scene in question, I can confirm that that is incorrect. It may be confusing because they turn their bodies to look at where the car would have been. They then turn back forward to the last place that they saw the car which is what Marty was then focusing on. After it shows the plate spinning, the next shot shows Marty and Doc facing the camera, and also the plate.
Correction: Although I don't think it is ever said, it is made clear throughout the film that Marty (posing as Doc's nephew) is only at the school for a short time, whilst staying with his 'uncle'. The night of the dance is obviously his last night before returning to his normal school.