That Time We All Forgot There Was A Back To The Future Sequel In 1991
And it’s not what you think.
The cultural relevance of Back to the Future is indisputable. Not only did the 1985 classic film utterly change the way we talk about time travel stories, but the film trilogy also, somehow, became one of the most unique sci-fi trilogies of all time — one that is so perfect that it has oddly avoided spinoffs, remakes, and reboots.
That is, except for one very specific odd case. In 1991, just one year after the release of Back to the Future Part III, an animated sequel series called Back to the Future hit CBS, which told the further timey-wimey adventures of Doc Brown, Clara Clayton, Marty McFly, plus Jules and Verne Brown, Doc and Clara’s sons briefly glimpsed at the end of Part III. Was this show any good? Well, the answer to that question is a qualified no, but that’s not for lack of trying.
Thirty-five years after its debut in 1991, Back to the Future the TV series probably is most famous for the first on-screen (and wordless) performances from Bill Nye, who appeared in live-action science lesson segments at the end of various episodes, as Doc Brown’s assistant. And yet, combined with the beloved nature of the Back to the Future films and the cult status of many 1990s TV shows, we still don’t collectively care about Back to the Future the cartoon. But why?
The answer might be a little surprising, but it probably comes down to one odd reason: The show picked the wrong protagonists.
Marty McFly isn’t really the main character of Back to the Future the series
This single moment from Back to the Future Part II was more adored by children than anything in the animated TV series.
While Marty McFly certainly appears in most episodes of Back to the Future, it’s hard to say he’s part of the show. Instead, Marty (voiced by David Kaufman) is relegated to being part of a quirky ensemble of characters, none of which quite makes for a great line-up of heroes in a kids’ cartoon series. Unlike, say, The Real Ghostbusters in 1986, which could easily translate a line-up of cool dudes into a super-team for a kids’ show, Back to the Future, as an animated series, struggled to figure out how its found-family dynamic would work in an episodic format.
The result? Most episodes involve time paradoxes caused by the young boys, Jules and Verne, or by Doc being more than mildly incompetent. And when Marty is the central character, he tends to be a bit more aloof than his cinematic counterpart, and pretty much lacking in the wit he had in the movies. In short, Marty is here, but he’s not the Marty of the movies, and feels, often, like an afterthought.
Back to the Future’s TV show is a bizarre conclusion of tones
While writers John Loy and John Ludin do a yeoman’s job of translating the paradoxes of the films into bite-sized episodes that traverse all of known history, they, and all the other creatives on the show, are stuck with characters who don’t really work as week-to-week characters, partly because there are simply too many of them. Plus, these people are not a crew on a mission, but rather a sitcom family getting into scrapes.
This version of Back to the Future is one part DuckTales, part Family Ties, and part Time Tunnel. And, as zany as the time travel adventures are, almost nobody is having fun, and often the ‘90s goofy cartoon vibe fails to work with the actual subject matter.
Case in point: The first episode is shockingly dark, and finds Jules and Verne flung back in time and on opposite sides of the Civil War. An ancestor of Biff Tanen is an officer for the Confederacy (because, of course), but even this feels oddly depressing, as the entire episode seems to strangely make light of the Civil War and relies mainly on a gag that Doc can use an electromagnetic device to take everyone’s weapons away.
Here, Doc Brown’s time-travel abilities are the opposite of his more concerned attitude from the films: Doc will gleefully go back in time in nearly every episode and risk causing all sorts of paradoxes and timeline changes, especially if he is out to save his family.
This is all fine, of course, and there’s really no need, then or now, to take the animated Back to the Future all that seriously. And yet, considering that other animated children’s shows — from The Real Ghostbusters in the 1980s, to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in the 2010s — have managed to deliver excellent time-travel tales, it’s somewhat odd that Back to the Future, the greatest time-travel franchise ever, didn’t.
While aspects of the animated Back to the Future are charming, when you revisit this show, 35 years later, it’s easy to understand how it’s been erased from history, like a person in a photograph, fading away.
