Back to the Future Trivia Quiz: Test Your Knowledge

Trivia Quizzes Movies

Weeks into filming, the studio made the almost unthinkable decision to fire its original lead actor and reshoot every single completed scene with a replacement, an incredibly costly gamble that nonetheless produced one of the most beloved and quotable performances in movie history. Back to the Future became the highest-grossing film of 1985 on the strength of that recast lead, blending inventive time-travel science fiction with warm, character-driven comedy in a way that turned a fairly simple premise, a teenager accidentally sent back three decades, into a cultural touchstone still widely referenced today.

Eric Stoltz had already shot roughly five weeks of footage as Marty McFly before director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale concluded that his serious, method-inflected performance was pulling against the comedy, and in January 1985 they replaced him with Michael J. Fox, who then spent months filming Family Ties during the day and Back to the Future through the night, frequently on four hours of sleep or less. The reshoots added several million dollars to a budget of roughly nineteen million, an overrun Universal accepted largely because Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was standing behind the picture. The screenplay had been turned down more than forty times before any of that, including by Disney, which balked at a subplot in which a mother becomes infatuated with her own teenage son, and by Columbia, which optioned the material and then let it go.

The DeLorean DMC-12 replaced an earlier draft’s refrigerator-based time machine partly because Zemeckis and Gale wanted a vehicle that rural 1955 witnesses could mistake for a spacecraft, and the film’s invented physics, a flux capacitor sketched out after Doc Brown slips in his bathroom and cracks his head on the sink, 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, and a trigger speed of 88 miles per hour, hold together tightly enough that audiences never bothered arguing with them. The entire plot funnels toward a single appointment: lightning striking the Hill Valley courthouse clock tower at 10:04 p.m. on November 12, 1955, the same night as the Enchantment Under the Sea dance where George McFly finally hits Biff Tannen and wins Lorraine.

Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, and Thomas F. Wilson filled out the 1955 half of the cast, while Alan Silvestri’s brass-heavy score and Huey Lewis and the News supplied the sound, with “The Power of Love” reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and picking up an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Lewis himself appears as the bullhorn-wielding judge who rejects Marty’s audition for being too loud, and the Chuck Berry gag at the dance, routed through a cousin named Marvin, has been argued about by fans ever since. Universal president Sid Sheinberg pushed to retitle the film Spaceman from Pluto, a suggestion Spielberg killed by responding with a memo thanking him for the amusing joke.

The two sequels were shot back to back and released in 1989 and 1990, sending Marty forward to October 21, 2015, then into an alternate 1985 dominated by Biff Tannen’s casino, and finally back to Hill Valley in 1885. Glover declined to return, prompting a lawsuit over the use of his likeness that changed how the Screen Actors Guild treats such practices, and Claudia Wells was replaced by Elisabeth Shue as Jennifer. Questions here run across all three films, from the mall whose name changes after a pine tree gets flattened to the specific year Doc ends up living in, and the answer key sits directly below for settling any disputed point of the timeline.