(2) Back to the Future Part II (1989): The Banned Ending They Hid for Over 35 Years - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKQdQUZF_f4
Transcript:
(00:02) Shark still looks fake. Hi. In 1990, a lawsuit over one movie sequel pushed the Screen Actors Guild to change its contracts. All because of a question that sounds almost absurd. Who was allowed to wear another person's face? That is not a metaphor. A real actor was replaced by a different man wearing prosthetics based on the first actor's face.
(00:25) And the studio even reused footage of the original actor as if nothing had happened. the original actor noticed and he took them to court. That is only the first thing hiding inside Back to the Future Part Two. Look at the very first scene of the movie. The girl on that porch is not the girl you saw at the end of the first film. Someone else was quietly swapped in, and the reason has nothing to do with acting.
(00:49) Look at the window of a dusty antique shop in the year 2015, and you will find a wink at the biggest shark in movie history. Look at a theater marquee and you will find a joke about Steven Spielberg's own family. Look at two kids laughing at Marty's arcade game and you are watching the film debut of a future Hobbit. There is even a joke told by the director himself with a perfectly straight face that was so convincing that people started calling the studio and a toy company to ask where they could buy the thing. And then there is the version of this film that you never saw. A version
(01:20) with no trip back to 1955 at all. A version where the whole third act takes place in a different decade. Where the hero is arrested for dressing like a hippie.
(01:37) And where the power that sends him home has to be pulled from power lines stretched across a canyon in a plan that gives him only a few seconds to get it right. It was written and it nearly became the film. and the reason it died tells you more about how this movie works than anything on screen. Today we are going through 13 hidden truths about Back to the Future Part Two released in 1989. And we will end with that lost version because it deserves to be last. Let's begin. Number one, the hoax that fooled a generation.
(02:03) Back in the late 1980s, there was no such thing as a real hoverboard. There still isn't, not the way the movie shows it. A board that glides silently above the ground, turns on a dime, [music] and carries a teenager across a town square is pure fantasy. So why did so many people believe it was real? Because of something the director said in a promotional special that aired on American television, hosted by Leslie Nielsen. Robert Zamechus looked into the camera with a completely serious face and explained that hoverboards were not invented for the movie at all. They
(02:37) already existed. He said they had been around for years, but parent groups had complained that they were too dangerous for children, so manufacturers had kept them off the market, and the filmmakers, he said, had simply managed to get their hands on a few and put them in the film. It was a joke. It was a deliberate hoax delivered dead pan, the kind of line you would expect in a mockumentary.
(03:01) But there is a problem with a joke told by a respected filmmaker in a serious tone about a toy that looks exactly like something every child wants. A lot of people believed him, especially children. The boards in the film carried the name of the toy giant Mattel, which only made it worse. The film's effect studio and Mattel's customer line reportedly began receiving calls from people asking where they could buy one.
(03:26) A Mattel spokesman had to explain that the board was a prop built for the movie and joked that anyone who wanted one should wait until 2015. The truth was much less magical. The actors did not glide at all. They were hung from wires and the crew spent a lot of effort making those wires invisible. Even today, the story has not died.
(03:47) Thomas F. Wilson, the actor who played Biff, says that fans still come up to him and ask whether hoverboards are real. It happens so often that he turned the experience into comedy. He wrote a song about the questions he is asked again and again. And he has a card that answers them, admitting that the boards did not really fly and that the actors were hanging from wires.
(04:10) What began as a throwaway gag in a television special became one of the most durable pieces of movie misinformation in pop culture. A single sentence said once and 30ome years later people are still asking about it. Number two, a future legend losing a video game. Somewhere in the middle of the 2015 sequence, Marty walks into a restaurant called Cafe8s.
(04:34) It is a place built entirely around nostalgia where the staff are faces on screens and the decor is wallto-wall with the 1980s. At the back, there is an arcade machine called Wild Gunman, a real game from decades earlier. Marty steps up to play it the way a man from 1985 would. [music] and two small boys wander over to watch him. They are not impressed.
(04:57) One of them stares at the controller and says with total disbelief, "You mean you have to use your hands?" And the other one answers, "That's like a baby's toy." It is a funny moment on its own. It shows a world where children have grown up with games that read your body and your voice, and a gun you hold in your hand feels ridiculous. But the real joke is who is standing in that scene.
(05:20) One of those boys was about 8 years old at the time of filming, and this was his very first appearance in a feature film. His name was Elijah Wood. 12 years later, he would be walking across the screen carrying the one ring across Middle Earth as Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Before he carried the fate of the world, he was just a kid in a silly hat with a bad attitude, making fun of Marty McFly for using his hands. The boy next to him is easy to overlook, but if you rewatch the scene now, it feels like a small
(05:53) piece of film history. A door opening on a career that would last a lifetime. Number three, the face that was replaced. Now, we come to the story from the beginning, and it is the one with the biggest consequences. In the first Back to the Future, the role of Marty's father, George McFly, [music] was played by Crisen Glover.
(06:14) His strange, nervous, twitching performance is one of the most memorable things in the entire movie, you could not imagine anyone else playing him. So, when Back to the Future Part Two began production, fans expected to see him again. They did see a George McFly, but it was not Glover.
(06:37) The part was played by an actor named Jeffrey Weissman, and the filmmakers did something almost unheard of. They fitted Weissman with prosthetics, including pieces that were reportedly made from molds of Glover's own face from the first film so that he would look like the man he was replacing. Why? The reason, according to the filmmakers, was a contract dispute. Reports say Glover asked for $1 million. Co-writer and producer Bob Gail has said that Glover's demands were close to what Michael J.
(07:05) Fox was being paid and that he also wanted approval over the script and that the producers made what they believed was an excellent offer which Glover turned down because of money. Glover tells a very different story. He has said that the best the producers offered him was $125,000 a fraction of what other returning cast members were getting. And he has disputed Gail's account.
(07:26) He has also said that his objections were not only about money. He did not like the way the first film ended with the McFly family suddenly wealthy and he felt the sequel did not respect what made his character work. Whichever version you believe, the result was the same. No deal was reached. Glover did not simply walk away.
(07:49) In 1990, he sued Universal and Amblin Entertainment over the use of his likeness and reused footage of his work from the first film. Universal's argument was simple. It owned the character of George McFly. Glover's position, as he has put it, was that they owned the character they wrote, but they did not own his face. The case went forward and was eventually settled out of court. One report puts the payment at $760,000, and the effects reached further than one lawsuit.
(08:15) Afterward, Screen Actors Guild contracts were changed to prohibit reproducing another actor's likeness without permission, whether through makeup, masks, or prosthetics. Every time a film studio today wants to recreate an actor's face, whether with makeup, with a body double, or with a computer, it is working in a world where that question has already been fought over.
(08:34) A contract dispute over a single supporting role ended up shaping how Hollywood protects the faces of its actors to this day. Number four, the girl who was swapped out of the first scene. Here is something almost nobody notices on a first viewing. Back to the Future Part Two opens by replaying the last few minutes of the first film, the moment Doc arrives in 1985 and tells Marty that something has to be done about his kids.
(09:01) Jennifer, Marty's girlfriend, is right there when the Delorean lands. In the first movie, Jennifer was played by Claudia Wells. In the sequel, the same moment shows a different actress, Elizabeth Shu. The filmmakers did not hide it. They reshot the ending of the first film almost shot forshot with Shu in the role and used it to open the sequel.
(09:24) The reason was personal, not professional. Claudia Wells stepped away from the role because her mother was seriously ill and she wanted to be with her family. It was a human decision and it left the production with a problem to solve. The solution was practical. Elizabeth Shu stepped in and the sequel could pick up exactly where its predecessor ended. It is a small detail, but it says something about the series.
(09:48) This franchise was held together by decisions made fast under pressure in real life. A sick parent, a pay dispute with another actor, a schedule that wouldn't wait. And somehow the film absorbed every one of those cracks and kept running at 88 mph. Number five, one actor, three roles, one dinner table.
(10:13) The 2015 portion of the movie holds one of its most ambitious scenes, and it is easy to forget how hard it was to film. Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly. In the future, he also plays Marty's son, Marty Jr., and he plays Marty's daughter, Marlene. So, in the family dinner scene, Fox is sitting at the table three times over, wearing three different costumes, speaking three different sets of lines, playing three different people.
(10:37) Today, we would call that a visual effect and move on. But in 1989, there was no easy way to do it. To make the scene possible, Industrial Light and Magic built a motion controlled camera system known as the Vistaglide, which could repeat the exact same camera move again and again. Fox filmed the scene once as one character.
(11:00) Then the camera performed the same move while he played the next, then again for the third. The recorded camera move was replayed each time, and the separate pieces were combined into a single shot so that three versions of the same actor appear to be sharing a table.
(11:18) To keep the timing alive, Fox reportedly heard his own earlier lines through a hidden earpiece, and answered himself. It meant that Fox had to react to people who were not there, hold perfect eyelines, and remember where each of his characters was supposed to be looking, all while keeping the performances distinct. The father is tired. The son is weak and nervous. The daughter is sharp and impatient. They all share a face, but not a single gesture.
(11:41) This is the kind of movie magic that no one talks about. There are no explosions or flying cars. It's just a family eating dinner, and it was one of the most technically demanding things in the film. Number six, the antique shop full of secrets. When Marty steps out onto the streets of 2015, he ends up in front of a store called Blast from the Past. It is a shop that sells relics of earlier decades.
(12:06) And it is the place where Marty will find the single most dangerous object in the entire story, a book of sports results from 1950 through 2000, which he buys and which will change the world. That is the plot reason the store exists. But look at the window because the filmmakers filled it with jokes. You can spot the sports almanac itself resting among games and videotapes.
(12:31) You can spot boxes for video games based on Jaws, a nod to Steven Spielberg, who directed that film and who served as executive producer on the Back to the Future trilogy. There is a talking plush doll of Roger Rabbit, a reference to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which Zamechus directed in 1988 between the first two Back to the Future movies. [music] And there is video artwork for Dragnet, the 1987 Universal comedy starring Dan Akroyd and Tom Hanks.
(12:56) The series also had a famous fan. In the first movie, when Marty tells Doc in 1955 that Ronald Reagan is the president, Doc stares at him in disbelief, the actor. Then who is the vice president? Jerry Lewis? Reagan reportedly loved that joke. In his 1986 State of the Union address, he quoted the closing line of the first film, saying that where we are going, we do not need roads.
(13:23) So, here is a window that is supposed to sell forgotten antiques, but is really a museum of the filmmaker's own world, a place where the sequel keeps winking at everything around it. Number seven, the shark that never stopped biting. A few steps from that antique shop, Marty walks past the Hollowax Theater.
(13:47) The marquee advertises Jaws 19 and as Marty looks up, a giant holographic shark lunges out of the sign and nearly takes his head off. Marty stumbles back and mutters that the shark still looks fake. There are several layers of joke in that moment. First, there is the obvious one. In the future, Hollywood has made 19 Jaws movies. It is a jab at endless sequels and it has aged remarkably well. Second, look at the credit on the sign.
(14:10) Jaws 19 is said to be directed by Max Spielberg. Max is a real person. He is the son of Steven Spielberg who executive produced the film. So the joke is that in the future Spielberg's own child will inherit the franchise and keep directing it forever. And then there is the line itself, the shark still looks fake.
(14:32) That is a wink at the original Jaws, where Spielberg famously fought a mechanical shark that kept breaking down in the water so badly [music] that he was forced to show it as little as possible. The failure became the secret of the film's suspense. In just a few seconds of screen time, Back to the Future Part Two manages to poke fun at Hollywood sequels, pay tribute to Steven Spielberg, and laugh at one of the most legendary production disasters in film history. Number eight, the future that they got right and wrong.
(15:00) When the filmmakers imagined the year 2015, they did not set out to predict anything. They took the trends of their own time, the technology, and the culture of the late 1980s and pushed them to ridiculous extremes. The result is a future with some stunning accidents of accuracy.
(15:23) Marty takes a video call from his boss, a face on a screen on the wall, something that looks a lot like the tools we use today for work. The film was made decades before video calls became normal. The McFly home opens with a thumbrint long before fingerprint locks arrived on everyday devices. Drones hover through the sky, one walking a dog, another carrying a news photographer for USA Today. A huge flat screen television fills a wall showing many channels at once. Characters wear headsets that cover their eyes.
(15:50) Not everything fit. We still have no flying cars, no hoverboards, and the movie seems to believe that fax machines would be everywhere forever. But there is one prediction that stands out because it is so specific. In the film, a newspaper headline announces that the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series, defeating a team from Miami.
(16:11) At the time the movie was made, Miami did not even have a major league baseball team. A team in the Miami area arrived in 1993 and the Cubs had not won a championship in more than 80 years. The Cubs did win the World Series. They did it in 2016, ending a drought of 108 years. The movie was off by one year, and the opponent turned out to be Cleveland, not Miami.
(16:35) The filmmakers have said they were not trying to see the future, and that may be the best part. Sometimes the future is closest when nobody is trying to predict it. Number nine, the shoes that tied themselves. When Marty steps into his 2015 outfit, he puts on a pair of futuristic sneakers. The laces tighten around his feet by themselves with a mechanical were.
(16:59) It looks like technology. It was not. The shoes were designed by Tinker Hatfield, the legendary Nike designer who also shaped the Air Jordan line in 1989. They were a prop. They did not lace themselves. The worring, tightening magic was a trick for the camera. Fans did not let the idea go. For years, they kept asking when they could buy a pair.
(17:23) Nike eventually built a version, the Nike Mag. And in 2016, it released a limited edition that could actually adjust itself around the foot. But that addition was extremely rare. Only 89 pairs were made. They were offered through an online raffle with $10 tickets, and the proceeds went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. It is strange when you stop to look at it.
(17:46) A sequence invented for a movie became so beloved that a major company eventually built it for real. Number 10. Why did the future not change right away? Here is the question that has haunted fans since the film was released. When old Biff steals the Delorean, travels to 1955, and hands his younger self the sports almanac, he creates a new timeline. But when he returns to 2015, everything still looks completely normal. The streets are fine.
(18:12) The sky is fine. Marty and Doc leave the future and go home. And only when they arrive back in 1985 do they find that the world has been twisted into a nightmare. Why did the future not change at the moment the past did? Fans have come up with a popular theory. Maybe changes in time do not happen instantly.
(18:30) Maybe they spread outward slowly like a ripple on a pond and take time to travel from the moment of the change into the future. The first film seems to support the idea. When Marty accidentally disrupts his parents' first meeting, the photograph in his pocket does not erase everyone at once. His brother fades first, then his sister.
(18:53) The change moves through the picture one person at a time, like a wave catching up. If the same rule applies here, then there was a window of time in which 2015 looked normal simply because the ripple had not reached it yet. That would also explain why Doc and Marty could leave a seemingly peaceful future [music] and return to a ruined 1985. The wave of change had already washed over the past, and it was only a matter of time before it arrived.
(19:20) The filmmakers have never turned this into a strict rule, and the movie does not spell it out. But the theory shows how deeply fans are willing to dig. Even a possible plot hole becomes a puzzle with an answer. Is the ripple the right explanation or is there a better one? You can decide for yourself, but the fact that the question is still being argued decades later is a sign of how much this story gets under your skin.
(19:44) Number 11, the villain with a very familiar skyline. In the nightmare version of 1985, Biff Tannon is not a bully with a car and a bad attitude. He is a billionaire. He owns a casino. He has a tower with his name in lights. and he controls Hill Valley with money and fear. People noticed the resemblance to a real person. In the 1980s, Donald Trump was one of the loudest symbols of excess in America. Trump Tower had opened in Manhattan in 1983.
(20:14) Trump Plaza opened in Atlantic City in 1984. Trump's Castle followed in 1985, and the Taj Mahal opened in 1990. For years, fans guessed that the writers had that world in mind. In 2015, Bob Gail confirmed that Trump had been part of the thinking behind the casino era Biff. That interview spread quickly and many people began calling the movie prophetic. But the story did not stay simple.
(20:43) In a later interview, Gail pulled back somewhat. He said that the original Biff of the first film was not based on Trump at all. Biff, he explained, was an archetype, the kind of bully almost everyone has met in their life. What came later in the alternate 1985 was different. The casino, the branding, and the swagger drew on the world of excess that Trump represented.
(21:05) So, the truth sits somewhere in between. Biff was not born from a real person. But the billionaire version of Biff, the man who put his name on everything and turned a town into his private empire, wore the shape of a very familiar era. Number 12. A hidden preview of what came next. Back to the Future Part Two was never meant to be a single movie.
(21:27) It was the middle of a pair. The second and third films were shot backtoback. The same cast and crew moved from one production straight into the next. That was an unusual plan at the time, and it meant that the sequel carries traces of the film that followed. You can see it in the ending of part two.
(21:48) After the story reaches its cliffhanger with Marty stranded in 1955 and Doc swept away to the Old West, a trailer for part three appears on screen before the credits. According to Bob Gail, the idea came from the end of The Three Musketeers, which closed with a trailer for The Four Musketeers. The message to the audience was simple. This is a cliffhanger, but a third film is coming and it is almost finished. Part two opened in November of 1989.
(22:14) Part three followed in May of 1990, only about 6 months later. For the filmmakers, it meant working with the second half of the story already in mind. And the Wild West itself was not an accident. When Zmechus read the early draft of the sequel, one of his notes was to add an act set in the Old West. The story grew too large to hold it, and the western became the heart of a separate movie. That is why the trilogy feels like one story.
(22:42) The ending of one film is the beginning of the next. And the sequel was built with its successor already looking over its shoulder. Number 13. The version of the story you never saw. Now we reach the version of the movie that almost existed. The finished film has a clever structure. Old Biff steals the almanac in 2015, travels to 1955, and hands it to his younger self.
(23:06) Marty and Doc follow trying to undo the damage and in the process the audience gets to watch the first movie again from the other side. It is one of the most celebrated ideas in sequel history. But that is not what Bob Gale and Robert Zmechus first wrote. In the early draft, old Biff did not travel to 1955.
(23:29) He went to 1967 to a year when a younger Biff, 30 years old, had just come into a sum of money he planned to bet heavily. With the almanac in his hands, he would turn that small inheritance into a fortune. When Marty and Doc returned to 1985, they found the same kind of nightmare as in the final film, a hill valley run by Biff. And the only way to fix it was to travel to the late 1960s. That is where the draft became strange.
(23:52) Marty tried to blend in by dressing as a hippie in a conservative town. That was a disaster. He was arrested in the draft for wandering the streets without a draft card and thrown in jail. And the person who got him out was Lorraine, his future mother. She paid his bail with $500, money she had been saving to visit George that weekend. That was the trap.
(24:15) Marty realized that the weekend was the weekend he was supposed to be conceived. If Lorraine spent that money on him and missed the trip, he would never be born. So, the story put the hero back into the same nightmare as the first film. Not saving the world this time, but saving his own existence by making sure his mother got to the right place on time.
(24:35) And then came the ending that makes the draft so unusual. The Delorean's power source was destroyed. Mr. Fusion, the device that fed the time machine, was gone. To get back to 1985, they would need a huge burst of electricity, 1.21 GW. And in 1967, there was no easy way to make it. So Doc came up with a plan that was as dangerous as anything in the series.
(25:00) They would tap into the power grid itself, the lines stretching across a canyon. Marty would have to fly the car into the canyon and hook onto the grid, and the burst of power would only last for a few seconds. If Marty missed that window, the car would short out and he would die. It was a highwire act on the biggest scale imaginable.
(25:24) a teenager, a time machine, and a burst of power that would not last long enough to forgive a mistake. So why was the draft abandoned? The draft had a problem the filmmakers could feel. The '60s version asked Marty to do something very close to what he had already done in the first film, protect his own birth. So the sequel risked repeating its predecessor's central conflict.
(25:44) It would also have meant building another world from scratch. New streets, new costumes, new cars, a new age. When Robert Zmechus returned from filming Who Framed Roger Rabbit and read the draft, he had two notes. First, add an act set in the Wild West. And second, he asked a simple question. Why not go back to 1955? It was the question that saved the movie. They already had a time machine, and they already had a beloved setting.
(26:11) Returning to the first film's own story meant that audiences could see the past they already loved from a new angle with the hero hiding in the margins of his own history. That one note changed everything. 1955 became the heart of the sequel. The western act turned into a movie of its own and a nearly completed script with a hippie hero and a canyon crossed by power lines was left on a shelf. Back to the Future Part Two is a movie about how a small change can ripple outward and rewrite the world.
(26:41) Its own history is no different. A single question from a director, why not go back? Shaped everything we know. Which makes you wonder what else the film once was and what else it might have become.
