Let's All Go Back to "Back to the Future" Quiz

Answer: Harold Lloyd

The scene being referenced is from "Safety Last", the 1923 silent movie starring the bespectacled hero, regularly played on film by Harold Lloyd. Lloyd's character climbs up the outside of the department store where he works, as a stunt to attract customers. As he reaches the part of the building where the clock resides, a window is opened unbalancing Lloyd and forcing him to grab the hands of the clock to prevent himself falling. It is one of the most iconic images of the silent era.

Christopher Lloyd, no relation to Harold, plays Doc Emmet Brown in "Back to the Future". The clock foreshadows the events later in the movie, where the Doc finds himself hanging from a clock as he tries to ensure that the power of the lightning that will soon strike the clock tower can be harnessed to send Marty back to his own time.

Answer: The theft of plutonium

Soon after the news item is aired, Marty places his skateboard on the floor and kicks it away. The camera follows it as it rolls across the room and it comes to rest against a bright yellow case stamped with the words "Plutonium: Handle with Care". The news item mentions that a Libyan terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the theft but the nuclear facility from where it went missing denied that it was stolen and that the suggestion of missing plutonium was merely caused by a clerical error.

The plutonium is the fuel required to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of energy needed to power the Doc's DeLorean car through time, with Doc's dog, Einstein, being the guinea pig who first travels through time. The lightning strike is a crucial part of the plot that is introduced later.

Answer: Stanley Kubrick

CRM114 was a device first created for the 1958 novel "Red Alert" by Peter George. Its name comes from the real life US military acronym for air-transport cargo (C) radio (R) maintenance assembly (M). The device's purpose in the novel was to jam enemy radio signals, by requiring that all messages received by an aircraft were preceded by a specific three-letter code that was pre-programmed into the device.

"Red Alert" was the inspiration for the script for Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove". Kubrick worked with George and Terry Southern on the script and used the CRM114 device as a key plot point; its failure meant that the recall message sent to a bomber, loaded with nuclear weapons flying over Russia, was not received. Kubrick then re-used CRM114 or equivalents of it as a running joke in future movies including as the serial number of the Jupiter explorer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) and as a chemical, serum 114, injected into Alex in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971).

CRM114 was included as a nod to Kubrick in a range of movies and TV shows such as "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", "Welcome to Marwen" (2018) and "Men in Black 3" (2012).

Answer: "Yeah? Well, history is going to change."

Well, history did change of course. At the time that Marty meets Strickland in the school corridor, he has no idea that Doc Brown has invented a time machine so there is some dramatic irony in his words as Marty soon disrupts the events that led to his very existence. We soon see Marty's band audition but they are quickly dismissed.

Marty did manage to perform at the school dance in 1955 in a desperate attempt to get his mother and father to hook up and save his future life. In the audience then was a much younger but not much different looking Principal Strickland - as Marty asked "did that guy ever have hair?"

Answer: Huey Lewis

"The Power of Love" is the theme song for "Back to the Future" even though its lyrics do not refer to any part of the movie. This is because when Robert Zemeckis approached Huey Lewis to write the theme song, Lewis rejected him, as he didn't want to write a song about the future. Zemeckis told him he could write any song he liked. So Lewis gave him the next song he wrote, which happened to be "The Power of Love".

The song was nominated for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards in 1986 but lost out to Lionel Richie's "Say You Say Me" from "White Nights".

Answer: Grandpa hitting George with his car.

George McFly had climbed a tree to spy on Lorraine changing in her bedroom. In trying to get the best vantage point, he fell from the tree into the path of Grandpa Baines car. In the original timeline, George was hit by the car and Lorraine fell in love with him when nursing his injuries. Marty unfortunately interfered with the "meet-cute" by pushing George out of the way of the car and was hit himself.

As a consequence, Lorraine fell for Marty instead. The result of this interruption was that Marty was thrown into a race against time to get his parents back together so that he and his siblings would indeed be born.

Answer: Mr Peabody and Sherman

Mr Peabody is the farmer who owns the land that the Twin Pines Mall was built upon. He is first mentioned by Doc Brown after Einstein becomes the first creature to travel in time. He mentions that Peabody had "this crazy idea about breeding pine trees". After Marty travels back in time and knocks down one of the pines with the DeLorean, his return to the future shows that the mall is then known as the Lone Pine Mall.

As Marty crashes into a barn on his arrival in 1955, the Peabody family come to see what has happened. Farmer Peabody is convinced, by his son Sherman, that what they are seeing in the barn is an alien who has come to Earth and mutated into human form.

The other Mr. Peabody and Sherman first appeared in segments on "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends", the TV show that first aired in 1959. The segments were called "Peabody's Improbable History" and involved Mr. Peabody (a dog) and Sherman (his adopted boy) who travel through time in a machine that Mr. Peabody has invented. A feature film called "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" followed in 2014.

Answer: Jerry Lewis

Lewis had no particular connection to the future 40th US President Ronald Reagan. He was perhaps chosen because his style of comedy was particularly madcap and juxtaposed awkwardly with the seriousness of being vice-president. Doc Brown went on to suggest that another comedian Jack Benny was Treasury Secretary and that Jane Wyman was First Lady (even though Reagan and Wyman had divorced several years before the 1955 setting of "Back to the Future").

Jerry Lewis was part of a double act with Dean Martin from 1945. The pair made more than a dozen movies together before Lewis became a headline act in his own movies, such as "The Ladies Man" (1961) and "The Nutty Professor" (1963). In 1982 Lewis was cast to play comedian Jerry Langford in the Martin Scorsese movie that borrowed his nickname for the title, "The King of Comedy". The black comedy sees Langford stalked by a wannabe stand-up, played by Robert de Niro. It was a critical success and earned Lewis a BAFTA nomination for best supporting actor.

Answer: They cut off your brother's hair.

The photograph of Marty with his siblings, Dave and Linda, was used throughout the movie to identify how much the future was being affected by the changes to history that were being made in 1955. By the time that Doc saw the photograph, Marty had prevented his father from being hit by a car - the event that had originally brought his parents together.

As soon as Marty admitted that he "ran into" his parents earlier that day, Doc asks to see the photograph again and realises that the images on the photograph were fading because the potential existence of the future McFly family was being erased.

Answer: Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan

"The Honeymooners" ran for 39 episodes between 1955 and 1956 and starred Jackie Gleason as a New York city bus driver, Audrey Meadows as his long-suffering wife and Art Carney as his best friend. In 1955 Marty calls the episode, "The Man from Space" a classic, even though, at that time, it was being shown for the first time. In fact in the real world, the episode was not shown until December 31st, 1955, several weeks after the movie was set.

In the sitcom episode, Jackie Gleason's character dresses up as a space man for a costume party, using whatever bits and pieces he can find is his apartment. Marty does something similar, wearing a hazmat suit and carrying a hair dryer and Walkman, to convince his science fiction-obsessed father that he was Darth Vader, visiting from outer space. This is in order to scare him into asking Lorraine to the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance.