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The DeLorean from Back to the Future
Marty McFly kicks off the classic 80s trilogy by time-travelling in some style
When the top brass on 1985’s runaway hit, Back to the Future, got together to brainstorm options for the film’s time machine, they went through several revisions. You can just imagine the film’s director and co-writer, Robert Zemeckis and executive producer, Steven Spielberg thrashing it out, industriously beavering out a solution that was stylish, functional and imaginative. Strange then that one option was a fridge. I repeat – a fridge. Riding in a time-travelling home appliance, Marty McFly would go from being cool to positively frozen.
As we well know, the white good idea was soon abandoned amid concerns that children would accidentally lock themselves inside them (that was the only problem?) And after some sort of laser device box was also ruled out (apparently similar to the one used by Denzel Washington in Déjà vu), a car was decided upon, with Zemeckis reasoning that a mobile time machine would work best onscreen.
So, how did the short-lived sports car from Northern Ireland land the Back to the Future gig? According to the DeLorean time machine’s eccentric inventor, Dr. Emmett Brown: “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”, before adding that the machine’s “flux dispersal” benefits from the stainless steel construction. This all sounds pretty plausible within a film that deals with such implausible subjects as time travel and match-making your own parents. But the movie’s co-writer and producer, Bob Gale, has since revealed that it was the vehicle’s gull wing doors and general futuristic appearance that earned the DeLorean its role, as it would tie in with the movie’s gag that sees it mistaken for alien spacecraft in 1955.
Only one model of the DeLorean was ever manufactured, the DMC-12 as designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro with a six cylinder PRV (Peugeot/ Renault/ Volvo) engine. Three different DeLoreans were used during the film’s production, each serving a different purpose with one used for exteriors, another for interiors and a third for shots of getting in and out of the car. Interestingly, eagle-eyed fans of the film will notice that the tyres used read Good Year, rather than the correct one-word spelling, Goodyear. Perhaps the tyre company refused the production team permission to use their products.
Critically, our beloved white-haired scientist heavily customises his two door coupe into a time-travelling machine, a task that fell to the movie’s art department. Bob Gale was keen for the car to have a messy, dangerous look that wasn’t too polished or smart, very much reflecting the scrappy way in which Doc would have assembled it. Unfortunately, production illustrator, Andrew Probert’s original designs were “too perfect” for Gale and so the task was handed down to Ron Cobb. Having previously worked on Star Wars, Alien and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Cobb added coils and vents to the vehicle’s rear, giving the illusion of airing the nuclear reactor. This first important step in the right direction helped Probert and soon he was liberally applying aircraft parts, blinking lights and creating a license plate classic – OUTATIME.
The car’s interior is similarly customised with the LED time display (allowing Doc and Marty to program what time period they wish to visit) and most famously with the fabled “flux capacitor”. Nestled safely inside a square box between the seat headrests, this glowing Y-shaped piece of electrical wizardry is “what makes time travel possible” according to Doc and relies upon the vehicle hitting a speed of 88mph. Marty is baffled by some of Doc’s scientific revelations regarding the machine, especially when he whips out some plutonium, asking: “Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?”, but Doc allays his concerns: “No, no, no, no, no. This sucker’s electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts” (mistakenly pronounced as ‘jigawatt’ by the actor) “of electricity I need.”
This nuclear reactor is originally powered by plutonium, but as Marty finds himself without the toxic chemical when stranded in 1955, he and Doc use lightning channeled directly into the flux capacitor instead. Such quick fixes are no longer needed by the film’s close when Doc returns from the future with a modified version of the DeLorean, capable of flight (“where we’re going we don’t need roads”) and fuelled by Mr. Fusion.
The Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor, from the year 2015, converts household waste into electrical power through cold fusion and so has no need for plutonium anymore. Fashioned out of a Krups coffee grinder, it is a cheeky spoof of Mr Coffee – a type of coffee machine all the rage in the US in the mid 80s. And as one technology is deemed obsolete, so something else is shown the door with the license plate number changed to a futuristic barcode.
And with that a cinema icon was born.
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