The car used in the film broke down frequently, but producers refused to change it, even after a last-minute sponsorship offer Ford Motors to change it to a Mustang. The choice of using a DeLorean was a bit of a joke amongst the producers, as the high-flying car designer had recently been arrested on drug charges and the company would soon declare bankruptcy. But the idea of Doc moving around the bulky machine became an issue until Zemeckis came up with the idea of putting the time machine inside of a car. In the original script, Doc used a refrigerator on the back of a pick-up truck as his time machine. One of the most famous cars in Hollywood history was the result of production problems.
The DeLorean wasn’t in the original script either Universal insisted on changing both, telling the producers that no film with a chimp had ever made any money. He was called Professor Brown in the first scripts, and instead of Einstein the dog, he had a chimpanzee companion named Shemp. Doc caught him in the act but was tickled when Marty professed his interest in Doc’s work and gave him a part-time job helping with his experiments.īut the Doc Brown that came to screen was different on the page. In 2011, Gale told Mental Floss that they first met after a younger teenaged Marty, intrigued by stories he’d heard about the mysterious and possibly dangerous inventor, broke into Doc’s lab. The films never explained how Marty and Doc Brown metīut the filmmakers definitely had a backstory for how the famed duo came together.