The latest episode of Saturday Night Live featured a skit in which a Universal Studios tour guide repeated a dark fan theory regarding the first Back to the Future movie. The theory was one in which he claimed to have read online and that was decidedly inappropriate for a family audience. This has inspired many to ask if the theory is real and, if so, where it had been proposed before.
While generally regarded as a classic work of sci-fi action and one of the best movies of the 1980s, many have argued that certain aspects of Michael J. Fox hit Back to the Future have not aged well. Chief among these issues is the film's treatment of racial issues and the fact that it implies a white teenager from the 1980s is responsible for inspiring the creation of rock and roll music. It has also been speculated that the movie would never be made today (much less promoted as a family film) given the incestuous overtones of time traveler Marty McFly being seduced in the past by his mother as a teenager and his plan to bring his parents back together (after accidentally separating them) by staging a sexual assault.
Saturday Night Live referenced how society's views have changed in the 35 years since Back to the Future premiered and the Internet culture that loves to build complex fan theories around classic movies, with a skit centered around a Universal Studios tour guide trainee named Thoby. Played by host Dan Levy, the lively Thoby (who was in a hyperactive state after drinking too much coffee) was unable to stop volunteering information that was only tangentially related to the attractions he was meant to be showcasing and, in same cases, far too personal. The first of these tangents came as Thoby was meant to be pointing out several of the cars used in the Back to the Future films. This inspired Thoby to describe a fan theory he'd read online somewhere which suggested that Doc Brown was a child molester who had been grooming Marty McFly and that he had invented his time machine to go back in time and stop himself from doing it after he felt guilty later.
A similar theory was mentioned in a 2015 blog post about Back to the Future by author Lenore Skenazy, who is most famous for her 2009 parenting guide Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. In the post, Skenazy discussed Back to the Future and a letter she had received from a fan whose friend (reportedly a trained rape crisis counselor) found the relationship between Doc Brown and Marty McFly suspect, suggesting it was inappropriate for an adult male to befriend a high school student. Skenazy rejected this notion, however, saying she was far more troubled that this counselor apparently believed that adult men only show an interest in young people as sexual objects.
It is worth noting that screenwriter Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis decided that Marty McFly sought out Doc Brown in their backstory for the unlikely friends, saying that Marty had become fascinated by the stories of the neighborhood kook. Doc, for his part, was overjoyed to have anyone show an interest in his experiments. The fact that Doc was paying Marty to act as his lab assistant and odd-job man also suggested a professional element to their relationship that was originally the basis for the friendship that grew between them as they traveled through time together.
It should also be noted that Rick and Morty originally started out as a pornographic parody of Back to the Future, in which Morty had to perform sexual acts in order to avert various paradoxes. This seems more likely to be the inspiration for the Saturday Night Live skit than the blog post by Lenore Skenazy. It is possible, however, that the SNL writing team came up with this dark theory on their own and used the skit to propose it themselves.
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February 08, 2021 at 04:58AM
