Back to the Future 4K: Watch how a sci-fi refrigerator evolved into the iconic DeLorean

Deservedly so, Back to the Future perhaps has more dates worth celebrating than any other franchise. To name a few… there’s July 3, on which, in 1985, the film first opened in theaters. There’s Nov. 5,  when, in 1955, Doc Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) toilet seat inspired him to invent time travel.

And, more pertinent to today, there’s Oct. 21, the day, in fictional 2015 at least, that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc travel to the future to go see what’s up with Marty’s rotten kids. Ostensibly, it's the same reason that five years ago, in the actual 2015, a bunch of PR folks got together to declare it the official Back to the Future Day. 

So without further adieu… happy Back to the Future Day!

To celebrate such an important date, as well as the 35th anniversary of the gold standard of time-travel trilogies, Universal is releasing Back to the Future: The Ultimate Trilogy on 4K Ultra HD (for the first time ever). And SYFY WIRE has an exclusive look at one of the bonus features below, which reveals a woulda-shoulda-coulda alternate title. It also shows off the original design of the time machine, which let’s just say wasn’t exactly a DeLorean right out of the barn.

Check out the exclusive clip below:

“In the first two drafts of the script, the time machine was actually a time chamber built out of an old refrigerator which Doc Brown had to drag around on the back of a pickup truck,” co-writer/producer Bob Gale says in the clip.

But when they got into pre-production, Gale says it was director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis who figured out they had an opportunity to create something truly iconic, that kids, who would eventually become DeLorean-craving adults, would actually want to consume en masse.

“When we finally got the movie to pre-production, director Bob Zemeckis was starting to think about how he was going to film some of these scenes, and he came up with the brilliant idea it would make a lot more sense for Doc Brown to have built the time machine into a car,” Gale says. 

Granted, Gale doesn’t mention the appetite for time-travel the DeLorean incited, and instead focuses on what that meant practically for the production company: that it could be more easily moved from location to location. 

But he doesn’t really have to mention the results of said change, does he?

Not today, the official Back to the Future Day, which also happens to be the day you can finally go out and nab yourself a copy of Back to the Future: The Ultimate Trilogy on 4K Ultra HD4K.