The classy easter egg hidden in the credits for ‘Back to the Future’
Given its status as one of the most beloved, enduringly popular, and eminently rewatchable blockbusters ever made, it boggles the mind that virtually every major studio in Hollywood was unwilling to take a chance on Back to the Future.
Director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Robert Gale struck cinematic gold with their timeless tale of time travel, with the pitch-perfect casting of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd creating an iconic double-act that anchored a massively popular trilogy.
If it wasn’t for Steven Spielberg, though, then it may never have happened at all. The Bobs had been rejected by all of the industry’s heaviest hitters, but a combination of Zemeckis striking gold with Romancing the Stone and the pair’s pre-existing relationship with the filmmaker after collaborating on his wartime comedy 1941 saw him fight their corner and get the project set up at Universal.
Of course, Back to the Future was hardly the first time travel movie or television show that ever existed, even if it’s definitely one of the best. To that end, a sneaky credit that would have gone completely unnoticed until the end of the film serves as a nod to another intrepid pairing who meddled with the very fabric of temporal existence.
Mr. Peabody and Sherman were two animated favourites first introduced in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. First appearing in 1959, the duo – a super-intelligent beagle and his adopted human son, respectively – would use their WABAC machine to move through the course of human history and dive into its most important events in the Peabody’s Improbable History segments of the series.
When Marty initially crashes in the distant past of 1955, his location is the Peabody Farmhouse, where a young boy immediately mistakes him for an alien. While the character isn’t explicitly named during the portion of the story set at his family abode, the credits reveal that Jason Marin’s kid was christened Sherman Peabody.
It wasn’t supposed to be a blatant acknowledgement of Zemeckis and Gale’s inspirations, but it was a neat little nod nonetheless. Mr. Peabody and Sherman were just one of many influences on Back to the Future, considering their antics were at the height of their popularity when Zemeckis and Gale were only children themselves, but they couldn’t quite emulate Marty and Doc in cinemas.
That being said, when 2014’s Mr Peabody & Sherman landed on the big screen, it earned a respectable $275million at the box office and was warmly received by audiences. Of course, it couldn’t hold a candle to Back to the Future from either a critical or commercial perspective, but it’s not as if there are many movies that have, over the course of time travel’s tenure as a regular plot device.
