How Doc Brown’s Cameo In A Million Ways To Die In The West Came To Be
Great Scott!
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Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West was…lets just call it underwhelming. There were moments sprinkled throughout, but overall, it left much to be desired, even for fans of his trademark crass humor. That said, there was one particularly inspired scene involving an unexpected time travelling cameo from Back to the Future Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown, and as the movie just hit Blu-ray and DVD yesterday, there is this new behind the scenes video that details exactly how this came to be.
This video comes from our dear, dear friends at Cinema Blend, and shows MacFarlane and the producers detailing just how this came to be. Set on the American frontier in the 1880s, A Million Ways to Die may be outlandish and foul-mouthed in a way you don’t usually associate with period westerns, but the world is consistent for the most part, with this one exception. But, as is pointed out in this video, you can squeak it in with the time travel element, after all, this is precisely when the bulk of the action in Back to the Future Part 3 goes down.
For a small moment, the whole scene can’t take up more than minute in the final film, it sounds like a great deal of effort went into this. First, they had to decide to do it, to break the reality of the film in this manner (though given the nature of the movie, you can’t imagine this was too fierce a debate). Then they had to get the blessing of Back to the Future producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis, which they did, as well as get Lloyd on board, which doesn’t sound like it took much convincing. And lucky for them, MacFarlane apparently owns the DeLorean from that film, which gives you an indication of just how stoked he was, personally, to include this gag.
Also, how awesome would it be to own the actual DeLorean from Back to the Future? If most of us were super rich and successful and had more money than we knew what to do with, this is exactly the kind of ridiculous thing we would probably purchase for ourselves, keeping it tucked away in a climate controlled garage, giggling every time we looked at it.
As you probably guessed, this is just one of many memorable cameos. Among others, Ryan Reynolds pops up, as he has in other MacFarlane pictures, and Jamie Foxx revisits his role from Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained for a memorable bit of violence.
If you’re wondering about what A Million Ways to Die in the West is all about in a larger, non-Back to the Future sense, this red band trailer gives you a pretty good idea. If this is something you think you’ll be into, you probably will, if not, you probably won’t.
