Back To The Future: Watch This Awkward, Offensive Deleted Scene

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

It’s entirely possible that you’ve already seen this deleted scene from Back to the Future. This embed has been around for a few years, and apparently this clip has been around even longer (I guess a pretty obvious statement, isn’t it?), but we’ve somehow managed to never see it, so it’s new to us and maybe it will be to some of you as well. And to top it all off, it’s super awkward and uncomfortable, which makes it even better. Take a look for yourself below.

Watching this, it’s easy to understand why it was left out of the finished movie. It does after all feature a teenage boy (Michael J. Fox) talking to his weird old friend (Christopher Lloyd) about “taking a few liberties” with his own mother. That’s just embarrassing all around. It’s even worse when your mom has a crush on you. But you can imagine the ratings people or the studio balking at this idea.

In addition to the sheer uneasiness of the discussion about Marty feeling up his mom (not to mention the wink he gets from Doc Brown, that killed me), it’s funny to see the 1955 version of the mad scientist misunderstand all of the modern terms that his young friend throws around. He interprets “hitting on” to mean that actually physically assaulting her. Or when Marty worries about something like this impacting him in the future, potentially turning him gay, Doc’s punch line is, “Why shouldn’t you be happy?” That line would likely raise some eyebrows today (though like half of Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a gay joke, so maybe not). Maybe Doc Brown could hang out with Drax the Destroyer and misunderstand things.

While it is a funny scene, there are others that are just as good, if not better, and if you place this in context with the larger movie, it doesn’t really add anything new or unique. So again, it makes sense to leave it on the cutting room floor.

Like I said, this has been bouncing around the internet for a few years, so I’m sure many of you have stumbled across it already (I don’t know where it originates). But if you haven’t, or if you just want to add a little touch of Back to the Future to your weekend, we hope you enjoyed our presentation. Now go outside.