Carl Sagan Said ‘Back to the Future’ Was Best Time-Travel Movie

What’s the best time-travel movie of all time? According to astrophysicist Carl Sagan, it’s not the thoughtful sci-fi approaches of Time After Time, Looper or Edge of Tomorrow. The best compliment Robert Zemeckis ever got was when the famed cosmologist bestowed that honor on his comedy, Back to the Future.

Sagan told Zemeckis that the Michael J. Fox movie featured the best time-travel scientific theory he’d seen in a movie. “I didn’t tell him I took it from H.G. Wells,” the director confessed to Bill Maher on a recent Club Random podcast. 

“It’s funny to watch a movie about time travel when you are now 40 years past when the movie was made,” Maher observed about jokes that were funny in 1985 about traveling to 1955. “You know, ‘If you know everything about the future, who is president in 1985?’ Ronald Reagan. ‘Yeah, right. And I’ll bet Jerry Lewis is vice president.’ Now looking from 2024, it’s funny in a different way. It’s like a double time travel.”

Michael J. Fox had to do some time travel of his own, considering that he was filming the hit sitcom Family Ties at the same time he was making Back to the Future.  The TV comedy’s producers tried to help out by writing reduced parts so Fox didn’t have to sit through so many readthroughs. Sleep was an issue since Fox didn’t own one of Hermione Granger’s Time-Turners allowing him to pack 36 hours into a 24-hour day.

But despite his fatigue, Fox was ad-libbing lines on the Back to the Future set that blew Zemeckis away.  The director reminded Maher of the scene where Marty regains consciousness in his mother’s 1950s bedroom and realizes he’s not wearing pants. The scripted line had Marty asking where his pants went, with Lorraine (Lea Thompson) responding, “Over there.” 

Fox took Zemeckis aside and said, “You know what she should say? ‘They're on my hope chest.’”

“And I said, that’s great! That’s going in the movie right now.”

Zemeckis says Fox steered many of the movie’s laughs. “He taught me so many things about comedy timing,” Zemeckis said. “He would come up to me and say, ‘You know what? I should take three steps and say this line.’”

“And I go, okay! Oh, that’s great, that’s better, let’s change the marks. you know? It was great having someone who just understood the mechanics of comedy.”  

Between Fox’s comedic chops and time-travel physics that made Sagan applaud, Back to the Future completely confounded video store clerks. “They never knew what shelf to put Back to the Future on,” Zemeckis chuckled. “They didn’t know if it was the science-fiction shelf? Should it be a comedy shelf? Is it an adventure shelf? They didn't know where to put Back to the Future.”