Great Scott! ‘Back to the Future’s’ Doc Brown Inspired a Generation of Scientists
Christopher Lloyd has played a lot of iconic comedy characters over the decades but one stands out in terms of longevity: Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. “I’ve done my share of work,” Lloyd told Variety, “and nothing compares to the way Back to the Future is ingrained in people’s minds.”
As a young actor, Lloyd probably didn’t imagine spending his golden years hitting up fan conventions to sign flux capacitors but here we are. “It’s phenomenal. Every day practically — and certainly I go to Comic-Cons — people come up and say, ‘You made my childhood,’” Lloyd explained.
But even more impactful is Doc Brown’s influence on a generation of future time travelers. “Back to the Future fills the gap in a lot of lives of young people, who have gone on to become doctors, scientists and what have you,” said Lloyd. “So a lot of gratitude and I feel real good about that. I feel very fortunate to be part of that.”
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Lloyd probably never gets his iconic ‘80s role without establishing his weirdo bona fides on the classic sitcom Taxi. He won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of burned-out, turned-on cabbie Rev. Jim Ignatowski, one of the funniest characters in television history. Don’t just take my word for it either — TV Guide has him at #32.
“There was a kind of a stupid bias in New York in the early ’60s or mid-’60s that it was kind of selling your soul to go to Hollywood and do a sitcom,” Lloyd told Variety. “Surely, if you are a serious actor, a real actor, you don’t go looking for sitcoms.”
His agent convinced him to put aside that snobbery and read for Taxi anyway. “I dug the role just reading it,” he said. Then he visited the show’s set to check out the vibe. “I thought, these guys are great. In New York, you’re always hearing about the ideal theater, (which) is to create an ensemble. And I thought, ‘It’s before my eyes right here. It’s ideal. And I’ve never changed my feelings about that. I just thought it was an incredible company. I was delighted to be a part of it. I thought, ‘This isn’t going sideways. This is a good thing. So I got over my reservations about sitcoms quickly.”
In Taxi’s backstory, Ignatowski was an excellent student who attended Harvard, only to be waylaid by “funny brownies” on his way to becoming “the living embodiment of the ‘60s.” Throughout the series, Rev. Jim is acknowledged as a genius, albeit at strange intervals.
Think of Rev. Jim as an alternate reality version of Doc Brown, a brilliant guy whose brain was fried thanks to experiments of a recreational kind. There’s definitely a multiverse in which Doc Brown ditches the DeLorean and time travels in a flying New York taxi cab.
