25 years ago today, the original Back the the Future film was released.  It was the top grossing film of 1985.  Here’s some things you may not know about the film:

Although Michael J. Fox was always the first pick to play Marty McFly, Fox was too busy filming “Family Ties” to sign on to the project.  They replaced Fox with Eric Stoltz.   After 4 weeks of filming (and $3 million dollars), the producers and Stotz agreed he wasn’t right for the part and he left the project.  Fox was then cast and they worked around his tight schedule to make the film.

Michael J. Fox is only ten days younger than Lea Thompson who plays his mother, and is almost three years older than his on-screen dad, Crispin Glover.

When Marty pretends to be Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, he plays a tape labeled “Van Halen” to scare George out of his sleep. It is an untitled Edward Van Halen original written for a movie called “The Wild Life”.

In the sequel the entire ending scene from the original movie was painstakingly re-created, shot-for-shot:

Remember, remember,
The 5th of November,
Nineteen hundred and fifty five.
Dr. Emmet Lathrop Brown,
Fell down on his crown,
And his dream of time travel came alive.

Take a capacitor with flux,
The doctor did mux,
Add one twenty-one gigawatts of power.
Soon the good doctor  heeded,
A velocity was needed needed,
Of precisely eighty-eight miles per hour.

And so thirty years past,
Good fortune at last,
In a parking lot of the mall, pines twin,
The doctor succeded,
His Deloran indeed did,
Travel forward through time and back again.