Everyone knows the DeLorean DMC-12 time machine from the Back to the Future movies, but we’d wager that most, including hardcore fans, won’t know the story behind the car and how the creators originally planned for the time machine to be a refrigerator.
You’ll learn all that and more thanks to Jay Leno, who recently met up with the films’ creator, Bob Gale. He wrote the original movie together with director Robert Zemeckis and then helped write and produce the later two films.
He revealed funny insights like the DMC-12 being picked because DeLorean the company was in strife at the time and it was a crazy thing to do. He also said the studio wanted to go with a Ford Mustang for product placement reasons, but that a character like Doc Brown would have never owned a Mustang. We even learn why they chose 88 mph as the speed the car needs to hit to travel through time.
The car in the video isn’t actually one of the three movie cars still in existence (there were seven in total used for filming). Rather, it’s a replica built by fans Terry Matalas and Joe Walser, who have built replicas for other fans and have done restoration work on some of the movie cars.
The length Matalas and Walser go in their quest for authenticity is impressive. For example, they had to create their own speedometer whose top listed speed is 95 mph, since on the DMC-12 the top listed speed is 85 mph, a few mph short of the all-important 88 mph figure.
Their efforts are all the more impressive when you consider there are no real records on what modifications were actually done. It was all done by looking at the movie cars and drawings as well as speaking with some of the people that worked on the movies.
