Did you see Marty McFly and Doc Brown materialize today in a DeLorean car? Remember, today is October 21, 2015, the same day the two time travelled here in "Back to the Future II." If they did arrive today, I am sure they would be disappointed to see no hover boards. However, the good news for them is that they could easily conjure up a video of Marty McFly on a hover board simply by viewing the movie on a smartphone, a device absent from the movie.
Okay, your humble correspondent is a big fan of the "Back to the Future" series but I feel compelled to cast more than a bit of aspersion upon the veracity of "Back to the Future" writer Bob Gale who is claiming that the character of Biff Tannen was based upon Donald Trump despite the fact of no mention of this before Trump's presidential run. First let us analyze the claim made in the Daily Beast and then we shall see why it is probably not true.
There’s a very specific analog between Biff Tannen, the bully and bad guy in almost every timeline in Back to the Future Part II, and a certain political figure who is rather popular in the United States right now. He’s been handed the keys to fortune, he’s unrepentantly used that fortune exclusively for himself, and he’s even become a public advocate for plastic surgery for women in his family.
It is not hard to put two and two together.
So, Bob Gale—writer of Back to the Future Part II and man who helped predict the IMAX theater and the self-checkout line—in these past few months, were you thinking what we’re all thinking?
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” he says. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
Of course, in the movie, Biff uses the profits from his 27-story casino (the Trump Plaza Hotel, completed in 1984, is 37 floors, by the way) to help shake up the Republican Party, before eventually assuming political power himself, helping transform Hill Valley, California, into a lawless, dystopian wasteland, where hooliganism reigns, dissent is quashed, and wherein Biff encourages every citizen to call him “America’s greatest living folk hero.”
“Yeah,” says Gale. “That’s what we were thinking about.”
So Biff Tannen must have been based on Donald Trump, right? Umm... Probably wrong. First of all a careful check of Google going all the way back to the original film's 1985 release reveals no comparison of Tannen and Trump by Gale until a few months ago. In addition, although the first film in the series was released in 1985 and Trump opened his first casino in 1984, the first draft of the screenplay was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale in 1980, years before the first Trump casino opened or before he was even well known outside of New York real estate circles.
Perhaps the character of Biff Tannen was developed in a later draft when Trump was a bit better known? Here is the problem with that theory:
Biff Tannen exists in this draft.
Therefore Biff Tannen was created back in 1980. Does anybody out there still want to believe that Tannen was based on Trump way back then?
This idea that Biff Tannen is based on Donald Trump is analogous to the still common belief that the character of Dr. Strangelove was based on Henry Kissinger. The problem with that idea is that when "Dr. Strangelove" was released in 1964, Henry Kissinger was still almost entirely unknown to the general public who would first hear about him after Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 and appointed him as National Security Advisor.
Of course, we could always give Richard Gale the benefit of the doubt since perhaps he could travel back in time in a DeLorean and consciously base Biff Tannen on Donald Trump complete with a "Make America Great Again" hat.
