Back to the Future: The Animated Series (1991–1992) – Extra Special: The Animated Series Revisited
Travel back in time with Doc Brown, Marty McFly, Clara, Jules, and Verne in this rare revisit to the cult-favorite 90s animated spin-off of the Back to the Future movie trilogy. In this extra special revisit, fans get another look into the animated adventures inspired by the legendary Universal Pictures films.
Originally airing from 1991 to 1992, Back to the Future: The Animated Series ran for 2 seasons with 26 episodes, blending comedy, science fiction, and family-friendly storytelling. Produced by Universal Cartoon Studios, the series gave fans more adventures in time with Doc and Marty, complete with clever humor, quirky inventions, and timeless fun.
This revisited special celebrates the legacy of the animated series, a nostalgic gem for kids of the 90s and fans of the classic Back to the Future movies.
👉 Watch more retro and modern cartoons here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/CartoonLTV
#BackToTheFuture #BackToTheFutureCartoon #BackToTheFutureAnimatedSeries #BTTF #MartyMcFly #DocBrown #UniversalCartoons #90sCartoons #CartoonLTV #CartoonRevisited #RetroCartoons #ClassicCartoons #CartoonCommunity #CartoonTime #CartoonEntertainment #CartoonSeries #CartoonEpisodes #CartoonUSA #CartoonCanada #CartoonNostalgia #CartoonMagic #CartoonHub #CartoonFans #CartoonForever #CartoonAddict #CartoonJoy #CartoonDaily #CartoonFamily #CartoonObsession #CartoonWatch #CartoonLife #CartoonStreaming #CartoonClassic #CartoonRetro #CartoonThrowback #CartoonMemory #CartoonLovers #CartoonAddiction #CartoonFun #CartoonLegends #CartoonFriendship #CartoonCollection #CartoonAnimation #CartoonHD #CartoonWorld #CartoonCulture #CartoonForever90s #CartoonVintage #CartoonHistory #CartoonSeriesHD #CartoonAdventure
Travel back in time with Doc Brown, Marty McFly, Clara, Jules, and Verne in this rare revisit to the cult-favorite 90s animated spin-off of the Back to the Future movie trilogy. In this extra special revisit, fans get another look into the animated adventures inspired by the legendary Universal Pictures films.
Originally airing from 1991 to 1992, Back to the Future: The Animated Series ran for 2 seasons with 26 episodes, blending comedy, science fiction, and family-friendly storytelling. Produced by Universal Cartoon Studios, the series gave fans more adventures in time with Doc and Marty, complete with clever humor, quirky inventions, and timeless fun.
This revisited special celebrates the legacy of the animated series, a nostalgic gem for kids of the 90s and fans of the classic Back to the Future movies.
👉 Watch more retro and modern cartoons here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/CartoonLTV
#BackToTheFuture #BackToTheFutureCartoon #BackToTheFutureAnimatedSeries #BTTF #MartyMcFly #DocBrown #UniversalCartoons #90sCartoons #CartoonLTV #CartoonRevisited #RetroCartoons #ClassicCartoons #CartoonCommunity #CartoonTime #CartoonEntertainment #CartoonSeries #CartoonEpisodes #CartoonUSA #CartoonCanada #CartoonNostalgia #CartoonMagic #CartoonHub #CartoonFans #CartoonForever #CartoonAddict #CartoonJoy #CartoonDaily #CartoonFamily #CartoonObsession #CartoonWatch #CartoonLife #CartoonStreaming #CartoonClassic #CartoonRetro #CartoonThrowback #CartoonMemory #CartoonLovers #CartoonAddiction #CartoonFun #CartoonLegends #CartoonFriendship #CartoonCollection #CartoonAnimation #CartoonHD #CartoonWorld #CartoonCulture #CartoonForever90s #CartoonVintage #CartoonHistory #CartoonSeriesHD #CartoonAdventure
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Short filmTranscript
00:01I don't know how we lucked out, but we ended up with probably the most awesome crew ever assembled on a Saturday morning TV series.
00:09It all came together at Colossal Pictures.
00:12And I do got to give Jeff Siegel and the Universal Cartoon Studio a lot of credit for knowing that we could put together such a great crew
00:23and just knowing that we would make it look different than anything else on the air at that time.
00:29Immediately, I wanted Phil Robinson because I had worked with him in the past.
00:33And, you know, he was like a mentor and talked to him about Back to the Future, said, you know, this is a great way to get you back here.
00:42And, you know, we could we got a good budget to get the best crew we could find together.
00:47We get our pals. We could, you know, it could be really cool.
00:50Phil listened patiently. And then he said, only on the condition that my pal John Stevenson comes with me.
00:58I didn't know that. I was doing a show with Phil Robinson for English TV.
01:02And I went back to prep the second season of that.
01:05And then I got a call from you and Phil when I was in England to say, would I like to come out to San Francisco and be an art director on Back to the Future, the TV show.
01:14And because I like you guys and because I wanted to go to San Francisco and because I thought Back to the Future was a great movie.
01:19I said, yes, Colossal was to put together the best pre-production crew, the best team of artists we could find in the Bay Area and and make the initial designs for the show completely, you know, original and unique and different to what was, you know, being done at the time.
01:37And I think, you know, being in Northern California versus Southern California helped give it a little, you know, different look and the kind of artists that Colossal, you sort of were hip and groovy studio could pull in also stopped it looking generic.
01:54Jamie Baker was the key influence for, you know, all the character design in that show.
02:01It had the right degree of between like just simple, easy to animate style between that and the photo realistic live action kind of characterizations that some universal kind of gravitated to.
02:16So we found that right balance and a definite degree of abstractness in there, too.
02:22In there, too.
02:23I believe this is the first drawing that Jamie did that kind of nailed the style.
02:31I fell in love with the the crew of people and town and, of course, having the opportunity to actually design some things.
02:43It was it was a rare opportunity and I loved it.
02:46When Phil Robinson, who brought me onto the thing and I saw, you know, your first character designs, I was really jealous because I was like, that guy's really good.
02:57In fact, he's better than I am.
03:00And I was really mad for a bit.
03:03And then I was really excited because the style that you'd set for the characters of Doc Brown and the family influenced all the incidentals.
03:13But it was such a great style.
03:14It was like I had seen anything like it, you know, certainly not in Saturday morning.
03:18I think we competed in a really fun way.
03:21I don't know if that's your memory, but my memory is that you would design some stuff and I'd be like, oh, that's really fun.
03:28And then I'd see on your desk and be like, oh, that character's really weird.
03:33And I think I think for us, the most fun that we had was designing the secondary characters because, you know, the eye wasn't sort of, you know, there was a less scrutiny for the secondary characters.
03:43So I think we got into this unspoken, you know, weirdness war where we kept trying to push the designs of the secondary characters just to be ever more eccentric and extreme and an order.
03:55And that was kind of that was the most fun I think I had on the show was seeing how weird I could get the background characters to look.
04:01One of the joys of putting this crew together is we were getting these great portfolios in.
04:08I remember Bob Pawleys in particular.
04:11I think he was right out of illustration school or something like that.
04:16Right away, we're like, OK, he's hired.
04:18It was like unanimous immediately.
04:20And Bill Cohn was the same.
04:22And Bill Cohn, yeah.
04:23As soon as he saw his stuff, it was just like, holy moly, why isn't this guy, you know, designing big movies?
04:29You know, we got really lucky.
04:30We found, you know, we had Bob Pawleys, Bill Cohn, guys who have gone on to have sort of amazing careers at Pixar as production designers.
04:38But I think we were probably Bill Cohn's very first, you know, like TV or movie credit and one of Bob's first, if not.
04:49And they did fantastic stuff.
04:52They kind of gave the show sort of an epic quality.
04:56And then we had great artists like, you know, Richard Moore, you know, paint those designs that Bob and Bill would come up with and give it a beautiful kind of color styling.
05:06And then one day I got this portfolio in that was just amazing.
05:12It's like hand drawn.
05:13This is just the envelope that it came in and it had all these scraps of art in it, like tons.
05:21Dave Gordon, his personality definitely lived up to his artwork, just the right degree of zaniness and crankiness and unexpected everything.
05:36Who sort of established a very eccentric and interesting and unconventional background and color style for the film.
05:45And between Jamie and Dave, I think everybody else who came on the show, we all sort of fit in with those two anchor points.
05:53Then all the other artists were able to come together and start kind of riffing on that and building it out.
06:00But we hope that, you know, by putting like 300 percent effort in, we could still, you know, get a bit of a return in quality.
06:08And I think, I think there's just, you know, there's just enough, just enough difference in back to the future from what was going on at the time that we stand out still.
06:17I remember really actually quite vividly the day that you came in with your portfolio, because I think we'd seen quite a few.
06:25And I sort of had this sort of, and then buying, you know, when I saw your stuff, I was like, oh, yes, this guy, this guy's just what we need.
06:34I remember doing huge pans and layouts with 10,000 buildings in it or some crazy banana pan or some crazy tilt.
06:46Design, you know, some of the vehicles, some of the set, a lot of props.
06:52Dave had done some of the great stuff, so I take Dave's and kind of riff off of that.
06:56Dave's concepts, yeah, and then put them into an environment.
06:59That was fun, because there's a great collective feel, and so we're passing things back and forth.
07:04And it was, you know, crazy, a deadline.
07:06And I think it was, each show was 18 minutes of animation divided between three.
07:12Three acts, yeah.
07:13And then each one person would get that to storyboard, like Joe got one or Bud would get one.
07:18And then Robin Steele.
07:19Robin Steele, that's right.
07:20They would do, you know, crazy amount of work in two weeks or two and a half weeks or some ridiculous turnaround.
07:26Yeah, I remember actually kind of almost apologizing to Bud because of just the volume of work that was being thrown his way.
07:36And him just saying, oh, far from it.
07:39I love it because I just closed my room, the door in my room.
07:44And, you know, I've worked in the studio for years where I'm always getting pulled in three different directions.
07:50And on this, I can just draw, draw, draw.
07:53So he was apparently very happy.
07:55And they were great.
07:56I mean, I remember his stuff, you blow up a little frame and it's a layout.
08:00I mean, it was done.
08:01He was designing and drawing at the same time because the speed you're doing this stuff at,
08:05it was lucky it was chicken scratch for some, but, you know, Bud's are beautiful layouts.
08:09I do remember when Richard Moore came in with his work because it was just so incredibly beautiful.
08:18And the fusion between sort of quirky concept that Dave Gordon had come up with that had been refined by yourself and generated a layout.
08:30And then Richard would paint that.
08:33And I remember one painting in particular sticks in my mind.
08:37I think it was Doc Brown's train.
08:40Do you remember this?
08:41Yeah.
08:42And Richard had painted this in a sort of his emulation of Dave Gordon filtered through you.
08:49Yeah.
08:50There was sort of this, this great soup, you know, where I could see bits of Dave and bits of Bob and Richard and it just, it was really fun to watch.
09:01I mean, Colossal at the time was like one of the strongest animation studios on the planet.
09:06I mean, it, it, it regularly won huge amounts of Clios and, and there was so much vibrant energy in the animation, you know, division.
09:15Yeah.
09:16Some of that energy I think helped also lift the Back to the Future stuff.
09:19Yeah, I think so.
09:20We were inspired by the other artists working, you know, doing great stuff in, in the commercial world and, and title sequences and things.
09:27There was a sort of a, a sort of a groovy and hip quotient that Colossal wanted to maintain and you didn't want to be the one to be less cool than everybody else.
09:36And I think that helped, you know, make sure that the quality was, was, you know, was as good as it could possibly be.
09:42It's funny.
09:43I remember when you guys would hear that you'd pray for three characters in a show, but it's a hordes of Romans coming over hillside or something.
09:51Yeah.
09:52So it was always too many things, but it was always a different period or place and time to go back to.
09:57But nowadays, oh, Roman, Google, you get 10,000 pictures.
10:02That's a really good point.
10:03And, you know, you have everybody everywhere going to the same research, referencing the same pictures in a way.
10:09And since we only had limited reference, we had to kind of depend on, depend on our own imagination and what we knew about it or interpret it.
10:17So I think that was actually kind of a benefit and kind of pushed us a bit.
10:21Hey, you should show the cell of you and me.
10:23Oh.
10:24Yes, this is our cameo.
10:26Jamie drew us both into the first episode, the Civil War episode.
10:33And that one's obviously Jamie.
10:35Yeah, back when I had hair.
10:37And this one's me, when I had hair.
10:40So we made a little Alfred Hitchcock appearance in the first episode, which I'm proud of.
10:46There must be hundreds and hundreds of incidental characters.
10:49We generated a lot of stuff, yeah.
10:51That were designed over those 13 episodes.
10:53I mean, it's way more characters for a season of Saturday morning than I've ever seen on any other show.
11:00You had to redesign everything from scratch in a week, and it was pretty tough.
11:05These scripts would come in, and they would say things like,
11:09Oh, well, Doc and Marty are flying in over ancient Rome.
11:13And everybody would go, Oh, we have to do ancient Rome.
11:17And we did.
11:18And you did.
11:19Oh, little tiny buildings, all of it.
11:21Oh, yeah, it was Rome.
11:22The drawings were amazing.
11:24Yeah, they were.
11:25I think the Dinosaur City was the most exciting one.
11:28Really?
11:29Yeah, I think it was John did that.
11:30But the flyby was, you know, it came in on the top.
11:34But there were all flybys.
11:35And you went all the way down.
11:36Yeah, but this was like, this was incredible.
11:39And then you were down on the ground floor in the stores.
11:43Oh, this is Dinosaur City.
11:45You mean coming in and going down.
11:47Yeah, it was, you know, what a background that was.
11:50It's kind of a memory that's really funny now.
11:53John Hayes and Dewey Reed had this whole new concept of, like, doing color with a computer.
12:01And I remember thinking, like, you're messing with things you don't understand, man.
12:06It's going to, this is going to work out crazy.
12:08What are you?
12:09And, of course, it worked out brilliant.
12:10You had a Macintosh.
12:12I did.
12:13And we managed to scan in one of the drawings that was from Back to the Future.
12:19Right.
12:20And I went, wow.
12:21You just wanted to color that model.
12:22You know how we could, like, take Studio 8.
12:25This is, like, pre-Photoshop.
12:27This is pre-CAP system.
12:29This is pre-everything.
12:30No leaks in the line work.
12:32Yeah, right.
12:33We had to figure out no leaks in the line work so you didn't bucket in badly.
12:36And so you go in and you just put a bucket in there.
12:38And I said, wow.
12:40This could actually do an entire IncaPaint design system.
12:44Do you remember that night?
12:45I do.
12:46It was so awesome.
12:47I do.
12:48You disappeared so quick.
12:49Because you wanted to do it.
12:51But that's because I went to John.
12:52I went to John Hayes and I said, John, you've got to check this out.
12:57And I'm, like, literally holding the mouse going, okay.
13:01So I go up like this and I go over and then I hit the button and it buckets in the color.
13:08And I showed it to John.
13:10And John went, wow.
13:12That would be really cool.
13:14I mean, so it literally took a department of 10, 15 people to do these color studies
13:20for all these thousands of characters in these crazy scripts that we had to me, basically.
13:28And I remember showing up the next day.
13:29John said, okay, go ahead and do it.
13:31The next day I showed up and I had this 2FX Macintosh in front of me.
13:35But you know what?
13:36We did it.
13:37And we could do every single character over and over again.
13:42Even as prehistoric as the processing was back in 1991.
13:46The time it saved when we would ask for a correction.
13:49Oh, yeah.
13:50It was awesome.
13:51And he would go to the computer and he'd change the colors around.
13:53And instead of waiting for someone to self-paint the thing and to dry and, you know, like,
13:58hours and hours, it would happen, you know, within, you know, some minutes.
14:02Yeah.
14:03But it was still amazingly fast.
14:04And then I had to kind of associate it with cartoon color.
14:07You know?
14:08You remember that?
14:09I remember the color.
14:10The cartoon color system that was over overseas.
14:12How am I going to make that digital stuff be the same thing as what I'm doing on ink and paint?
14:17And it wasn't.
14:18And it wasn't.
14:19And blue balls showed that.
14:22That's another story.
14:26That Bob Gale did focus on the blue baseball.
14:29Which, you know, he had a good point.
14:32It was meant to be lighter than the blue that it was, as Dewey mentioned.
14:39And someday he'll forgive me.
14:41So this whole color system just turned out to be an incredible experiment.
14:46But also, it was extremely valuable to us.
14:49Because we had to do, I can't remember how many character color studies we had to do every week.
14:56So you were doing like two and three backgrounds at a time.
14:59Yeah, I think that was the amount.
15:00And I was doing, you know, 27 characters or however many characters it was.
15:06I disappeared, so I'd go home and work on the watercolors.
15:09I moved to San Francisco to take the job as the production assistant on the show.
15:13And I moved without knowing a single person in San Francisco.
15:17And the crew of the show really kind of became my family.
15:22Yeah, Colossal was an amazing place to work.
15:25And yet, you know, those guys were all your pals too.
15:28And you hung out with them.
15:29And, you know, I remember reporting back to Universal when I first started there.
15:32And looking at the work that was being done and thinking like, this is like too good for Saturday morning.
15:37You know, it was really surprising to see this level of talent in one place coming from, you know, for me coming through places like Hanna-Barbera and other places in Los Angeles.
15:49It was a whole new thing.
15:51The thing that I remember most from the production was just seeing, you know, Jamie and Bosco and Steven and Stuart and Dewey and Richard Moore and all of them seeing all of this brilliant art every day.
16:06Yeah.
16:07Which I would then take to the color copier and spend hours waiting for the color copier to make a color copy of the stuff they ship off to Asia.
16:16And that was the other thing that I got to do is because of that show, I got to go to Asia the first time and second time on hand carries back in the olden days before FTP and all of that.
16:26When if the film was late, someone lucky me got to get on a plane, go to Taiwan, pick up the film and come home in the same within like 24 hours.
16:37The film would come back from Taipei.
16:41We'd have to, there was always a time crunch.
16:44Everything was deadline driven.
16:47Immediately when we got it, we'd have to go into a edit suite and start looking for retakes.
16:54Right.
16:55Frame by frame, shot by shot, it would take hours.
16:58Yeah.
16:59Sometimes all night long.
17:00Cutting out all the, you know, correction slates and cleaning it up and making it look and making sure, okay, oh, they caught all their mistakes.
17:07Every once in a while we would see one where they missed and we'd have to fix that or whatever and, you know, smooth it all out.
17:14So many things could go wrong in the production process.
17:17Just so much attention to detail of color pops, wrong backgrounds, jumpy animation, so many things.
17:28Continuity between shots.
17:29Right.
17:30And we found every one of them.
17:32We sure did.
17:33It turned perfect.
17:34Yeah.
17:35At one point or another.
17:36So that meant flying down to Universal every week pretty much.
17:42Yeah.
17:43But they were nice enough to give us a golf cart, you know.
17:45That was fun.
17:46Except at like 4 a.m., you know.
17:48Yeah.
17:49So many times coming out of editing and seeing that sun come up, it was tough.
17:55I remember getting all the animation stuff cleaned up, all the, you know, getting it all corrected
18:01and then, you know, having the script out and the storyboards cutting together the episode
18:08and then go, okay, now let's watch the episode.
18:11Now let's see how the story flows.
18:14Finally there was time to do that.
18:16Yeah, now let's start editing.
18:17And often that was at 1 and 2 in the morning or something crazy like that.
18:21And often Bob Gale and John Lute and John Loy, they would come in early in the morning
18:28to see what we'd done.
18:29Yeah.
18:30Then they would want to make their corrections and we'd go through the review process.
18:33Yeah.
18:34It was because of the pre-production package that we put together, foolproof, you know.
18:40Yeah, indeed.
18:41Every little detail was accounted for.
18:43Everything, the boards were like, you know, mini layouts.
18:46Absolutely.
18:47Lots of detail and acting.
18:49Everything was in there.
18:51At that time, in fact, James Wong Studio was the biggest in the world.
18:58Over 800 people.
19:00Wow.
19:01Animators working there.
19:02Eight different floors.
19:04And we could not track what animators were animating what.
19:11It was really mysterious.
19:13It's amazing.
19:14Everything works out when you think about it.
19:16Yeah.
19:17The communication was amazing.
19:19No email.
19:20And how complicated the process was.
19:23And when a correction or a revision would have to be made for some reason or another,
19:27the levels of communication that would have to happen before we got a response to say,
19:32okay, got it.
19:33And we're on it.
19:34Came up.
19:35Things get lost in translation sometimes.
19:36Yeah, that happens.
19:37But a great time.
19:39It was a great honor to do it.
19:41So fun.
19:42And a lot of the people from Back to the Future went on to, you know, careers at, you know,
19:47Pixar.
19:48Well, it just so happened that we wrapped at a good time.
19:51Yeah.
19:52The whole series wrapped right when Toy Story was ramping up.
19:55Because Johnny and Joe Ramph boarded on the first episode and then, you know, went to
20:00Pixar.
20:01Bob and Bill went to Pixar, Bud Lucky, Jamie Baker.
20:05Yeah.
20:06But I think there were quite a few people on our crew who'd never actually worked in animation
20:11at all and had started on the crew.
20:14So, I mean, Bosco Ng was one of those who's now a director at Lucasfilm.
20:20Not only did I get to work on Back to the Future and meet great people, but I met my
20:24future business partners, John Hayes and Phil Robinson.
20:27We later started another San Francisco studio.
20:29Yeah.
20:30And that's where Wild Brain came from out of that.
20:33At the time, I remember being by your desk and I think Heather was looking for some storyboard
20:40people and was mentioning Henry's project and so I was fortunate to go to there and so
20:46I was on Henry's for a little bit and then, I don't remember, I went, I'm about to come
20:50back for the second season and then back over to, and then I got the job at Pixar.
20:54They remembered me at Universal from, they had a party for us when, it was like a wrap party
21:00or something, a premiere party when the first episode aired.
21:03And I'd met Jeff Siegel at that party and he had a job for a junior development executive
21:10and that was my first, that was my first job as a development executive was at Universal
21:15and that was because of this show, yeah.
21:17You know, coming up with the computer ink and paint system, I ended up the first creative
21:21person at Microsoft and a lot of other technical things.
21:24I mean, doing that work was, I mean, it changed my career and my path in life.
21:31I ended up being one of the heads of Microsoft and then Yahoo.
21:36But, you know, I went from the media business, which was so fun, to the technical business,
21:42which is very dry and kind of boring.
21:44And now I'm back in the media business, which I'm really happy about.
21:47So, no, it was, it changed my life.
21:49It totally changed my life.
21:51The best thing for us is that, you know, this show brought me to America where I met you.
21:57Yes, me too.
21:58And, like, I met a crew of people that are still some of my best friends 25 years later.
22:04So, for that, thank you, Back to the Future, the TV show.
22:07That would, you know, I appreciate it.
22:09The one thing that also changed is our friend and colleague, Phil Robinson.
22:15God bless.
22:16He's no longer with us.
22:17Just a few months ago that he passed away.
22:20And part of this DVD is dedicated to Phil.
22:25So, Phil, we miss you.
22:26We do, man.
22:27I wish you were here.
22:29Phil Robinson, right here.
22:30Phil Robinson.
22:31I'm here and Phil Robinson.
22:32Fool.
22:33You're in good stuff.
22:34You're in great.
22:35That's right.
22:47You
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