Transcript
Speaker: Are you ready, kids? Get your parents' permission, check your mailbox, and grab your shopping cart. It's time for the Adventures in Collecting podcast. I'm Eric.
Speaker: And I'm Dave. Welcome to Adventures in Collecting, where we talk toy news, culture, and hauls. Along with our journeys as collectors.
Speaker: Hey everybody, and welcome back to Adventures in Collecting. Eric here. What you are about to see and or hear, depending on how you choose to enjoy this, is a conversation that Dave recently had with a legendary screenwriter Bob Gale. So there is a new documentary that is being produced by our friends at the Nacelle Company about Back to the Future of the Musical and ah Bob is out there helping promote said documentary. Dave had the opportunity not only to to talk to Bob, but ah when when Back to the Future the Musical was on Broadway, he had a chance to see it. So this is a rare departure from all things that are necessarily toy related with something that is just super fun and pop culturally aware. so As always, we're we're we're always thrilled to be able to help our friends over at the Nacelle Company with anything that they're working on. And I'm super jealous that I did not get to participate in this very cool conversation that you are about to hear. As a huge fan of Back to the Future and you know some of Bob's other work, including some of his work work on things like used cars and Tales from the Crypt and and even you know some work in DC Comics. um
Speaker: Yeah, Bob is a super cool character and this is a really cool opportunity. So I hope you guys all enjoy this interview ah as much as I did, because it's rare that I get to just sit back and enjoy them. So um yeah. So i enjoy a 30 minute chat with legendary screenwriter Bob Gale. Dave, take it away.
Speaker: So we are here with Bob Gale. Bob, um as we are on a show about collecting, what are you currently collecting? ah I have been, um <unk>ve actually to sell off a lot of my older comic books because it's time ah and a whole bunch of these things have been offered at Heritage.
Speaker: I took very good care of a lot of the really special Marvel issues from from the 60s. So um I did all right with with a lot of those.
Speaker: um I have been actually getting more fascinated with the great... illustrators, some great American illustrators ah from the late 19th century into the late 1960s.
Speaker: And there's a magazine called Illustration published by the Illustrated Press. they do a lot They've done a lot of books, very limited print runs,
Speaker: So I'm trying to get my hands on on some of those things because the high quality of their printing is fantastic. And I am just fascinated by ah good these painters were, breadth of artwork that they did, how many of them there were,
Speaker: and probably equally as fascinating is that in the heyday of this stuff, everybody in America knew the names of all these people.
Speaker: Today, we just know Norman Rockwell. Maybe some people know James Montgomery Flagg and JC Leindecker, but my God, there were dozens of these guys and they all had followings and they were all celebrities.
Speaker: ah And they were making incredibly good money, um in the in especially in the Depression, which was the height of pulp magazines.
Speaker: You know, The Shadow and Doc Savage and um all the well the science fiction stuff came in a little bit later than that. um all the hard-boiled detective stuff, and then it all got cynical after World War II, the same way we got film no noir.
Speaker: We got darker pulp fiction, and then with the 50s craze in science fiction movies, then we get...
Speaker: Galaxy magazine and astounding science fiction and planet stories and all that stuff. So that's kind of been what has been floating my boat for the past year.
Speaker: Awesome. So, you know, I, you have the mug and we're, know, going to, I have the T-shirt from the the show. So speaking of collecting, the DeLorean from Back to the Future has become a part of a lot of collections, um a pop culture icon in its own right.
Speaker: um So what led to the DeLorean becoming the time machine in the film and in turn coming to the musical? Well, you may have heard that in early drafts of the screenplay, the time machine was a refrigerator.
Speaker: um It was actually a time chamber, which Doc had to reconstruct into refrigerator. And the gimmick was that when you travel through time, the time machine stayed in one place and you appeared, you know, you stepped out of the chamber in whatever year you were.
Speaker: So you could never travel back in time to period where the time machine had not been invented. Well, okay when when Doc Brown, um we had these scenes where Doc Brown had to transport the time chamber of the refrigerator to a nuclear test site to literally harness the nuclear energy of an atomic bomb.
Speaker: He had to load it on the back of a pickup truck.
Speaker: And one day Bob Zemeckis walked to the office and he said, you know, Bob, I'm thinking about these scenes I got to shoot where Doc has to load the the time chamber on the pickup truck.
Speaker: I don't want to shoot that stuff. It's just boring. um Wouldn't Doc have been smart enough to have built Time Machine Mobile and it built it into a car?
Speaker: And I said, that's a great idea. Well, John DeLorean happened to be on trial in the summer of 1984 when we were doing these rewrites. He was on the news every night.
Speaker: Every night we would come home and turn on the CBS Evening News, the NBC Nightly News, and they would have a story about the John DeLorean trial. So Bob said, let's make it a DeLorean.
Speaker: and it would give the give it some notoriety. And of course, we have the Gold Wing Doors. It was a perfect idea. And only embarrassed that I didn't think of it myself.
Speaker: So there was no like plan B if it if you couldn't like make it into the DeLorean, like if there was some issue with like you know rights to the car or anything like that? Well, the car was defunct by 1984. The company had gone south The last year that they made them was late 1981 or early 1982.
Speaker: So there was no company there to even sue us. Plus, here's the deal about lawsuits about using things in movies.
Speaker: As long as we don't have scene where we say, this DeLorean's a piece of crap car, and we disparage the product, as long as we're using the product in a positive way,
Speaker: or not a negative way. So you watch any movie that's got cars in it, they're just stock cars that they rented or they bought for the or the production.
Speaker: And car companies are fine with that. Sometimes they'll make a deal. You might see the most egregious example of it was at the beginning of the James Bond movie, Live and Let Die.
Speaker: And there's that car chase in in Manhattan and all the cars are GM cars. And you're like, wait, what? Really? ah That they made some kind of deal with with General Motors that all the cars...
Speaker: that you see in that movie were GM cars. So you can do that. But yeah, so we didn't have to go to DeLorean. And then here's the great, the great postscript to that story is that the movie comes out and by this time, the assets of the DeLorean Motor Car Company had been sold to somebody else.
Speaker: So Universal gets a letter from this guy accusing us of misusing their IP, their trademarks, their copyrights, whatever.
Speaker: So Universal's attorney calls me and says, want to send you this document where this guy is looking to sue us.
Speaker: And she sends it to me. She faxed back then. It was, everything was faxed. I said, okay, I have the answer for you here. And we had received a fan letter from John DeLorean telling us how much he loved the movie and how well the DeLorean car was depicted. and If I ever get another car company going, your guys can be on my design team.
Speaker: So i said I sent that letter back to the attorney, and I said to her, why you just show this letter to to the guy who wants to sue us, and that ought to shut him up.
Speaker: And, yeah, it shut him up. Oh, that's amazing. um And, you know, the franchise has... lived on in many forms since 1984. It's been an animated series, multiple video games, a theme park ride that is missed by everyone, um and now on stage as a musical and on Broadway and on the West End, it's where it started, and now touring.
Speaker: um How has it felt to see the franchise be accessible in this many forms? And which has been kind of your favorite new way of seeing the franchise?
Speaker: Well, every time it's new, it's exciting. I just got back from Hamburg, Germany, where we opened the show week and half ago in German.
Speaker: um And it's great. It's great. The audiences love it. We are about to celebrate next week, our first year anniversary in Tokyo, where it's being performed in Japanese.
Speaker: And that's totally cosmic. They are insane about Back to the Future in Japan. So it's mind boggling to me.
Speaker: This is every writer's dream to concoct a story that is so popular that it just keeps on going and going. And it's a story that um holds up in all these different mediums.
Speaker: And that actually has been one of the most extraordinary experiences, creative experience of of mounting Back to the Future of the Musical, which ah you'll see in this documentary, The Future on Stage.
Speaker: What was so extraordinary about this is that when we started First of all, it been it was rejected by all these Broadway producers.
Speaker: They would say, well, maybe you could make a musical out of Back to the Future, but what makes you think that you guys could do it? You know, with the disdain that people from Broadway have ah for people from Hollywood.
Speaker: And we said, well, actually we think we can because and we know just a little bit about Back to the Future, but they didn't want to hear about that. And at this time, we had Alan Silvestri, who's, you know, he's an Oscar-winning composer.
Speaker: We had Glenn Ballard. He's a Grammy-winning songwriter. um this is This is a dream team, really. But now, if you haven't done a Broadway musical, we don't care.
Speaker: Glenn goes off and he co-writes the music for Ghost the Musical. And we go back to these guys and say, well, actually Glenn Ballard now has had some Broadway experience. Yeah, but Ghost didn't get good reviews.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, really? So the guy the we've who produced Ghost was a British producer by the name of Colin Ingram.
Speaker: And Colin had seen Back to the Future when he was he And he learned to skateboard. He had very tight, curly hair. and he was annoyed that he couldn't wear his hair like Marty McFly.
Speaker: But he was true Back to the Future fan. And so his reaction was, I'm going to get to work with you guys? Hell yes. Sign me up. So that's how we found our producer for the musical.
Speaker: And um Colin has done an absolutely incredible job. And that's why we mounted the show in London before we brought it over to Broadway.
Speaker: We made it a big hit in London. We won the Olivier Award for Best bests New Musical. And then the folks on Broadway, then they then they won. So we we got the show off the ground on Broadway and then that led to the U.S. s tour. It led to our international our international dates. And knock on wood, it's just going to keep on going because we start U.K. tour in October.
Speaker: believe we're going to go to Holland in 2027.
Speaker: The UK tour is actually going to stop in Paris for a couple of weeks in 2027. twenty seven And if it gets some traction, we may, we might offer a French language show and crazy as it seems, we are on a Royal Caribbean ship called the star of the seas that goes from um Orlando, Florida down to the Bahamas. we perform the show.
Speaker: on each of these cruises two or three nights and the audience is there, even though it's a little bit abridged from the version that you'll see on the tour or the in London or any other venue, um it still plays great and it's it's a joy, really is.
Speaker: And now a word from our sponsors.
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Speaker: And now, back to the show. it's It's amazing to just kind of see it kind of spread, you know, continue on and just kind of move forward and become this big, you know, kind of juggernaut just like the movie was.
Speaker: And to see, you know, great performances like Roger Bart was just fantastic as Doc. Yes. You know, very different from Christopher Lloyd, which was which was great. Yeah.
Speaker: Was that kind of something that came in the direction, like, or was that more of a a Roger Bart choice? Well, when we chose Roger Bart, we knew we knew Roger.
Speaker: And one of the things about the musical, which we we talk about in this documentary, is that the one thing that we didn't want to do was have people walk out of the theater and say, you know, I would have been better off sitting at home watching the movie again.
Speaker: So what we needed to do was make sure that we used the stage in the best way possible, that it was a stage show. It was not a stage show trying to be the movie.
Speaker: So there were things that immediately, and this was from the very inception, the first thing that went away was a skateboard change. First thing, because, okay, you asked the question.
Speaker: You got Marty McFly, this actor, he has to sing, he has to dance, he has to be funny, he has to act. We can't expect that he can do skateboard stunts.
Speaker: Plus, even if he could do skateboard stunts, all you got to do is land in properly and you break your ankle and you're out of the show for five or six weeks. That is insane.
Speaker: yeah So we have, you saw the show. We have an illusion of the skateboard. We see him on a skateboard. He can skateboard on a straight line. That's safe. That's okay.
Speaker: But we're not going to do this elaborate skateboard chase. Instead, we turn it into the lunchroom chase. which is equally entertaining. It's funny. It works. The audience loves it.
Speaker: the other One of the other things was the terrorist chase. We didn't want to have gunfire inside of a closed theater. We couldn't even do that. It's hard enough to get the DeLorean to go 88 miles per hour on the stage.
Speaker: We're not going to have a terrorist van chasing it. That's crazy. So I came up with this idea that Doc it's is incapacitated radiation poisoning, which makes sense. He's handling plutonium.
Speaker: And Marty's got get to get get an ambulance over there to save Doc's life. It it all made total perfect sense. um We couldn't do the dog on stage because it's a dog.
Speaker: And we're not going to put somebody in a stupid dog costume. And we couldn't do baby Joey because with a baby, you never know what's going to happen. So those were the, and and the other one that went away was the Darth Vader scene because, okay, you can't have an actor sing where he's got his face all covered with a hood, a mask.
Speaker: I saw Spider-Man on Broadway and, you know, it doesn't work. It's, You can't have you can't see can't see the guy's face.
Speaker: It's not good. So those were the things that immediately had to go away. And then there were other things where we said, we we know we have to have this.
Speaker: We have to have Earth Angel and Johnny B. Good. We have to figure out how to do the clock tower. We have to figure out how we can make the car fly at the end. We have to make the car go 88 miles per hour.
Speaker: there are all these other iconic things that we do have to have. And we do. And of course you've seen it. So you know that some of them are pretty much like in the movie.
Speaker: And then sometimes we play a little bit with your expectations because in the movie, you say this, Oh, we did we did that. And we expanded the part of Goldie Wilson because who knew when we made the movie,
Speaker: that those six or seven in minutes that Don Full of Love appears, he was going to be such a memorable character and the audience was going to love. So he's got this great kind of show-stopping gospel number in Act One, and everybody loves that number. It's just one of the best best numbers in the show.
Speaker: We also thought, okay, you know what? We can... get a little bit more into Doc Brown's backstory. Because in a movie, you just don't, you just gonna go, go, go, go.
Speaker: And in a musical, You have to have songs. And what is Doc going to sing about? Well, we've got that wonderful song in Act Two called Through the Dreamers, which is, i think, probably my favorite song because it's all about the creative process.
Speaker: And anybody that is trying to do something is going to identify with that song. And there's nothing flashy about it. It's just the character singing this great song.
Speaker: But boy, does it get gigantic round of applause. So the direction that John Randall gave to the cast, he said, look at the movie, of course.
Speaker: You need to know what we did it what they did in the movie because the audience going to expect a certain amount of that. But you have to make the character your own.
Speaker: You can't just imitate what was done. And now some people went one way with it. um and some people were looser about.
Speaker: And with Roger Bart, Roger said, you know, the thing that I take away from Christopher Lloyd's performance is his unpredictability.
Speaker: You never really know what the guy's going to do. And he said, I can do that. I can easily do that. I'm not going to try to talk like him.
Speaker: I need to be me. And kind of the other interesting thing about Roger's performance, very interesting thing. Roger's a parent.
Speaker: Christopher Lloyd was is not a parent. And there is a warmth, um more of a warmth in the Doc and Marty relationship in the musical than there is in the movie.
Speaker: And it works really, really well on stage. Yeah. Yeah, it was fantastic. um So we talked about the creative process. There's couple things that I want to ask about that are just kind of outside of the Back to the Future realm.
Speaker: OK. One of the things that um you've written kind of. I it's one of the more kind of well-known unreleased video games of all time, Tattoo Assassins.
Speaker: So how did. writing a linear kind of screenplay script or television script translate to having all these different characters to write for for a fighting game?
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: It was... you know, was it a Mortal Kombat ripoff? Yeah, it was, kind of. um the The gimmick was that every character...
Speaker: had a big tattoo on their chest and the fatalities involved making that tattoo come to life. So if somebody had snakes on their, on their chest, snakes could come out and strangle, strangle the opponent. If you beat them, it was just, okay, that's what, that's what these fighting video games are. They're a bunch different characters and let's think about what,
Speaker: would be cool. And you kind of think backwards to say, all right, what is a, what have we not seen before? Or what is a variation on something we have seen before that we haven't seen before?
Speaker: So, um, you know, the, um, Tonya Harding, net Nancy Kerrigan thing was going on at the time that, uh,
Speaker: we did this. So I made one of the characters an ice skater and you know, people criticize it. Well, where's the, where's the ice? what What is she skating on?
Speaker: But come on, it's a video game, right? um It's kind of cool to say, all right, she can, if she kicks somebody in the face, um they're going to bleed because she's got blades on the, on her feet. Right. yeah So this,
Speaker: See, her finishing moves, she does a pirouette or she does ah you know a 720 spin and takes somebody out.
Speaker: Yes. So it was just like, okay, let's just have as much fun with this possible. Is it one of those things where you hope it like actually gets a an official release one day or if it like anything like that, especially with all these games being re-released?
Speaker: I really don't know what the rights situation is on that, but I know that if you're into retro gaming, I mean, series retro gaming, um there's um there's a MAME version of it.
Speaker: So if you've got an emulator that runs MAME, you can find Tattoo Assassins by Data East and, you know, put it it on your retro handheld or whatever device you're using and you can play it. So it is it is out there still.
Speaker: um Another one of my favorite things, and I Wasn't sure which one to go with, but um one of my favorite TV episodes of all time, the awesome, amazing stories episode, Go to the Head of the Class, was something that you wrote.
Speaker: um Again, working with Christopher Lloyd. um Right. After working with him in a comic role, what was it like writing for him as something just vastly different, as like a horror role? Because I remember as a kid watching that because, oh, Doc Brown's in it. Oh, that's not Doc Brown.
Speaker: But it became one of my favorite things. Like ah it was, to me, it's my favorite Amazing Stories episode. Well, thank you. um Well, remember, he's he was also Judge Doom, right? So you talk about a scary guy. um You don't get much scarier than that.
Speaker: um You know, Christopher is is a, um he's a theatrically trained actor. He can do anything. He's And he prides himself on that.
Speaker: he can Back to Future 3 was actually his very first screen kiss. um So being a romantic leading man, that was new to him. playing a bad guy that wasn't. I mean, he was, you know, he was a Klingon, right?
Speaker: Yeah. So, if so yeah, Star Trek, what was that? Two or three. um He was, he he was that guy. So,
Speaker: so The whole key to, and and Mick Garris had written the first draft of of this Amazing Stories episode, so ah certainly certainly want to give him some some credit.
Speaker: And Bob asked me to read it, and I said, all right, Bob, I can make this a whole lot better. And Mick Garris very happy with what I did with it. I said, let's make this guy frustrated Shakespearean actor.
Speaker: And that became the key to his pomposity and his theatricality. And that made it really fun.
Speaker: And Chris just, Chris ate the scenery you met in that role because he said, yeah, I know how to do that. And I'll never forget that. Like the the bit at the end with the stitches, like it's just, it's such a fun episode.
Speaker: and all right we are at 10 a.m m if you had one more question you wanted to to ask um we're gonna have to wrap up here in a few minutes absolutely thank you thanks guys yep um so we talked about it kind of at at the beginning um i've seen the musical i saw it on broadway i absolutely loved it um and you could see all people of all different ages just like um enjoying the story. So how does it feel knowing that this story can resonate generationally, whether on stage or on screen? And what's it like celebrating that in the documentary, A Future on Stage?
Speaker: Well, it's it's glorious in in a word. um One of the other things that we did in the approach to this was to make sure that if you had never seen the movie, you can go to the musical and have a great time. And sure enough, there are more people than I expected had not seen the movie and um love it and then are motivated go see the movie.
Speaker: And then there are other times where um people would say, I'm afraid to go see the musical because what if it shatters my memories of the of the movie? And of course, my presence in this is your guarantee that that will not happen. But the fact that it is embraced by generation after generation shows that we hit something um that appeals to every human being, not only in America, but all over the world based on its success in Japan and Germany, which is who were my parents?
Speaker: My parents were once children. That's a cosmic idea. When you first realize that when you're seven, eight, nine years old, your head explodes because how is that possible?
Speaker: How is that possible? You know, how is it possible that, you know, you got into this world by coming out between your mother's legs? I mean, that's, it's a miracle. It's unbelievable.
Speaker: So this sort of, humanity is really what is at the basis of Back to the Future. So people say, oh it's a time travel story.
Speaker: Well, yeah, but really it's a human story. And the success of the story of the movie, of the show is all about that.
Speaker: Because we'll see these various time travel movies and they they can be interesting. Some of them are really, really interesting. um um Premonition is, is that what it's called? Predestination, the one with Ethan Hawke.
Speaker: That's a fascinating movie. And then there's the one, why am I blanking on the name? It's a real low budget movie where the time machine is was in the guy's living room and they only go back a few hours.
Speaker: Primer? What's that? Primer? Grimer, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Grimer's great. Yes, it is. right Those are, those are, those are two movies that kind of avoid, you know, like time cop.
Speaker: Oh, okay. um Final countdown. Sorry. Sorry. So um there's, there are a lot of these things where, you know, the,
Speaker: Time travel is kind of used as a plot excuse as opposed to it being ah really about something else. So um that is the strength of Back to the Future.
Speaker: It's not really just about time travel. And we don't use time travel a whole lot. We make time travel very difficult. You need 88 miles an hour and 1.21 gigawatts.
Speaker: and gigawatts and gigawatts are both correct, by the way. you look that up in the dictionary, it comes from the root the Greek root, gigo which means gigantic.
Speaker: So there that's where that comes from. But yeah, so we have all those bells and whistles of of of time travel and technology and so forth, but it's really, really hard to do it. You can't just jump in and go.
Speaker: And that's why in part two, Doc Brown says, when this is over, I'm going to destroy the time machine because it's too dangerous and we can't have people doing this stuff.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's a human story. That's the strength of it. That's why it works so well. And we happen to use a time machine. But if he had, you know, a magic feather that was good for three trips through time or something that might work equally well.
Speaker: And I've never really explored that, but yeah. So there, there it is. That's my, that's my theory about it. Awesome. Bob, thank you so much. And, um, welcome, Dave.
Speaker: Future on stage. It's available to buy or rent on Amazon, iTunes, and anywhere where you can kind of get your, your streaming movies in. So we'll keep, we'll tie up for that.
Speaker: Back to the future musical.com to find out where the musical is playing. Cause if you're in the West, it's we were, we're opening in Houston to- tonight and we'll be there for a week. And we're going to Tucson. We're going to San Jose, Sacramento, Portland, Salt Lake city.
Speaker: So go to backtofuturemusical.com if you're in the areas of any of those places and you can see the tour. Or um go to Japan. Go go to Hamburg.
Speaker: Or hop on, get get tickets for Star of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean Cruise out of Orlando and see the show that way. um yeah We think we're going to be around for a long time. And even though the tour, this version of the tour is going to end in the end of June.
Speaker: I think it'll get resurrected very quickly. And we want to keep this going as much as possible. As long as people keep loving this show, we're going to keep on doing it.
Speaker: Yeah, i would I would second that. Go see it. it's It's definitely a good time. Absolutely. I loved it when I saw it on Broadway. Bob, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show, Dave. Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you for hanging out with us today. Subscribe, rate, and review this podcast wherever you listen, and then tell your friends to do it. Thanks also to Joe Azari, the golden voice behind our intro.
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Speaker: Stop by and say hi. Show us your hauls and photos. Tell us your toy stories. Maybe we'll talk about it on a future episode. don't try this at home void where prohibited in some assembly required each sold separately not a flying toy consult a physician if your toy run exceeds more than four hours
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