At the end of the Back to the Future trilogy, many were surprised to discover that Doc Brown and his new family settled down on Saturday mornings as part of Back to the Future: The Animated Series, establishing a complicated canon. Premiering in 1991, Back to the Future: The Animated Series picked up where the original trilogy ended. Including talent like Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd and Tom Wilson in their reprised roles, along with the movies’ co-writer Bob Gale as producer, it was as close to a true sequel as fans would get for years.
Lasting for two seasons, Back to the Future: TAS became a beloved curiosity among the fans for its colorful characters and bizarre stories. Considered a cartoon cult classic, Doc and Marty’s animated educational adventures attempted to continue their story and fill in gaps within Back to the Future’s lore. With the involvement of co-creator Bob Gale and much of the trilogy’s original cast, despite its surreal setting, Back to the Future: TAS called into question its canonicity, along with all the Back to the Future continuations.
Considering all three movies as canon and having expanded upon them, it questioned if Back to the Future: TAS was their intended epilogue. Additionally, with the involvement of many of the original Back to the Future trilogy’s talent, Christopher Lloyd and Bob Gale, they added legitimacy to the cartoon’s world. However, talking about a trilogy of time travel like Back to the Future, canon rarely tends to be clear with multiple timelines, paradoxes, and retcons. In the case of Back to the Future: TAS, its complicated place in the continuity revealed more about the original Back to the Future story, where it begins, where it ends, and its ultimate message.
Back To The Future’s Multiverse Explained
Back to the Future: TAS, despite some continuity discrepancies, considered the original trilogy canon to the show. Many episodes further explored the events of the trilogy’s last two movies, with stories like Back to the Future: TAS, Season 1, Episode 9, “Solar Sailors,” which served as a sequel to Back to the Future Part II, and Back to the Future: TAS, Season 2, Episode 8, “A Verne By Any Other Name,” which took place during the trilogy’s finale. However, it’s the involvement of Christopher Lloyd in the show’s live-action sequences and Bob Gale as a show-runner that truly made Back to the Future: TAS a sequel series, but not necessarily the definitive one.
Although it’s well established that the Back to the Future trilogy is canon to the cartoons and implies that it was supposed to be an epilogue, according to Bob Gale, it was one of several possibilities after the events of Back to the Future Part III. Despite the existence of a Back to the Future cartoon, ride, video game, and several comics, in a 2010 interview (via The Telltale Blog), Gale explained: “Only the movies are canon. Everything else fits into the ‘what-if?’ category, or might be canon in some alternate universe.” So while any sequels beyond Back to the Future III may not be canon to the films, they do nebulously exist in a theoretical multiverse branched off from them.
It’s odd that after so much effort to continue Back to the Future’s story, nothing definitively does so. However, Back to the Future: TAS helped reinforce Doc Brown’s theory about the future: “Your future is whatever you make it.” So, Back to the Future’s continuations beyond the movies being framed as what-ifs by Gale were fitting, highlighting the theme of how important choices are and how far they reach across time.
