In Back to the Future, Marty McFly races through time in a DeLorean. But an earlier version of the story would have put him inside a refrigerator. It wasn’t simply a joke the filmmakers tossed around: a surviving draft places a modified fridge at the center of Marty’s trip home.
How the refrigerator would have worked
The early time machine was a chamber that stayed in one place. To get Marty back from 1955, Doc Brown would have fitted it into a refrigerator, loaded the equipment onto a truck, and taken it to a nuclear test site. The plan was to use the energy of an atomic blast to power the journey. That’s a very different climax from the finished film’s dash to the clock tower.
In an interview about the film’s early drafts, co-writer Bob Gale explained a problem with this setup: getting the stationary machine where it needed to be made for cumbersome scenes. A time machine built into a car could move with the characters—and keep the action moving, too.
Why the fridge stayed in the past
There was also a real-world concern. Director Robert Zemeckis said the filmmakers worried that children might imitate the movie by climbing into refrigerators and closing the doors. As the original production notes recount, the team settled on a mobile machine and found comic potential in the DeLorean’s gull-wing doors.
The change did more than swap one prop for another. A refrigerator could hold a time traveler, but the DeLorean could carry a chase scene. It gave Doc’s invention a striking silhouette and gave Marty a way to race toward the moment he needed to reach. One of cinema’s most recognizable cars began, improbably, as an appliance.