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The Back To The Future Cartoon Was A Fucking Crazy Parade
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As we've mentioned before on the site, Doc Brown's character-concluding decision to father children with a historically dead woman and blast through time in a screeching lightning train was reckless at best. And so it's only natural that the 1991 Back To The Future TV show would follow the horrific mishaps of this family, sandwiched with live-action science demonstrations by Christopher Lloyd and an oddly mute Bill Nye.
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They're like the Penn and Teller of mad science.
But despite its audience of the young and curious, an average episode of Back To The Future: The Animated Series played out like Rick And Morty episodes Adult Swim rejected for being too bleak. Don't believe us? The pilot for the series starts with Doc's younger son Verne stealing the time machine and traveling to the Civil War ... followed by Doc finding a photo revealing that little Verne died for the Confederate Army.
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"But hey, it says here that the Alabama chapter of the KKK is named in his honor."
Doc eventually prevents this by creating a truce between Verne's Confederate pals and the Union, and the gang happily flies home like they didn't just irrevocably alter the outcome of a Civil War battle. That's basically the story of the series, as Doc, Marty, and Doc's kids manhandle historical moments while Doc's wife Clara waits back home with sandwiches.
In the third goddamn episode, Doc brings his kids to the very moment the dinosaurs are wiped out by a meteor, saving the group by hastily stopping the comet and changing the future into a lizard-ruled wasteland. (One of said lizards looks like Biff, implying that a Tannen once fucked a dinosaur.)
This means that Doc is forced to go back and kill the dinosaurs himself, re-altering his actions so that the meteor gets back on a collision course with Earth ... but not before one of his kids befriends a scared pterodactyl. So how does Doc handle this unfortunate attachment? Obviously, the rest of the series would involve the group goofing around with their adopted dino friend. I mean, otherwise, he'd have to ...
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