When Back to the Future first came out in 1985, it was an instantly appealing sci-fi action comedy, but it took a few years, and three sequels, to truly appreciate just how well put-together that script is. Initial attention for the film focused on Michael J. Fox, and his most immediately memorable quotes centered on the skeptical, yet grudgingly accepting, ways in which he took in the movie’s wildest plot points. “Are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?” was one; “Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?” another.
Those don’t have quite the same power today, as we’ve long-since become accustomed to the potential incest storyline, and while a DeLorean may have been incongruous in 1985, it is now a car primarily associated with Back to the Future. Yet the script is so layered, and so fun, that over the years, other lines have emerged as even more quotable, and none of them is from Fox. Christopher Lloyd‘s Doc Brown, Tom Wilson’s Biff Tannen, and Crispin Glover’s George McFly have gradually risen to be correctly viewed as just as integral.
In 2026, these are the top quotes that battle it out for #1.
To a kid not familiar with ’50s slang, Biff Tannen’s threat just sounds like a threat, with a reference to trees that doesn’t need to make sense. For the benefit of those who hadn’t figured out the joke by the sequel, though, older Biff explains in Part II that it’s supposed to be a pun, “Make like a tree and leave.” And it’s a character trait — Biff is prone to malapropisms and mixed-up phraseology, memorably including “Hasta la bye bye!” on the now-defunct Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios.
It took time to fully appreciate the heavy-lifting that one line was doing as character shorthand. Biff — and his ancestors and descendants, who all look like him — seldom fully thinks through his mean-spirited actions. It’s the threat of violence that matters to him, and screw the nuance. Invariably, it’s that lack of calculation that foils all of his awful goals.
In 1985, Crispin Glover just seemed like an actor playing an awkward teen. In the years since, with his button-pushing avant-garde roadshow films, karate kicking over David Letterman’s head, the occasional Charles Manson cover song, and a general pattern of both playing and appearing weird, Glover is seen differently.
Marty rehearses the ‘Hey you” line with George McFly over and over; he’s unable to make it sound as assertive as it’s meant to be. His delivery that once just sounded nervous now feels of a piece with his subsequent roles as uncomfortable psychopaths like Willard. Most people who do impersonations of Glover today utter that line with more of a disturbed edge, and it endures because of the recontextualization.
Somehow, his more assertive “Gimme a milk…CHOCOLATE!” has never quite caught on as a catchphrase, despite the inherent hilarity of his perception that chocolate milk is in any way a tough-guy drink that makes him look cooler.
In 1985, few of the MTV-watching teens going to see Back to the Future could be expected to necessarily know the 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode,” written by Chuck Berry. This was a joke for the parents — when Marty plays the song at a 1955 school dance, the leader of his backup band, Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, calls his cousin Chuck so he can hear the song over the phone. This creates a bootstraps paradox: Chuck Berry copies the song he hears, which is played by future Marty who originally heard Chuck Berry’s version. Thus, in the new timeline, nobody created the song originally. For many of the film’s original fans, it took repeat viewings and parental explanation to get it.
41 years on, though, the gag is so well-known that when Chuck Berry died, some references to his death referred to him as Marvin Berry’s cousin. Seth MacFarlane spoofed the scene on Family Guy, replacing Marvin Berry with Rick Astley’s cousin Marvin Astley; “Your cousin, Marvin…” has since become a meme about any famous person whose cousin tips him off to his big future moment.
The final line of the movie was a great way to end it on an exciting, weird note in 1985, and once both sequels were decided upon, it made a great tease into Part II. The beauty is that the line works metaphorically as well, suggesting a sort of out-of-the-box thinking that characterizes Doc, and endorses new approaches not necessarily mapped out already.
In the ’80s, a typical sequel delivered more of the same — think Friday the 13th, or Smokey and the Bandit. By that logic, a Back to the Future Part II would be expected to go back to 1955 again, which it did, but in an extremely roundabout way that took a major detour through the future and an alternate present first. Shot back-to-back with a threequel that was a full-on western, this was definitely not following a well-worn road, but blazing into new horizons.
Also, in the end, the DeLorean resembled the remark, by actually needing a railroad track instead.
When most people think of Christopher Lloyd, there’s a 90% chance this is the line they hear in their heads. Doc Brown says it 15 times across three films (and more), and with the power of his enunciation, it packs a bigger punch than more profane exclamations of shock that an average person might use.
The the origin of the phrase is unclear — the oldest known record suggests it was a nickname for Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott, exclaimed when he died. In America, it was an exclamation of surprise used by Mark Twain as if it were common parlance in his day, so it has the bonus for Doc Brown of not sounding like an anachronism when he travels back to 1885. On the other hand, if anyone uses it today, they are probably quoting Doc Brown, whose use of it has near single-handedly kept it in the vernacular.
