Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

 

Doc Brown

Jules

Verne

Clara

Einstein

Marty McFly

Professor Marcus A. Irving (mentioned only)

Jennifer Parker

Fritz (German agent, unnamed until "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!" Part 2)

Adolf Hitler (mentioned only)

Karl Heinrich

Albert Einstein (mentioned only)

 

Didja Notice?

 

The regular cover of this issue is a symbolic version of the moment the Time Train takes off through the sky with Doc and his family in front of Marty and Jennifer at the end of Back to the Future Part III.

 

    The issue opens in 2038, where Doc has taken his family on their first trip to the future, to an amusement park at the Lone Pine Adventure Center in Hill Valley. The park uses realistic-looking humanoid robots to create different fantasy worlds of past eras, of mythology, and of past society's visions of what the future would look like. The first world the Browns visit in the park is a Victorian vision of the future, with steam-powered technology, etc. Then they get a glimpse of a "knights and knaves" realm, including a fire-breathing dragon, then a future world of rocket ships and travel tubes that appears as if it may be inspired by the 1999-2013 animated science-fiction comedy TV show Futurama (notice that a distant passerby in the background of panel 1 of page 9 looks similar to the show's lead character Philip J. Fry)!

    The park overall is similar to that seen in the Westworld franchise of feature films and TV shows. 

 

On page 5, Doc reminds Clara of the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is part of chaos theory, where a very small change in the conditions of an environment can later result in large effects on the environment. The idea has been used in many time travel stories and originated in Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder", in which a time traveller goes back to the Cretaceous Period and accidentally kills a butterfly, causing far-reaching changes in the present.

 

On page 5, Verne remarks he has experience stopping robbers. This refers to events in "Stowaway to the Future".

 

On page 6, after hearing an explosion, Doc exclaims, "What in the name of Archimedes' globe was that?!" Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC) was a Sicilian scientist now considered one of the leading scientists of classical antiquity. He is said to have constructed a type of globe that was a planetarium or orrery consisting of models of the Earth, Moon, Sun, etc. that could be rotated around each other in such a way as to mimic the movements of the planets in the night sky, predicting eclipses, etc. Doc named his horse in 1885 after Archimedes, as seen in Back to the Future Part III.

 

On page 9, a roving trash receptacle with the name Waste-X1 is seen in panel 2. It is similar to the Litter Bug roving receptacle seen passing through the alley next to the Blast from the Past shop in the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II.

 

Due to the well-intentioned antics of Jules and Verne, the amusement park suffers a dangerous malfunction of the robots. On page 10, Doc's suppositions about cascading malfunctions are similar to what happens in the 1973 Westworld film.

 

    In the final panel of page 10, Doc worries he'll have to pay for the damage currently being wrought in the amusement park and is afraid he may have to go back in time and get more rare comic books. In "Emmett Brown Visits the Future", Doc traveled to April 18, 1938 to buy a stack of Action Comics #1 (the first appearance of Superman) calling it the single greatest investment in the history of man. This was how he got the money he needed (and then some!) for the DeLorean's hover-conversion and Mr. Fusion energy reactor.

    From Clara's reaction, it's clear she was not aware of this particular venture in Doc's past. Of course, she probably also doesn't know what a comic book is since she is from 1893 and true comic books were not invented until around 1933.

 

On page 11, Lone Pine Adventure Center is seen to be a division of MAI-TECH. This is a fictitious company, later revealed to be owned by Professor Irving. The "MAI" of MAI-TECH represents the initials of Professor Marcus A. Irving.

 

On page 13, Doc remarks on Marcus' robots trying to kill him and Marty in "Who is Marty McFly?".

 

Most of pages 16-19 cover the end scene of Back to the Future Part III.

 

At the end of this issue, Doc has taken his family to the 1939 New York World's Fair. The World's Fair is an international exhibition of scientific, technological, and artistic achievements of the world's nations, generally taking place every two or three years in a different city around the world. In 1939, the World's Fair did take place in New York and it did feature a focus on what life might be like in the future. The structures seen beyond the crowd on the last page of the story are the Trylon and Perisphere, two iconic structures built for the fair and then disassembled when the fair ended in October 1940.

 

At the end of the story, two men who appear to be German undercover agents for der führer (German leader at the time, Adolf Hitler) appear to be looking for Albert Einstein at the World's Fair and one of them has mistaken Doc, with his wild, white hair, as the German defector to the United States! The real Albert Einstein was there at the Grand Opening on April 30, but not on September 31 as far as anyone knows.

 

Notes from the DeLorean Time Machine: Doc Brown's Owners' Workshop Manual (The page numbers come from the 1st printing, hardcover edition, published 2021)

 

Page 135 reveals the Time Train's first trip started on September 9, 1993, shortly after Doc finished the construction.

 

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