Back To The Future Plot Hole Explained - Why Don't Marty's Parents ...

Back to the Future is an all-time classic, but there's been one possible plot hole that fans have been debating for 30 years. (Time travel can be tricky like that.) But after Chris Pratt and James Gunn got into the most high-profile iteration of the debate yet, one of the movie's original writers jumped in and settled the question once and for all.

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Like all intractable arguments, this one unfolded via Twitter, when Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn decided to tackle the #FivePerfectMovies challenge. After considering whether personal favorites of his including The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Babe rise to the level of perfection, Gunn turned to Back to the Future, deeming it worthy of the label. But he added a caveat: "Why don't Mom and Dad remember Marty?"

In the film, Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly travels back in time to his parents' high school years, inadvertently disrupting their courtship. He's tasked with getting them to fall in love in order to ensure his own birth in the future. It all works out in the end, but when Marty returns to 1985, his parents never mention his uncanny resemblance to "Calvin Klein," the wildly-dressed out-of-towner who set them up all those years earlier.

But Guardians star Chris Pratt didn't see that as too much of a problem, and argued via Twitter that, by 1985, "it could have been years since his parents would have perhaps originally noted the uncanny resemblance between their son and that kid from high school."

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Enter Bob Gale, who co-wrote Back to the Future with director Robert Zemeckis, and who cleared things up once and for all in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

"Bear in mind that George and Lorraine only knew Marty/Calvin for eight days when they were 17, and they did not even see him every one of those eight days," he pointed out. Gale continued:

So, many years later, they still might remember that interesting kid who got them together on their first date. But I would ask anyone to think back on their own high school days and ask themselves how well they remember a kid who might have been at their school for even a semester. Or someone you went out with just one time. If you had no photo reference, after 25 years, you'd probably have just a hazy recollection.

So Lorraine and George might think it funny that they once actually met someone named Calvin Klein, and even if they thought their son at age 16 or 17 had some resemblance to him, it wouldn't be a big deal. I'd bet most of us could look thru our high school yearbooks and find photos of our teen-aged classmates that bear some resemblance to our children.

That definitely makes sense. Marty's parents watched him grow up day by day—his re-arrival in 1985 might be a touching reunion for Marty (and for us viewers), but his folks are just seeing the same kid they've known every single day for the last 17 years or so. It'd probably take an old photo of their pal Calvin to remind them of the resemblance. With Gale's answer, it looks like this old movie debate is all wrapped up.

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