Back To The Future: The Animated Series Review

Back To The Future fans depending on where you read this review you'll know that i'm currently in the process of reviewing things from the Back To The Future franchise and that includes what i'm about to review today. What i'm going to review is something that not even fans of the Back To the Future franchise talk about and after seeing a few episodes I can kind of see why so here is my review of Back To The Future: The Animated Series.

The premise of this show is basically it's the further adventures of Doc , Marty and Doc's family so to say it's episodic would be an understatement. Unlike other episodic shows where you don't need to have seen the first episode to understand what's going on in this case you need to have seen at least the first and third film just because those films introduce alot of the characters that are seen in this series.

Returning as Doc Brown in the shows live action segments is the great Christopher Lloyd with the character being voiced by Homer Simpson yup you heard that right Dan Castellaneta is in the show. Chris isn't the only returning actor tho as we also have Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton Brown and Thomas F. Wilson as not only Biff Tannen but also every ancestor of the Tannen family. The new actors are Cathy Cavadini as Jennifer Parker , David Kaufman as Marty Mcfly , a young Josh Keaton as Jules Brown and Troy Davidson as his brother Verne Brown.

The returning actors are fine even tho Christopher Lloyd shockingly sounds pretty bad in the live action segments. Both Mary and Tom are pretty decent in the show altho none are really given much to work with which I guess makes sense since we did just have three films set in that world. It's with the new actors tho that in my opinion the acting works it's best even a young Josh Keaton is actually pretty good in the show.

The animation was done by Big Pictures don't worry if you havn't heard of them I havn't either and I can't even find out what they've worked on because there's nothing about them on the internet anywhere. As for what I thought about the animation it's very cartoony which normally wouldn't be an issue but the fact that the film series it came from was very mature in a lot of ways it really is kind of jarring.

Another issue I have with the show is that it's aimed at little kids which wouldn't be an issue but it trys to have it cake by having be set in the world of Back To the Future. From day one people should have realised that having a Back To The Future animated series aimed at kids is a bad idea and it's because in order to understand anything you need to have seen the movies they can't make a kids shows based on a film that had a PG rating and expect the kids watching the show to understand everything that's going on.

Unlike the film series which strictly follows the rules of Time Travel established in The Time Machine for some reason this series doesn't. Just so you know what I mean the rule of time travel is if you build and then use a time machine you can only go backwards and forwards in time not in time and space. For some reason this show doesn't follow that rule in fact it breaks it in the very first episode and that really annoys me because the first film did time travel really well so now to see those same characters moving in time and space in a time machine to me is really irritating.

This show first started airing on CBS on September 14th 1991 and lasted for two seasons airing it's final episode on December 26th 1992 and lasting twenty six episodes with each season being thirteen episodes. For you see this show went into production just after the third film came out and the world was craving more adventures and since Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis didn't want to do a sequel they instead chose to make an animated series that way the world can get more adventures and they can work on other films. It's not a bad idea in theory but the issue is like I said they chose to aim a film which would have been seen by teens and adults at little kids.

To me what would have made the most sense was if they used the actual Back To The Future theme for the intro to the show since that's the theme that's most associated with the franchise or if not that at least "The Power Of Love" by Huey Lewis and The news. What we have instead is a pretty bad cover version of "Back In Time" which granted was written for the film but it's not a song that you think of when you think of Back To The Future and for some reason they reuse a scene from the end of the first movie and they remove the great score by Alan Silvestri and replace it with a terrible piece of music.

I have to say that I kind of hate that they made this show very cartoony it's not a bad idea but when it comes from a film is kind of grounded in reality it doesn't make sense and can be jarring. I think that they made it cartoony just to please the little kids but without realising that the people most likely to not only watch this show but also enjoy it are people who watched and enjoyed the movies so why they didn't take a more realistic approach is beyond me.

It seems that the animation wasn't the only thing done to please little kids because anything that made the movies more adult isn't present in this series at all. All of the jokes are jokes that little kids would have enjoyed. I honestly don't think that I laughed at one single joke all throughout the entire series which is pretty bad considering that this is meant to be a comedy. Heck even the characters seem like a more cartoony version of there movie counterparts how they managed to do that with established characters is beyond me but some how they did it.

Overall I can very easily see why fans of the franchise wouldn't talk about this franchise however at the same time it is still new adventures with our favourite characters so if your a fan of the franchise it might be worth checking out but if your not a fan don't even bother just avoid the fan inside me is giving this series a 5.5 out of 10 but if I wasn't a fan it would be getting at least a 4 out 10