Back to the Future started with a yearbook. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale had met at the University of Southern California in 1971 and wanted to make a time-travel film, but they had no story until Gale found his father's high-school yearbook and learned his dad had been class president. Would they have been friends at the same age? Only time travel could put a son in school with his parents. Gale's first draft, in 1980, sent Marty McFly back to 1952; the film settled on 1955.
The time machine was not a car at first. Early drafts had a laser, and then a chamber built around a refrigerator that had to be taken to a Nevada nuclear test to work. Steven Spielberg vetoed the refrigerator for fear children would climb inside one, and the finale needed the machine to move anyway. Zemeckis picked the DeLorean because its gull-wing doors would look like a flying saucer to a family in the 1950s, and the film makes the joke itself when Marty crashes into a barn and is taken for a spaceman. Ford offered $75,000 to make it a Mustang. Gale said no.
Andrew Probert, hired to draw the storyboards, sketched the first versions because he needed a car to board: clean and manufactured-looking, with a reactor in the rear and the flux capacitor over the seats where the camera could see it. Zemeckis wanted the opposite — a machine that looked "unstable and unreliable", built by an inventor from aircraft surplus and junkyard parts. Ron Cobb, who had worked on Star Wars and Alien, came in for about a week and gave them the reactor on the back and the coils all over the body; Probert refined it from there. Michael Scheffe finished the flux capacitor and made the Mr. Fusion unit from a Krups coffee grinder.
The rules were set for the audience. The car has to reach 88 mph because the number was easy to remember and looked good on the speedometer — whose real scale stopped at 85, the federal limit for speedometers from 1979. It needs 1.21 gigawatts, spelled "jigowatts" in the script, from plutonium in 1985, from a lightning strike to get home, and from household rubbish once Doc comes back from 2015 with Mr. Fusion. The OUTATIME numberplate has eight letters, one more than a California plate allows. Universal's effects shop built three main cars for the first film, and the A car — the hero car — is now at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
DeAGOSTINI launched its 1:8 partwork in Japan on 31 January 2017, as a weekly run of 130 issues, and this is that edition. It builds a die-cast and ABS model 527 mm long and about 8.4 kg, with lit time circuits, gull-wing doors that open with their lamps lighting, a brake light worked by the pedal and a digital speedometer that reads 88. The manufacturer link goes to FanHome's current US edition of the same car, a longer 158-stage run designed with help from Joe Walser, the authority on the film's time machine.