It’s somehow been 40 years since director Robert Zemeckis and his screenwriting partner Bob Gale blew our minds with “Back to the Future,” and lots of folks are revisiting and thinking about the classic time travel film right now for its anniversary. Rightly so: The movie has an undeniably great premise, sports one of the most tightly constructed screenplays ever written, features a slew of A+ performances from its stellar ensemble cast, and has one of the best and most memorable scores in a decade full of great movie music. The film burrowed its way into the pop cultural landscape, and never left.
But the movie’s reach goes far beyond just inspiring Halloween costumes or influencing every subsequent time travel movie (they’re all in conversation with this in one way or another). Even today, four decades after its release, you’ll still find a reference to it buried in a place you’d never expect: the website of an auto parts store.
If you visit the O’Reilly Auto Parts website, oreillyauto.com, and search for “121g” (real ones will know that’s a shout out to the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to make time travel possible), the result will send you to a page for a flux capacitor that looks just like the one Doc Brown invented the night he slipped and hit his head in 1955. Despite its official-looking product information, which warns customers to “time travel at your own risk” and cites “plutonium” under a section indicating the product’s “material compatibility,” O’Reilly’s flux capacitor model isn’t actually for sale. But there’s actually a reason behind this fun little easter egg beyond just a corporation having a little fun and showing appreciation for a classic movie.
Read more: The 15 Best Fictional Cars In Movies & TV Shows
O’Reilly Auto Parts has a clever reason for hiding a flux capacitor reference on its website
Doc points at the Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future – Universal Pictures
In 2017, the Springfield News-Leader spoke with O’Reilly spokesperson Mark Merz, who revealed that the page was originally put on the company’s website in the late 2000s “as a security tracking measure to see if anyone was using [their] online catalog.” O’Reilly doesn’t want competitors to know every single item available on their website, and since manually exploring the site to compile all that information is prohibitively time-consuming, O’Reilly thinks an easier way might be to run some sort of program that would automatically copy their entire database. If that happens, though, O’Reilly would know — because the stolen list would include a flux capacitor, a product that doesn’t actually exist. Then they could presumably tell their competitor to meet them in court — just watch out for lightning strikes on that clocktower out front.
“Back to the Future,” which had one heck of a theatrical run 40 years ago, is returning to regular and premium format theaters for a limited engagement starting on October 30, 2025. I saw it in IMAX during this year’s Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Los Angeles, and seeing it in that format was an incredible experience that I recommend for any fan of the movie. I’ve seen this dozens of times at home and I even caught it on the big screen during its rerelease back in 2015, but seeing it in IMAX was like watching it for the first time again. It moved me to tears at one point (I did not expect that to happen!), and I was caught up in the experience the way audiences must have been during that original run all those years ago. Don’t miss your chance to see it on the biggest screen possible.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
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