Needles

Marty androids

Needles' gang

Doc Brown

Marty McFly

Professor Irving

Doc androids

Didja Notice?

On page 4, Doc is impressed with Marty's use of the word "galavanting", thinking Marty has been paying attention in his classes. But Marty actually got the word from Jennifer's use of it in "Who is Marty McFly?" Part 2, where Jennifer said she was paying attention in class. The word is misspelled here. It should be "gallivanting".

In panel 5 of page 5, the brick wall in the background has graffiti scrawled on it reading "OUT OF TIME".

Professor Irving uses a spray can of mist in the faces of the unconscious Needles and gang called Memory Cloud to make their remembrances of the past hour hazy. This is a fictitious drug, probably obtained by Irving in the future.

   Professor Irving traps Doc and Marty in the Pleistocene Epoch (January 8, 19654 BC, to be exact). Doc refers to it as the "Pleistocene Era", but "epoch" is the proper term; it is part of the Cenozoic Era. The Pleistocene Epoch (often referred to as the Ice Age) lasted from 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago. Marty mistakenly calls it the Cretaceous Period (145-66 million years ago) until Doc corrects him.

    The beasties they see there appear to be a mastodon and saber-tooth cats.

Doc more-or-less correctly refers to the saber-toothed cats as "saber-tooth cats" instead of the popular misnomer, "saber-tooth tigers", as they are not related to the modern tiger line of big cats (although calling them "cats" is not quite accurate either, as Doc amends on page 16).

When Doc informs Marty they're in the Pleistocene, he adds they're probably near the end of it, with primitive man appearing quite soon, relatively speaking. Homo sapiens migrated to the Americas around 14,500 years ago, so about 5000 years after Doc and Marty's appearance there, a short time in biological history.

On page 14, Marty worries that if they go stomping around in the Pleistocene, they may squash Chuck Berry's ancestors. Chuck Berry (1926-2017) is often said to have been the Father of Rock and Roll. Marty played Berry's signature 1958 song "Johnny B. Goode" three years before it was written in Back to the Future.

On page 15, Marty remarks he doesn't want to be the Flintstones. This is a reference to the 1960-1966 animated sitcom The Flintstones, about a stone age family living an extremely fantasized life in the Stone Age.

On page 18, Doc makes reference to "the classic Ray Bradbury story". He is referring to Bradbury's classic 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder", in which a team of time travelling dinosaur hunters accidentally alters time when one of them steps on a grounded butterfly in the Cretaceous Period. Because of this classic short story, the potential outcome of a seemingly minor change in the past due to time travel has become known as the "butterfly effect", part of chaos theory.

On page 19, Professor Irving refers to the "saber-toothed tigers" as Smilodon fatalis. Smilodon fatalis is one of the recognized species of saber-toothed cats.