I thought I knew pretty much everything a fan of Back to the Future should know but I was wrong. Or maybe not. It depends on some fact checking.
Photo Source: Wikipedia
The original plans were for the time machine design in Back to the Future to be based on a refrigerator. That's a true fact according to an archived article on cbsnews.com so there's at least a better than 50/50 chance it's true. A fandom.com wiki entry written by somebody backs that claim up.
Look, there's a global pandemic happening right now. It's not like I can go to the reference desk of the local library for a better source. A wiki and CBS is the best I got.
From what I've read on the internet the claim is that in later script drafts the time machine was changed from a refrigerator to a retrofitted DMC DeLorean. This is allegedly due to concern that young children might reenact what they saw in the movie and get trapped in the fridge and suffocate.
Just so we're on the same page Back to the Future is the movie where a teenage boy (Michael J. Fox) is too lazy to skateboard so he grabs onto the back of a moving vehicle and uses one hand to wave at women jazzercising while "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News is playing. I think the women were jazzercising. When my mom went to her fitness class in the mid-'80s it was jazzercise so that's what I assume it was.
Should I be calling major bull crap on this claim about the original time machine design? There are literally dozens of websites touting this claim but I feel like I've debunked it.
Note to self: Make post about the Einstein refrigerator. Refer back to this post and claim that the movie was going to use that fridge because the dog named Einstein was stuffed in it for the first time experiment. Other people will copy that claim to their websites. Debunk that in a few years.