The bear sniffing Marty's boots.
- " He [Marty] heard a noise from the cave behind him — a growling noise. / Marty looked over his shoulder at the cave mouth, and a rushing grizzly bear! / "Yaaah!" Marty remarked. / The grizzly bear ran toward him. / Marty ran too. His boots fell from his grip, but there was no time to stop and retrieve them. Then his fancy, white, ten-gallon hat flew from his head. Too bad. Marty had a bear on his rear end — the kind of problem that only had one possible solution. / Marty ran like hell. "
- —From Back to the Future Part III by Craig Shaw Gardner (quote, pages 43 and 44)
A bear is a mammal that has a large body with stocky legs, long snouts, small rounded ears, shaggy hair, paws with five non-retractable claws, and short tails.
History[]
Outside the McFly farm in 1885, when Marty McFly arrived in the DeLorean time machine, a black bear woke up in its cave and investigated the noise. Upon seeing Marty, it stood up and challenged him, before chasing Marty out of the cave. Marty threw his boots to the bear, which it began to sniff.
Afterward, Marty fell down the opposite hill and knocked himself out. When he came to at the McFly farm, he spoke of being chased by a bear.
The shooting gallery within the sales wagon belonging to Colt Peacemaker salesman Elmer H. Johnson at the Hill Valley Festival featured bears as targets, along with ducks, gunslingers and Indians.
In 1850, as Daniel Clayton and Martha O'Brien crossed the Oregon Trail, they converged in northern Wyoming in what would later be Yellowstone National Park. Martha and Verne Brown were chased by a bear. Dr. Emmett Brown told them to sit on a buffalo hide atop Old Faithful. They were then lifted up by the geyser and were saved by a glider flown by Doc and Daniel Clayton.
In 1888, Dr. Windjammer Diefendorfer had several animals in his care, including a grizzly bear, a beaver, an eagle, a rattlesnake, and a rabbit.
A 1933 poster for the Bob Brothers All-Star International Circus mentioned bears as one of the attractions.
Behind the scenes[]
- In Super Back to the Future Part II, the password to reach Round 4-2 is 'bear'.
- In the novelization of Back to the Future Part III, it is a grizzly bear that chases Marty (see Quote above), rather than the black bear seen on-screen.
- The extinct California grizzly bear still existed in in the 1880s and was probably meant to be the kind of grizzly encountered in the novelization. Today there are only black bears, and the grizzly is most visually represented on California's state flag.
Appearances[]
- Back to the Future Part III
- Back to the Future Part III novelization
- Super Back to the Future Part II (Password)
- Back to the Future: The Animated Series
- "Gone Fishin'" (On the cover of "Daredevil Brown" comic book)
- "Clara's Folks"
- "Verne's New Friend" (Mentioned only)
- "A Verne by Any Other Name"
- "Verne Hatches an Egg" (Picture of a bear is on the pet hospital building.)
