12 Terrible Early Concepts That Almost Ruined Iconic Heroes

7. Marty McFly Could've Been A Video Pirate & Doc Brown Could've Been Professor Brown

The first draft screenplay of Back to the Future was written in 1980 by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and, while there were a number of notable differences to the plot, it's the differences in the two main characters that we're going to be focusing on here. For starters, Doc Brown was going to be known as "Professor Emmett L. Brown" and Marty would have called him "Prof" instead of "Doc" - but that's just a minor difference in comparison to some of the other changes that would have been evident. Professor Brown would have lived in an abandoned Orpheum theater and would have had a pet monkey named Shemp instead of a dog named Einstein. Marty would have been a streetwise video pirate as well as an aspiring musician whose alias would've been "Marty Lewis". His girlfriend would have been called Suzy Parker and his mother would have been called Eileen Baines. Thankfully, Universal didn't want to make a movie in which the hero was a video pirate - and the idea of Doc Brown being called Professor Brown (and owning a pet monkey) just doesn't feel as if it would've worked.