Michael J. Fox Doesn't Care About A Mistake In Back To The Future's Most Iconic Scene

Like any movie in this specific subgenre, there are plenty of confusing time travel issues that occur throughout "Back to the Future." Some of them are pretty major — like how neither Lorraine (Lea Thompson) nor George (Crispin Glover) notice the fact that their son Marty (Michael J. Fox) looks an awful lot like the mysterious Calvin Klein who played such a prominent role in the start of their relationship. But there are a number of insignificant little nitpicks that don't hurt the movie's credibility too much, but have nonetheless been noticed by fans over the years.

One example is the specific model of guitar Marty plays during the school dance that serves as the climax of "Back to the Future." To the casual observer, it looked like the type of guitar that rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry's (fictional) cousin Marvin would've been playing. So it fit the bill within the movie's humorous suggestion that it was actually Marty McFly who debuted the song "Johnny B. Goode" to the world, a song Chuck Berry wouldn't release for three more years. As for Michael J. Fox himself, he was only pantomiming Marty's guitar playing and also didn't do his own singing for the scene.

Indeed, the model of guitar in the scene — a Cherry Red Gibson ES-­345 — was used by the real Chuck Berry throughout his career and in many of his most famous live and televised performances. So it seems like the movie did its due diligence in that regard. What's the issue, then? Well, the Gibson ES-­345 wasn't introduced until 1958, three years after that scene took place.

October 14, 2025, saw the release of Michael J. Fox's memoir, "Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum." As the title suggests, it is a deep dive on Fox's career during the making of "Back to the Future," with a lot of the focus given to fun anecdotes about the movie and its legacy. In the book, he reveals that guitar experts are the ones who typically point out the error of Marty playing a Gibson ES-­345 before the guitar was actually created. Those experts then question why Marty didn't simply play a Gibson ES-350T instead, which is also a famous model of guitar and one that Berry himself used in and around 1955.

As Fox explains in the book (via Entertainment Weekly), "The film's art department simply picked the ES-­345 because it evoked the iconic wine-red axe that Chuck Berry famously duckwalked across stages all over the world." While noting that he understands why people feel the need to point out such mistakes, and that it simply speaks to how much people love the movie that they watch it over and over again to notice these types of things, Fox doesn't feel that the guitar gaffe is a huge issue. "Both the '55 and '58 versions of the Gibson electric are rare and beautiful instruments," he writes. "For me, it makes little difference which I played."

Unfortunately, the exact guitar Fox played in "Back to the Future" has become an example of an iconic movie prop that seems lost forever. The last time Fox or anyone else involved with the movie saw it was literally during the filming of the scene in which it was used. It's whereabouts have been a mystery every since. If a crew member walked off with it, which seems to be the most commonly believed theory, that crew member has been able to keep his or her secret for over 40 years.