| abstract
| - The Back to the Future film trilogy and the short film sequel, Doc Brown Saves the World, present a detailed local history of the fictitious city of Hill Valley and the genealogies, information, and histories of its residents. Each event described in this timeline is either depicted in the films (or on other artifacts such as newspapers depicted in the films), in the novels, in screenplays to the films, or described in interviews by the Bobs (director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis and producer/co-writer Bob Gale). Additionally, some dates (e.g. Verne's birthdate and Clara's birth year) are derived from episodes of the animated series, although whether or not that information is canon is subject to dispute by fans. Information from fan fiction is not included. According to Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future Part II, whenever a time traveler alters key events occurring in the past, they effectively bring an alternate timeline into existence at their point-of-entry, and their original timeline is erased, even though its events are not forgotten by the time-traveler. Thus, every time travel jump into the past depicted in the Back to the Future saga "destroys" a current timeline and "creates" a new one, although Doc Brown often uses the phrase "erased from existence" to describe the deleterious effects of this process. Because of this, events from later timelines do not make their way backward into previous ones; for example, Bob Zemeckis has specifically denied the presence of a second Marty at Twin Pines Mall in Timeline 1. As a time traveler acquires multiple recollections of these altered timelines, a fourth-dimensional latticework begins to emerge which can be expressed graphically, as Doc Brown actually does for Marty McFly (in a crude blackboard drawing) in Back to the Future Part II. Doc further explains that the new timeline causes the world to "change around" the time traveler (e.g. Jennifer and Einstein in 1985A), leaving him or her unaffected unless the new timeline precludes the time traveler's existence (e.g. Old Biff, in a scene deleted because, according to Bob Gale, the audience likely would not understand the reasoning behind it). Accordingly, there is no second version of the time traveler, as had been suggested by Imagineer Bob Gordon in issue #108 of Starlog Magazine, years before the second film was released.
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