National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment released Back to the Future Part II in November 1989, reuniting director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale for the long-awaited sequel to their 1985 blockbuster. Filmed back-to-back with Part III, the film pushed practical and optical effects to their limits while imagining 2015 with now-iconic specificity. It remains a defining artifact of late-eighties Hollywood ambition.

This cell, confirmed as the Back to the Future Part II Title Card, captures the film's opening logo treatment across three successive frames of 35mm. The center frame carries a visible lens flare or reel artifact that partially obscures the lettering, giving this particular pull a quiet documentary quality — the title sequence caught mid-projection, exactly as audiences first encountered it.