Great Scott! One Of Back To The Future's Signature Props Is Missing And A Global Hunt Has Begun

When Marty McFly stepped onto the stage to absolutely nail his rendition of Chuck Berry's iconic song "Johnny B. Goode," he created an indelible moment of film history. "Back to the Future" has been preserved and revered ever since, but now Marty's signature red Gibson guitar is missing, and the team behind the movie is on the hunt to find it.

Gibson guitars, along with "Back to the Future" star Michael J. Fox and writer/producer Bob Gale (who worked on all three films in the "Back to the Future" trilogy), are teaming up to produce "Lost to the Future," a documentary that will chronicle their search to track down the missing guitar, which appears to have been lost somewhere in the space-time continuum (or as Fox has jokingly put it, "in some teamster's garage").

It's hard to imagine something so famous going missing, but the trailer for "Lost to the Future" explores what the guitar means and why the film's cast and crew are so desperate to find it again. Director Doc Crotzer told The Hollywood Reporter that they have "been looking into leads and rumors for a long time, and as you can imagine, we're talking 40 years ago, so memories fade. We weren't in the era of digital trails, or of receipts and things like that. There are conflicting reports too. You can find about as many different rumors as you can people."

The team believes that the guitar disappeared after it was returned to rental house Norman's Rare Guitars in Los Angeles. Crotzer approached Mark Agnesi, Gibsons' director of brand experience and a former GM for Norman's in the 2000's, about the guitar, and they believe it might have been intended to be auctioned off, although they see no evidence that it was actually sold through an auction. Most likely, a customer at Norman's simply bought the guitar. Conflicting stories emerge from there, whether the buyer was a female friend of Norman's or an international buyer from Japan, with any evidence of this sale lost to the sands of time.

With the search failing to produce any answers, the team behind the movie is now asking you — yes, YOU! — if you have any leads on where the cherry red Gibson ES-345 might be. You can call or text 1-855-345-1955 with any leads, or share your tips on the "Lost to the Future" website.

According to Gibson, the cherry red ES-345 is either a model from 1960 or 1961. The guitar doesn't have a serial number for authentication, but there is one detail that makes this particular guitar stand out from all the others: the 12th fret had a single gold bar marker on it instead of the normal split parallelogram inlay going completely down the fretboard. This unique signifier is what the team calls "the smoking gun" that will tell them they've found the right guitar.

Despite their difficulty in finding it so far, the team believes they will locate the guitar eventually. Agnesi said the "Japan theory" is the likely truth, considering how popular vintage guitars have been in the country, and they have Gibson's international teams on the hunt.

While this search is a fun bit of marketing, for director Crotzner, it's really about reuniting Fox with this guitar, either for just an hour or maybe forever:

"My hope would be whoever has this guitar is enough of a fan of the movies to allow that to happen. There are a lot of possible scenarios. Does the person who has it want to be found? Do they want to, say, lend us the guitar?"

That's not to say whoever has the guitar has to hand it over for nothing but charity. Angesi added that he is "absolutely 100 percent ready to start talking with anybody who comes forward who might have the guitar about potentially buying it," which would allow Gibson to add it to its collection.

Any vintage model of that guitar would be worth between $25,000 to $50,000, so the guitar itself is, quite literally, priceless. Happy hunting, everyone!