Biff Tannen - Back To The Future: The Animated Series

Back To The Future: The Animated Series

Biff was the present day villain of the series, although most episodes featured one of his numerous ancestors or descendants instead, always as some villainous cretin, so frequently that, when in Rome, Marty rhetorically questioned if there was a "Tannen" in every time and place they visited after coming face to face with Bifficus. Biff's ancestors also have the same tendency to use the phrase butt-head or some variant. It was his great-great-grandfather General Beuregard Tannen, a Confederate cavalry officer and presumably Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen's father, who was the first to use butt-head as it is today. He would call his Union foes and his enemies in general "buttocks brains" until one of Doctor Brown's time traveling sons corrected him and said the proper phrase was "butt-head". The Confederate approved the term.

The series established that Biff has a son, Biff, Jr., who is about 18 years old by 1991. No mention of a wife is made, and it appears that Biff is a single father or a widower (it should be noted that in an early drafted script for Part II, Biff, Jr. was to be the owner of the 80's café in 2015). In the episode, The Money Tree, he is shown driving a tow truck, which means in the six years between the movies and the series; he still has his automotive detailing business (he drove a "Biff's"-branded tow truck in 1985 in the movies).

The series has a few episodes centered on Biff. It revealed that in 1967, he saw the Comet Kablooey and thought it was an alien ship, and that in 1992, he tried claiming Jennifer Parker's grandparents' ranch after finding a deed saying the Tannen family owned it. However, Marty, Jules, and Verne went back to 1875 to make sure that the Tannens never got the deed.

One episode in the second season which took place in 1944 introduced a military character named Frank Tannen, possibly Biff's father who was later absent during the fifties, who lived in Hill Valley and was in the United States Army.

The first season of the cartoon featured a segment after the end credits in which Biff would break the fourth wall and tell the audience a joke which related to the theme of the episode.