1985-April

• April 1
  • Two Japanese government-owned corporations, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, and Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation, are privatized and change their names to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and Japan Tobacco.
  • Eighth seeded Villanova defeats national powerhouse Georgetown 66–64 to win the first 64 team field NCAA Tournament in Lexington, Kentucky.
• April 11 – The USS Coral Sea collides with the Ecuadorian tanker ship Napo off the coast of Cuba.
• April 12: 1985 El Descanso bombing: A terrorist bombing attributed to the Islamic Jihad Organization in the El Descanso restaurant near Madrid, Spain, mostly attended by U.S. personnel of the Torrejon Air Force Base, causes 18 dead (all Spaniards) and 82 injured.
• April 15 – South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriages.
• April 18 – The United Kingdom has its first ever national Glow-worm day.
• April 19 – The U.S.S.R performs a nuclear test at Eastern Kazakhstan.
• April 21 – Brazilian President Tancredo Neves dies, he is succeeded by Jose Sarney.
• April 23 – Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. (The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than 3 months.)
• April 28 – The Australian Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) splits.

1985-March

• March 3 – An 8.0 on the Richter magnitude scale earthquake hits Santiago and Valparaíso leaving 177 dead, 2,575 hurt, 142,489 destroyed houses and about a million people houseless
• March 4 – The Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS, used since then to screen all blood donations in the United States.
• March 8 – A car bomb planted in Beirut by CIA mercenaries attempts to kill Islamic cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah and kills more than 80 people, injuring 200.
• March 11
  • Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and de facto leader of the Soviet Union.
  • Mohammed Al Fayed buys the London-based department store company Harrods.
• March 14 – Five lionesses at the Singapore Zoo are put on birth control after the lion population increases from 2 to 16.
• March 15 – Vice-President Jose Sarney takes the oath as the first civilian president of Brazil in 21 years, as the elected president Tancredo Neves had become severely ill on the day before.
• March 16 – Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut (he is eventually released on December 4, 1991).
• March 17 – Expo '85, a World's Fair, is held in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, until September 16.
• March 21 – Canadian paraplegic athlete and activist Rick Hansen sets out on his 40,000 km, 26 month Man in Motion tour which raises $26M for spinal cord research and quality of life initiatives.
• March 23 – OCAM dissolved.
• March 25 – The 57th Academy Awards are held at in Los Angeles, California with Amadeus winning Best Picture.
• March 31 – WrestleMania debuts at Madison Square Garden.

1985-February

• February 5 – Australia cancels its involvement in U.S.-led MX missile tests.
• February 9 – U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena is kidnapped and murdered in Mexico (his body is discovered March 5).
• February 10 – Nelson Mandela rejects an offer of freedom from the South African government.
• February 14 – CNN reporter Jeremy Levin is freed from captivity in Lebanon.^[1]
• February 16 – Israel begins withdrawing troops from Lebanon.
• February 19
  • William J. Schroeder becomes the first artificial heart patient to leave the hospital.
  • China Airlines Flight 006 is involved in a mid-air incident; while there are two injuries, no one is killed.
• February 20 – Minolta releases world's first autofocus single-lens reflex camera.
• February 28 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army carries out a mortar attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary police station at Newry, killing 9 officers in the highest loss of life for the RUC on a single day.

1985-January

January

• January 15 – Tancredo Neves is elected president of Brazil by the Congress, ending the 21-year military rule.
• January 17 – British Telecom announces it is going to phase out its famous red telephone boxes.
• January 20 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan is privately sworn in for a second term in office (publicly sworn in, January 21).
• January 27 – Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) formed.
• January 28 – In Hollywood, California, the charity single "We Are the World" is recorded by USA for Africa.

The first draft of Back to the Future was finished in February 1981. Columbia Pictures put the film in turnaround. "They thought it was a really nice, cute, warm film, but not sexual enough," Gale said. "They suggested that we take it to Disney, but we decided to see if any other of the major studios wanted a piece of us." Every major film studio rejected the script for the next four years, while Back to the Future went through two more drafts. During the early 1980s, popular teen comedies (such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Porky's) were risqué and adult-aimed, so the script was commonly rejected for being too light. Gale and Zemeckis finally decided to pitch Back to the Future to Disney. "They told us that a mother falling in love with her son was not appropriate for a family film under the Disney banner,"

Back to the Future

Writer and producer Bob Gale conceived the idea after he visited his parents in St. Louis, Missouri after the release of Used Cars. Searching their basement, Gale found his father's high school yearbook and discovered he was president of his graduating class. Gale thought about the president of his own graduating class, who was someone he had nothing to do with. Gale wondered whether he would have been friends with his father if they went to high school together.