It's just a relatively small clock on the face of a building. Big Ben is a clock tower, and many others. They're meant to be seen from afar... The courthouse clock is too small for that, plus there is no tower!
It's all a lie!
When they were building it in 1985 it was a clock tower.
I think that guy just stole his wallet.
Well, the tower is there in the 1948 shot from "An Act of Murder," it's still a very small clock but at least it's a tower, and markedly different from how it appears in BTTF:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/back-to-the-future-clock-tower_n_4242145.html
That just makes it even more odd that it's not like that for Back to the Future, but I guess they had to stick the clock onto the face of the building because it was a lot easier to shoot the movie with it more accessible.
Either way,, it is known as the Clock Tower.
Perhaps take it as an injoke.
I think the writer envisioned a tower, and it was planned that way, until it became too difficult to film it that way. Or they had already removed the tower but decided not to change the dialogue to "courthouse clock"... Or even forgot to.
shareCould be the case...seems like decent thinking.
So Millburn...
"I think the writer envisioned a tower, and it was planned that way, until it became too difficult to film it that way."
Yeah, why not. That would make sense and it is very likely that it had happened this way.
Save the clock tower!
Saaave the clock tower!
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Next we'll find out that this isn't a real product: https://www.oreillyauto.com/flux-capacitor?q=121g
EVERYTHING IS A LIE!
I bought one of those out of the back of one of those white vans that sell high end "overstocked" speakers for $100, and it didn't work beyond showing a snazzy light show. The speakers weren't much good either..
shareTokyo Olympics 2020 isn't happening in 2020, either!
Another shocking fact; Tokyo and Nintendo are the WRONG spellings of those words, to the japanese people, they are NOT "Tokyo" and "Nintendo", but 東京 （とうきょう！） and 任天堂 (にんてんどう！） - it's the insane, mad and illogical english pronunciation that creates this kind of mistakes.
Can you believe it, Nintendo misspells their OWN name..
Just in case you can't read the hiragana in the brackets, that would be "Toukyou" and "Nintendou" (this is how japanese write it in hiragana, because that's correct).
Other ways to write it in Roumaji are:
Tōkyō and Nintendō
Tookyoo and Nintendoo
Absolutely WRONG way to write it would be
Tohkyoh and Nintendoh
But english madness results in these warped roumajizations, it's terrible, but we have to somehow live with it. Because an english-speaker would BASICALLY pronounce "Tokyo" and "Nintendo" correctly, due to the messed-up way english is pronounced, they usually omit the lines or the 'ou' (and even more rarely use 'oo'), when writing those words - the english has a tendency to avoid short wovels, they always 'stretch' them, so it sounds 'correct enough' to japanese ears.
So, Clock Tower not being an actual TOWER is the least of my worries..