I can’t be the first person to notice this, but a glance through Internet searches doesn’t bring up any immediate hits.
Watch part of this clip from The Blues Brothers, starting at about 1:33. The relevant part is pretty short.
Now watch this clip from Back to the Future, 38 seconds in, starting after Doc says “When this baby hits 88 miles per hour…”
It’s not the same prop, but it looks very much like the same real-world item, a Futaba radio control, rejiggered into two movie devices. It wouldn’t be hard to see that the one in BB is an older version, with fewer bells and whistles, than the one we get a closeup of in BTTF (which itself is souped up). The handle angle is different, the stuff in the center is certainly different, but the flat-head toggles and the flip-switch toggles are in the same places on the top, along with the pair of omnidirectional controls.
Two remote controls used to very different ends by Jake Blues’ jilted bride and “Doc” Emmett Brown…and Universal Studios’ props department.