E.T. 40th Anniversary - A Journey Back In Time
Forty years ago, a young Steven Spielberg released his sixth feature film - a science fiction fairy tale by the name of “E.T. The Extraterrestrial”, which captivated the imagination of audiences worldwide like no other film had ever done before.
Even now, it remains the second best-grossing film in history. But what was the world like in 1982 and why did this film in particular leave such an indelible mark?
Join us for a trip back in time to 1982, in search for the magic of E.T.
After a decade of rocking events that included the energy crisis, and a collective consciousness still battling the scars of the Vietnam war, the 1980s had a slow start in the United States.
But as soon as former Hollywood star Ronald Reagan was elected as their new president (1981), a wave of optimism dawned in the nation.
An optimism that remained for most of the decade, spurred by auspicious financial results and global economic expansion, which established the notion that the sky was the limit, and anything was possible.
Nothing reflected best this positivism than the entertainment industry, from the toys offered to children to the films and TV series that reflected the ideals of the time.
Although the Rubik’s cube took the toy world by a storm in 1980, and video games were making their apparition, rag dolls, Barbies, action figures, and LEGO bricks remain children’s favourite toys.
In 1982 the playground is full of bikes, skates, roller skates, hula-hoops, jumping ropes, frisbees, ping-pong tables, and other traditional games.
Disco music, roller skates, and paranormal events were the main pop trends. Rainbows, wool laces, and pompons adorned little girls and teens.
The success of shows like “Little House on a Prairie” and “Dukes of Hazzard”, and the established popularity of country music since the late 1960s, created a country-cool trend, replicated by upscale fashion labels such as Ralph Lauren.
Pop culture and social conventions were slowly detaching from the influence of the late 1970s, but as soon as the changes were set in motion, nothing could stop their quick advance.
And yet, some things stayed very much the same.
After a decade of feminist movement, women were still pigeonholed to working as secretaries, teachers, nurses, and in retail sales.
It would take several more years before they could start climbing the corporate ladder towards higher rank positions.
"9 to 5" film poster (1980)
We ignore the profession of Elliott’s mother in the film, but we can assume rather safely that she works as a secretary.
But while traditional roles are still the norm, a raising awareness of health and good looks becomes a trend, and Jane Fonda’s Workout videos make aerobics -and its fashion- a global trend.
In 1981, the Wedding of the Century between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer took the world by a storm, in a fairy-tale ceremony tailored to please a society that fervently wanted to believe in happily-ever-afters and dreams come true.
Since the announcement of her engagement to the Prince of Wales, the fashion style of Lady Diana Spencer was copied everywhere, from her hair style and romantic blouses down to her wedding dress.
People of all ages enjoy music on radio, LPs, RPMs, and cassettes. The latter can be carried and listened everywhere, from Boomboxes to portable Walkmans.
The music charts of the time are topped by ballads, country music, and rock’n’roll, with punk acts and avant-garde groups of techno music thrown in for good measure.
Some of the most popular performers of the first years of the decade included Christopher Cross, Olivia Newton John, Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand, Herb Alpert, and the groups The Manhattan Transfer, Alan Parsons Project, Air Supply, Chicago, Asia, Toto, Journey, Yes!, and Pink Floyd, to name only a few.
The lure of the paranormal inherited from the 1970s - with a record in UFO sightings, the quest for the Sasquatch making headlines, the book “I Visited Ganimedes” by Josip Ibrahim becoming a best-seller, and the mind-reading, spoon-bending powers of Uri Geller gaining global fame- still permeate the collective consciousness during the first years of the decade.
Thus, it was not coincidence that the early 1980s saw a surge of magicians, such as David Copperfield, Doug Henning, and Siegfried and Roy, who astonished audiences worldwide with elaborate shows and sophisticated illusions.
People wanted to believe in magic.
In fact, ‘dreams come true’ seemed to be the motto of the era, one embodied by two young entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who would become millionaires when most of their peers were still in college.
For the first time in history youth didn’t just have the drive and the ambition, but they were making more money than their own parents.
The term Yuppie (from the terms ‘young’ and ‘hippie’) was coined to define the new generation of worker. Young, assertive, competitive, and highly ambitious, they had arrived to conquer the world with an inebriating false sense of control.
Personal Computers had made their first timid entry into offices during the late 1960s, but by 1981 they were still far from common, being regarded as costly toys.
Even in the office, their uses were limited, and could not dethrone the electric typewriter, the roll-o-dex, the file archiver, and the fax machine.
At home, Betamax is the only source for home video entertainment. All news and entertainment came from printed media (magazines and newspapers), radio, television, and the cinema.
While PacMan is all the craze at video arcades, Atari and Intellivision present options for playing video games at home. In 1980 Nintendo launched its first portable video game, “Game & Watch” and by 1982 they are almost as common as pocket calculators.
Hoping to bank on the popularity of video games, this same year Disney releases its ambitious avant-garde fantasy “Tron”, which fails to reach its target audience, but presents to the world the future of computer animation.
If dreams were the constant theme of the early 1980s, the future was a persistent obsession at this time, often faced with more curiosity and optimism than realism.
In October 1982, Disney enterprises opened its newest amusement park, EPCOT Center, an ambitious project once dreamed by Walt Disney himself, which would serve as a prototype for the world of tomorrow, as revealed by its acronym: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and its slogan: “the magic of possibility”.
The fact that the original project was never realized didn’t matter - EPCOT presented the public with the latest advances in technology at the time, including the widespread use of animatronics in most of its rides.
To those who visited EPCOT at this time, the future never seemed more reachable or more exciting.
Family films were rare
In 1982 the global population is a little over 4 billion people.
Globalization is a term not yet coined, but scientists all over the world are already alerting on the issues of overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources
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The Berlin wall still stands imposing and mortal, and despite a thawing in relations and the attempts to establish cultural exchange, the iron curtain remains largely impenetrable.
The threat of nuclear conflict still hangs over the collective consciousness.
In terms of filmed entertainment, the cost of producing and distributing a show was much higher than today and required a larger production team.
Thus, the number of new productions were significantly lower than what we find nowadays, and yet were one of the most buoyant industries at the time.
Even after the introduction of video cassettes, the distribution of filmed entertainment was also carried out at a slower pace, and additional services -such as close captioning, dubbing, and subtitling- added additional production time.
Save for very special cases, it was not uncommon for a film or sitcom to take months, and sometimes even years, to be released to a global audience.
In order to cut costs, reruns were usual on television, and it was not uncommon to watch TV series two and up to ten years old.
No one complained - the world ran at a much slower pace.
Some popular TV series and sitcoms at this time include “Fantasy Island”, “Dallas”, “Dynasty”, “Mork & Mindy”, “Three’s Company”, “Laverne & Shirley”, “The Smurfs”, “Facts of Life”, “Diff’rent Strokes”, “The Love Boat”, “Charlie’s Angels”, “Chips”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “The Greatest American Hero”, “The Bad News Bears”, and “Benson”, among many others.
Family films -aimed mainly at adults but child-friendly- were rare. Save for animated features, Disney dramas, and comedies, most theatres screened serious dramas, catastrophe films, or horror films.
Notable exceptions of these years were the “Star Wars” saga (1977, 1980), “Grease” (1978), the “Superman” saga (1978, 1980), “The Black Stallion” (1979), “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), and “Clash of the Titans” (1981), all of which became box office hits.
Science Fiction films were not uncommon, but for the most part they were regarded as cheesy entertainment.
Although Stanley Kubrick raised the bar of the genre with “2001: Space Odyssey”, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, subsequent films such as “Barbarella”, “Logan’s Run” (1976), and TV shows such as “Star Trek”, “Lost In Space”, “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, and “Space 1999", reaffirmed the trend.
In 1977, “Star Wars” broke the mold, proving a huge box office success and unleashing an avalanche of copycats. But with the sole exception of “Battlestar Galactica” (1978), none was able to reach a comparable success.
A constant subject in the realm of fantasy, space exploration and the possibility of establishing contact with outer space entities took over the collective imagination after the first moon landing in 1969.
The 1970s were a especially fruitful decade for NASA, launching at least four successful missions that amplified our knowledge and understanding of the Universe: the Viking I and II missions to Mars, and the Voyager I and II probes to explore the outer solar system.
In 1977 the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Ohio reported a signal from outer space that was catalogued as the strongest candidate for an extraterrestrial radio transmission ever detected.
In 1980 for the first time ever, science became a popular topic by the hand of astrophysicist Carl Sagan who, in his slow baritone voice, untangled the laws of the universe in the TV series “Cosmos”.
The series proved such a huge success that a book, also by Sagan, was released the same year as its companion.
Sagan was a fervent advocate in the search for intelligent life in the universe, endorsing the idea of extraterrestrial communication as an actual, although remote, possibility.
But this was enough to fuel people’s imaginations.
In addition to these scientific advances, after a 6-year recess, in 1981 NASA launched the first space shuttle, the most successful human mission into space since the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s.
The shuttle not only lowered the cost of space missions by “recycling” the spaceship for up to 100 trips, but it also helped to launch satellites and space labs into orbit.
In August of 1982, the first Compact Disc (co-developed by Philips and Sony) was manufactured, heralding a thrilling new era of digital data.
All of these achievements, along with the rise of computing, seemed to confirm the general belief that the future meant technology, and the technology of the future was already within our reach.
This is the world in which a being from outer space visits our planet, becomes stranded by mistake, and befriends a human child as lonely as itself.
Although Spielberg had previously presented a story of extraterrestrial connection in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), this time he sought to present it through the eyes of a child, and even from the point of view of the extraterrestrial itself.
This novel treatment made of “E.T.” a highly personal experience and instantly original, allowing the audience to savor the adventure almost on a first-person basis.
The story captivated a world eager to believe in fairy tales and happy endings.
One of the key aspects of “E.T.” is that the alien is a real physical creature, the creation of Carlo Rambaldi, who also created the creature for “Alien” (1980), and the worms in David Lynch’s “Dune” (1985).
Thanks to Jim Henson and a long line of illustrious stop-motion animators, audiences were familiar with the use of puppets on films. Thus, it was accepted that the extraterrestrial creature would be a combination of ‘strings and cables’ magic.
However, the result achieved by Rambaldi was of such quality, that persuaded many to believe that the creature was real.
Several versions of the alien were used depending on the need of the shot: robotic miniatures, a full-size head for close ups, hand prosthetics, and a full-body cast worn by an actor for scenes in which E.T. had to run or walk around the house.
Unlike modern films, in which CGI replaces characters and creatures of imagination, in 1982 digital animation is still a developing technology, and it would be a decade more until it can render images with enough definition as to recreate believable creatures interacting with actors on the scene.
However, E.T.’s physicality is a key factor in its credibility.
As Rambaldi once declared in an interview: "The secret of creating what technology is unable to express lies in the work of the artisan, who is able to develop characteristics that touch our deepest emotions."
A fact that Spielberg would learn the hard way a few years later.
Following the example of his friend George Lucas, in 2002 Spielberg decided to revamp his iconic film with the latest CGI technology for its 20th anniversary edition.
New scenes were added with a digital creature, modifying and even deleting details on some scenes. But the public noticed the changes and largely disapproved of them.
The backlash meant that Spielberg finally went back to his original version, and vowed never to modify any of his films with CGI.
For all its technological achievements, "E.T."’s main strength comes from its emotional honesty.
Spielberg used most of his children actors’ natural reactions and even unscripted lines (ad lib), choosing skilled actors for the main roles, and actual medical personnel for the scene where E.T. is being studied.
All these creates a pervading mood of convincing realism, thus taking the fantastical into reality.
The music score by John Williams -who was already familiar to the ears of audiences worldwide thanks to “Star Wars”, “Superman”, and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” - masterfully enhances every mood portrayed on the screen, creating unforgettable emotional landscapes.
“E.T.” was first exhibited in the Cannes Film Festival and received a standing ovation. It was only a prelude to what would follow.
Even Richard Attenborough, who won “Best Film” at that year’s Academy Awards for his film “Gandhi”, thought that “E.T.” should have won instead, considering it “a quite extraordinary piece of cinema.”
A self-proclaimed “Peter Pan” fan, the film inspired Michael Jackson to record a song, “Someone in the dark”, based on the story of E.T. and Elliott. This, in turn, lead to an audiobook of the film, narrated by Jackson himself.
Both E.T. and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” were released in 1982, and both would become icons of the decade, changing the parameters by which entertainment was created and gauged.
A core scene in “E.T.” is the one in which the mother reads “Peter Pan” to Gertie, while Elliott and E.T. listen from a nearby room.
In the story, Tinker Bell dies and the only way to resurrect her is to clap while expressing the belief that fairies exist. The scene plays again in the back of our minds when Elliott bids a tearful goodbye to E.T.’s corpse, only to notice that its dead flowers are now coming alive.
Both scenes encapsulate the message of the film - anything is possible, and miracles can happen if you believe.
Most of what we associate nowadays with the 1980s happened from 1983 onwards.
For its last issue of 1982, Time magazine honored the Personal Computer as the “Machine of the Year”. In 1983, the third and last successful installment in the “Star Wars” trilogy was released, sealing the way in which films would be made and marketed henceforth.
That same year cell phones hit the stores for the first time ever, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” becomes the best-selling album of all time, “Flashdance” is released, Madonna releases her best-selling debut album “Madonna”, Cindy Lauper releases her debut LP “She’s so unusual”, and MTV is born.
All of these and more would change the face of the world forever, defining popular culture and what the rest of the decade will be.
Even forty years after its release, “E.T.” speaks to audiences around the world, and still enchants new generations of cinephiles willing to engage in an unforgettable adventure.
The impact of E.T. can be illustrated by the fact that it’s the film with the longest theatrical run ever, with more than a year of continuous showing in theatres.
Looking back at “E.T.” and 1982, we can see how far film making and technology have advanced in these four decades.
But this retro vision may also make us nostalgic about the things we have lost since then - from the simplicity of the analogue and the blind optimism to the focus on emotions before technology-, reminding us of what makes us human and connects us to the rest of the world.
To Learn More
Interested in taking a closer look at 1982? Check out this EPCOT Souvenir book from 1982:
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