1. The Storybook!
While this is the one I have available for photos, I won't be putting a lot of time into it, in no small part because I had largely forgotten about it. The storybook is credited to William Kotzwinkle, who also wrote the official novelization. The copy I have has a signature from a family member that dates it 1982, and even that feels distinctly perfunctory; this was the kind of gift that got bought because it was "supposed" to be what kids were into. The condition is quite spectacularly bad, with the pages completely separated from the covers, which did somehow stay together. The best part is the cover, which captures the moody opening of the movie. As seen in the opening pic, somebody added a couple ET stickers. Here's another pic of the back.
I only had the heart to take a very brief look inside. What stood out to me, and definitely figured in what I remembered, is that a good chunk of the pictures are dedicated to the government agents and the hospital/ lab, easily the most frightening and arguably inappropriate for children (at least after ET drinking beer). This part certainly shaped as much as I did remember of the movie, and one might think it maybe colored my opinion against it, but if anything, freaky was what kid me was into (so, no change). Here's a spread, and then I'm moving on...
2. The Bike!
If there was one thing about ET that made a favorable impression on me, it was the LJN toyline. What was most interesting about this was that the manufacturer didn't bother developing a core body of action figures with a consistent style or scale, but just put out a bunch of semi-random junk. I'm not sure how much I had, but the one I definitely remember is a toy bike with Elliott and ET aboard. Here's a decent pic I found floating free.
From my recollection, my brother and I were still playing with this toy until at least 1986. I can recall a fair amount of detail, including the fact that ET was removable. Where I'm definitely hazy is the size of the thing. The best reference image I could find puts the bike at exactly 3 inches, which would leave Elliott not much bigger than an army man figure, maybe about the size of a Marx 70mm space guy if he could stand upright. I can further remember that at some point we dropped it out a window, fitted with an improvised parachute. That would sound like the end of the line, except as far as I remember, the toy actually survived. I can only guess what misadventure finally claimed the pair, but I must admit it's not likely they lasted much longer. And that leads us to...
3. The stuffed toy!
Of all the ET merchandise, the ones that were truly everywhere were the stuffed toys. From prevailing accounts, these were mad in a range of sizes by a company called Kamar, with the most frequently encountered specimens being small/ medium toys made from a smooth, vaguely leathery material. In an ironic twist, the best and most well-attested images are from the movie Critters, where a specimen gets ignominiously shredded by one of the invaders. Here's a pic credited to Horror Movie A Day; I politely disagree with the author's assessment that this is a knockoff.
"Sure you got four sequels, but my movie made over $2 billion adjusted dollars."
And this is something where I have a possible Mandela effect. I have a very distinct memory of seeing a whole bin of stuffed ETs on sale. I don't believe I was particularly young, maybe in 1985 if not later, which would definitely be at the tail end for first-wave merchandise. What's entirely odd is that I remember them being in different, very bright colors, which sounds unremarkable except that I've never seen a single picture of an authorized toy that wasn't gray or brown like the movie portrays. Maybe it was a last-ditch recolor the people really into ET have forgotten about. Maybe they were actual bootlegs/ knockoffs. Maybe even my memory is hazy that far back. (But... I found Krull.) Now I'm just getting depressing, so let's move onto...
4. The video game!
This is of course the most infamous part of the ET vintage merchandise. It's now infamous as the worst video game of its time, and a financial bomb that possibly contributed to the collapse of Atari and the whole video game industry in 1983. Inevitably, some apologists have come forward. Two of the better works of revisionist scholarship come from Polygon, which covers the much wider context of the "crash", and the Video Game History Foundation, which does a run-down of actual contemporary reviews of ET and other Atari games. My own recollection is that I heard of this game reading a few hilariously ancient books on video games still on the library shelves in the early 1990s, without getting any hint of the disaster that would come out of the game. A few years after that, perhaps in 1995, I saw an actual copy on the shelves of a thrift store, quite possibly my latest sighting of an ET item "in the wild", and still had no notion of the infamy it would develop. In hindsight. it really took the age of the internet for people to be aware enough of old video games to talk about it. No pic; let's just move on to...
5. The... sequel???
Now we have the centerpiece of this exhibit. I remember seeing this on school library shelves, probably at least until around 1990. I now know it was written by William Kotzwinkle and published in 1985, which was practically current for a school library book. I am sure I never read it, but I believe I looked over the back cover at least once. Here's the cover in full glory, with the original novelization of the movie.
The novel is now notorious, if known at all, as the closest thing ET got to a sequel. It does indeed follow ET's adventures after the movie, but its tone and overall relationship with the movie comes closer to what would now be considered fan fiction. I haven't ventured to try to find or read it, but did find reviews at Branded in the 80s and The New Englander, neither of which is encouraging. It's safe to say if an official ET "canon" is ever hashed out, nobody is going out on a limb for this book.
Now, I wrap this up. I feel that I have at least better explained why I have no problem treating ET as a "franchise" movie. Consider this a further testimony to how we absorbed pop culture. There was no ebay, no Wikipedia, no official or unofficial dissections of canon, just whatever we saw on the shelves, and that was enough to keep the memory of a movie alive long after any hope of a sequel had sailed. For that, even I can give the movie a little respect. That's all for now, more to come!
Whoa
ReplyDelete