E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. phone home!

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is perhaps Steven Spielberg's signature fantasy film. It was the biggest blockbuster of 1982 and, in fact, The Eighties as a whole. John Williams' score, flying bicycles, and an Ugly Cute alien hero are just the tip of the iceberg here.

A group of aliens are in a forest on Earth, not far from a suburb, exploring and collecting plant samples. They are forced to leave in a hurry when alien-seeking scientists arrive on the scene, and one of them is not on the ship when it takes off...

Down in that suburb live Elliott, his older brother Michael, and his little sister Gertrude, the products of a broken home with an overworked mom named Mary (the dad is absent). Over the course of a few days, lonely Elliott encounters the stranded alien and lures it to his house with Reese's Pieces, offering it shelter and naming it E.T.

E.T. learns English—if only a few words—through the kids and especially television, and finally is able to tell them what he wants: to "phone home." Elliott helps him rig up a telephone-like device from such things as a Speak-and-Spell to attempt to transmit a message to his planet. But as they wait for a response, E.T. gradually sickens—as does Elliott, because the alien has developed a psychic bond with him. The government scientists catch up with E.T., and soon all seems lost for the poor little guy. It will take The Power of Love and a daring escape to set things right...

For information on the infamous video game adaption, go here.

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial provides examples of

• Actually Pretty Funny: Mary fails to contain her laughter when reprimanding her son Elliott for calling Michael "penis breath."
• Aliens Are Bastards: Averted, the aliens have no intention of conquering Earth, just sampling Earth's plants, though it's left ambigous as to why exactly they're collecting them. For all their advanced technology, however, they're still capable of making mistakes, such as leaving one of their own on Earth.
• Always with You
• Armies Are Evil: Averted. They're more like obstructive and arguably they have a point.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the van during the Chase Scene.

Michael: I'm gonna crash and we're all gonna die and they'll never give me my license!

• Batman in My Basement
• The Big Damn Kiss: Parodied Trope by Elliott, who is subliminally reenacting The Quiet Man. Interspersed with actual footage (which E.T. is watching on TV) for bonus points.
• Big No/Please Don't Leave Me: When Michael wakes up and sees the flower that E.T. has revived begin to die again, he shouts out a Big "NO!", which is cued up in synch to Elliott's scream of "E.T., DON'T GOOOO!!!", right before E.T. flatlines.
• Billing Displacement: Dee Wallace as Elliott's mother Mary.
• Bittersweet Ending: E.T. gets to back to his home planet, but that means saying goodbye to Elliott. But on the lighter side of things, it's plausible that the aliens will return to Earth to grab more plant samples.
• Bowdlerise: For the 2002 special edition re-release of the film, the guns of the cops at the end of the film were digitally replaced by CGI walkie-talkies (Spielberg, now a father himself, felt the shotguns could have been too frightening for his children) and "terrorist" changed to "hippie" (referring to Michael's Halloween costume). When the film eventually was released on DVD, the initial run saw both the 2002 release and the original theatrical cut packaged together in one set.
  • Some sources say it was Drew Barrymore who asked for the guns to be edited out.
  • The change was mocked mercilessly by many, but perhaps most infamously by South Park in the episode "Free Hat" (which showed us what would have happened if this change had also been applied to Saving Private Ryan). After the episode aired, Spielberg himself later admitted that editing E.T. was a mistake and vowed never to do such a thing again.
  • "And you know what they're saying into those walkie-talkies? 'Where the hell are our guns? We're trying to stop an alien from escaping!'"
• A Boy and His X: A boy and his marooned alien botanist.
• But Now I Must Go: "I'll be... right here."
• Cast the Expert: The doctors are real doctors. The commentary mentions that this was because actors wouldn't quite speak as if they had been using the proper terms for years because, well, they hadn't been.
• Chekhov's Gun: E.T. being able to make Elliot's bike fly.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Mary is reading the trope naming section of Peter Pan to daughter Gertie at one point, foreshadowing E.T.'s recovery in the climax.
  • Also, that seems to be the principle behind the flying bikes, as seen when Elliot and Michael's buddies all take flight on their bikes to evade the feds.
• Coy Girlish Flirt Pose: Elliot is a deceptively good ladies' man.
• Disappeared Dad: "He's in Mexico with Sally."
• Disney Death: E.T.
• A Dog Named "Dog": E.T. is an extraterrestrial.
• Dramatic Alien VTOL: When E.T. finally goes home.
• Drop What You Are Doing
• Dungeons and Dragons: This is what the kids were playing when Elliott wanders outside and discovers E.T.
• Enforced Method Acting: When Gertie bursts in on Elliot and sees E.T. for the first time, Drew Barrymore was actually scared when E.T. suddenly stretched his neck up.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials
• Everytown, America
• The Faceless: With the exception of Elliot's mother, the audience doesn't see the faces of any adults until the final third of the movie, playing up the film's perspective from a child's POV.
• Follow the Leader: A few mostly-forgotten knockoffs such as Nukie and especially Mac and Me, which cranks the Product Placement Up to Eleven. More successfully, this was the likely inspiration for the Sitcom ALF.
  • Less successfully, the boy and his alien plot was stolen for the Mystery Science Theater 3000-fodder Pod People.
• For Halloween I Am Going as Myself: Not quite; E.T.'s one of the rare examples who can't go as himself. He needs a formless ghost sheet.
• Free the Frogs
• Full-Moon Silhouette: The Ur Example.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Michael says "son of a bitch" at one point when he's driving the van. It's said so quietly that you have to have the subtitles turned on to catch it the first time around.
  • Also:

Elliott: *fed up that nobody believes him about E.T.* IT'S NOTHING LIKE THAT, PENIS BREATH!

• • (Considering what "penis breath" is implying).
• Healing Hands: E.T.'s famous finger.
• Heart Light: E.T. is probably the Trope Codifier
• Hope Spot: After being able to elude the cop cars, one of Michael's friends cheers "We made it!" only for a couple dozen FBI agents to burst back onto the scene.
• Humans Are Morons: Averted. Not only do humans heal him and help send him home but there are many moments in which E.T. seems less intelligent than humans, despite coming from a more advanced race, such as when he becomes fascinated with a can of pencils, only to run screaming when they tip over.
• Innocent Aliens: The title character.
• Meaningful Echo: Because E.T. parrots what others say, there are a good deal of these by the end, such as "I'll be right here."
• Messianic Archetype: E.T., right down to the resurrection and the Michaelangelo touching of fingers between man and the Divine. So blatant was the parable it was spoofed on The Simpsons:

Rev. Lovejoy: I remember another gentle visitor from the heavens, he came in peace and then died, only to come back to life, and his name was... E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. (cries) I loved that little guy.

• • Spielberg himself has said he never intended the film to be interpreted as a religious fable, and has himself joked about it.
• Mood Motif
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: E.T. hides himself amongst toys to avoid detection.
• Never Trust a Trailer
• No Name Given / Only Known by Their Nickname: The scientist tracking E.T. begins the film as a nameless, faceless figure distinguished by the bunch of keys hanging from his belt; later in the film, when he becomes a more sympathetic figure, his face is shown, but his name is never revealed. In the end credits he is listed as "Keys".
• Oh Crap: The scientist attempting to scramble back into the moving van, as Elliott pulls out the last peg of an attached walkway.
• One Head Taller: Played for Laughs; Elliott has to climb on top of a fallen classmate to kiss the girl.
• Parental Substitute
• Phrase Catcher: "Shut up, Greg!"
• Playing Sick
• Plot Hole: As the Mad Magazine parody asked, why couldn't E.T. heal himself with his own finger when he fell ill, or fly to escape the scientists at the beginning?
  • Pretty sure one's healing powers can't heal one's own Death by Despair. No good reason for him not flying himself, though.
• Product Placement: Perhaps the definitive example of the trope in the just-introduced Reese's Pieces, which saw a successful launch in large part thanks to this film.
  • While M&M/Mars kicked themselves for turning down the offer to use M&Ms. Oops.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The police and government agents are the villains of the film, but even then they are very reasonable, never actively trying to harm the children when they find out and even giving Elliott time to grieve after ET dies. This is particularly true of Keys, who gently talks to Elliott to try and figure out what's wrong with E.T., while telling him that E.T.'s presence on Earth is a miracle.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: When Elliott goes to the forest at Halloween and his mother asks where he is. Gert: "Anyways, why would Elliott go to the forest? Why would he do such a thing?"
• Shout-Out:
  • Two to buddy George Lucas' Star Wars franchise: Elliott shows E.T. some of his action figures, and one of the trick-or-treaters is dressed as Yoda. (Notably, E.T. appears to recognize Yoda. Perhaps he's just happy to see someone who isn't freakishly tall and smooth-skinned, but then...) John Williams even sneaks "Yoda's Theme" from Empire Strikes Back into the score at that moment.
    • Also, when the goverment agents invade Elliot's house, the astronauts get a well known breath.
    • Came full circle when members of E.T.'s species appeared in the Galactic Senate in The Phantom Menace.
    • And in the Expanded Universe, we have the E.T. Species senator funding an extra-galactic botanical expedition...
    • And in Revenge of the Sith, Yoda's departure from Kashyyk looks much like ET's departure from Earth.
  • There's also a shout-out to that other Star-thing:

"Well, can't he just beam up?" "This Is Reality, Greg!"

• Sistine Steal: One that Animaniacs hilariously brought full circle in one short: The Warner siblings help Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel and the result is that Elliott and E.T. are depicted upon it.
• Spheroid Dropship: The alien ship.
• Spin-Off/Expanded Universe: There was a pair of novels published which expanded upon E.T.'s race, who are master botanists and develop their technology from plants.
• Starring Special Effects
• Strapped to An Operating Table: Both Elliott and E.T. get laid down on operating tables when they are sick and the house is quarantined. Unfortunately, E.T. doesn't last very long...
• Synchronization
• Tastes Like Friendship: Reese's Pieces.
• This Is Reality
• Uranus Is Showing:

Tyler: "Where's he from? Uranus? Get it? Your anus?" Greg: He doesn't get it, Ty. Tyler: "Get it, YOUR? ANUS?"

• The World Is Just Awesome: It's suggested E.T. sees Halloween this way.