Talk:E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

References to use

Please add to the list references that can be used for the film article.

• Booker, M. Keith (2006). "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Praeger. pp. 157–170. ISBN 0275983951. 
• Sragow, Mike (2004). "Steven Spielberg on E.T.". In Rickman, Gregg. The Science Fiction Film Reader. Limelight Editions. pp. 254–260. ISBN 0879109947. 

Untitled

The California wildfires of August 2009 came close to the home where the movie was shot. Any update as to whether the home received any damage? 22yearswothanks (talk) 22:43, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Lead needs work

The lead for this article, and the article in general, could be greatly improved. In the lead, there could be some more general information about gross revenue, rank among top-grossing films (both outright and adjusted for inflation), awards won, place in Spielberg's career and more. I will open this up for discussion first before I make changes. Please post actual content here and we will hopefully come to a consensus and get it into the lead. ET is one of the most influential movies of all time; it deserves an excellent wiki article. Dougmac7 (talk) 06:00, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I didn't understand a word of that. If you think the article isn't an WP:FA, please nominate it for a WP:FAR. —Aladdin Sane (talk) 12:56, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Clarify and expand remark at editor request: I feel the presumption for how the article stands now goes to the other 1116 editors that got the article to FA status. See the edit stats for an indication of the work already accomplished. I'm not finding an argument for "greatly improved" in any of what's written. Having scanned the article as an editor I see one minor improvement: The Academy Awards nominations and wins have somehow gotten de-emphasized over the years, and I think may deserve re-emphasis. This criticism largely came about because of the footer of the article which does not mention them, making the info hard to find.

When speaking to the idea of "greatly improved" and the first idea given is "we need to say more about how Hollywood made a bundle off the film", I tend to react negatively: The art, not the money made, should be the emphasis in my opinion. (Note on my comments: I have not seen the movie in question; I do tend to use this article and a few other FA articles as a "benchmark" for writing about fictional subjects on Wikipedia.)

An FA tends to go into maintenance mode, and it is admitted that WP:FAR's are required sometimes because an article can go downhill, or the FA standards have changed: I'm not thrilled with the current FA standards, as they seem to mandate every lead be a WP:TLDR. I think the lead here is "right-sized" and I enjoy the article greatly. Most edits to the article now, as opposed to in its history (link goes to original August 2002 version of the article), seem to involve reverting unsourced assertions about ET's alternate sexual preference. It's not that unusual, the "Hamlet" article has the exact same sourcing issue on the exact same point. But I've got to compliment User:Baseball Bugs for this recent edit to the article, the editor knocked it out of the ballpark. —Aladdin Sane (talk) 19:49, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Inspiration

ET shares many themes with the 1956 British movie "Supersonic Saucer", in which "a group of school children at a boarding school spot a flying saucer and then soon meet a diminutive being from Venus. The alien, whom the kids name "Meba", communicates with the children by telepathy. Bad guys who were planning to steal valuables from the school safe try to kidnap "Meba" to make use of his remarkable abilities, but the children fight the bad guys and keep their friend "Meba" out of the hands of the crooks. The bad guys are rounded up with "Meba"s help at the end. There is one scene where one of the children takes "Meba" for a ride on her bike just as in E.T." -Jim Riecken, IMDB.com76.70.119.149 (talk) 19:49, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

What are ETs qualities?

Please help us come up with some of ETs Qualities comparing him to alf. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.164.18.199 (talk) 01:24, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

What's stopping you from doing it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:31, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Alf, the "alien life form" TV series? why compare E.T. to Alf? is Alf considered to be influenced by E.T.? in which way would the comparison of E.T. to Alf be relevant to the article? (roman e./germany) --84.154.71.153 (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Influence on popular culture

In my personal experience, E.T. was the film that kicked off the BMX cycling hype. Everyone about my age (~11 at that time) wanted to have a BMX bike as a direct effect of watching the film. Kuwahara manufactured a BMX bicycle that we used to call "Kuwahara E.T.", which might have also been the actual model name. IIRC the bike at least looked (maybe in fact was) identical to the one used in the film by the main character. - can anyone confirm this experience? got some reference? worth adding to the article? (roman e./germany) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.154.71.153 (talk) 17:03, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Outside of Wikipedia you could probably write a - short - essay on ET's cultural impact. It was hugely popular, but even at the time the film was generally perceived as a slightly retro one-off; moreso nowadays. It showed that there were big bucks to be made from family-friendly films, and made the video nasties seem even more unsavoury, unfortunately so in the case of John Carpenter's contemporaneous The Thing, but other than that you'll struggle to tie it in with pop culture in the 80s and subsequently. It was the golden child, the outlier, the Jesus. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 19:55, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Original Screenplay

The original screenplay E.T. apparently was plagiarized from a screenplay written by a young teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was originally titled Pi (algebraic pi) as the alien was named. It was written by Johnny Colafrancesco and submitted to a little known producer at the time. He received a letter stating a movie could be made if he provided an amount of money in the 6 figure range. The letter also stated he would relinquish ownership of the screenplay after 7 years if he did not provide the funds. An original copy of the manuscript is kept by a lawyer with the name of Bob Hays and safely locked away in his safe in Birmingham, Alabama. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.90.92.202 (talk) 04:16, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I see no reference in Google News Search or Google Books Search mentioning a Colafrancesco in relation to this film. We would need to verify this claim with a reliable source. Erik (talk | contribs) 19:46, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The Alien

Anyone else think it's a bit odd that an encyclopedic article on the film E.T. doesn't contain a single clear picture of the alien itself? It's frequently invoked in the article, and there's even a section where the alien's appearance is said to have deterred Mars from condoning the use of M&Ms, but nobody, upon reading this article, would really know what the alien looked like. Not condoning the use of pictures willy-nilly - they're just there to illustrate the text, in the end - but I'd say that this is an aspect of the film that would very much be worth illustrating. Robdwebster (talk) 12:52, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

File:ETbuckleup.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion

An image used in this article, File:ETbuckleup.jpg, has been nominated for speedy deletion at Wikimedia Commons for the following reason: Copyright violations What should I do?

Speedy deletions at commons tend to take longer than they do on Wikipedia, so there is no rush to respond. If you feel the deletion can be contested then please do so (commons:COM:SPEEDY has further information). Otherwise consider finding a replacement image before deletion occurs. A further notification will be placed when/if the image is deleted. This notification is provided by a Bot, currently under trial --CommonsNotificationBot (talk) 04:32, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It or He?

Cleverly, the article avoids giving ET - the character - a gender. It's all "ET does this" and "ET does that" rather than "he does this" and "he does that", so kudos to whoever wrote that bit. Perhaps it was unintentional, but I like to imagine that at least one of the people who contributes to Wikipedia is as clever as me. But the section about the sequel novel in Other Portrayals section is more problematic; the text talks about "its attempts to return to Earth" and "its planet". Is ET an it? Technically I suppose he doesn't have a cock, at least not that we get to see, and so concepts of gender don't apply, but it seems stilted and autistic. This must have been gone over before, what was the outcome? I could easily rewrite it as e.g. "ET attempts to return home, in the process violating the laws of his planet" - I could do that in my sleep but I like to post to talk pages like this because it boosts my public profile. Ten minutes from now I will probably make the necessary edits anyway, so don't expend too much effort replying. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 19:55, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. In fact, the plot synopsis includes many instances of "he"/"him"/"his" that refer to E.T., and several instances of "it" and "its". Rewording the entire plot synopsis to remove all of the foregoing would almost surely yield an extremely stilted result. I think the first thing to do is to research and see if we can make an authoritative determination on whether "he" or "it" is correct. I'd say the most important sources would be the screenplay, followed by any statements by its author (Mathison), followed by any any statements by Spielberg. DocKino (talk) 11:08, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

imaginary friends and other stories of imagination

call me a skeptic but there are certain things I hear that quite simply don't have the ring of truth to me, and it's from a perspective that I would categorize as "Occam's razor". Do I believe that it's more likely that a successful celebrity movie director dug deep into his childhood memories and came up with "new old" material to collaborate and merge with a stalled science fiction project (as this article says), or do I do I believe it is perhaps more likely that a successful and sophisticated celebrity movie director with an army of trained advisors and having experienced some previous very large Hollywood projects found it a more simply defended position against anticipated claims (be they spurious or not) of plagiarism and intellectual propery theft to recall interior memories that could predate most competing claims on a simplistic and hackneyed story for children? From my perspective, this article should say that "Spielberg says" or "Spielberg claims", unless there is some corroborating evidence for that story. Without evidence, somebody saying something about themselves is "original research", and it does not harm the story (and in this case Spielberg) to simply say "Spielberg says...". And while we're at it, just to help you form a perspective on what I'm saying, do we really think it's more likely that Steve Jobs sat in on a university class about calligraphy (original research with no records of course registration), or that the Apple Lisa and Macintosh more likely simply incorporated the typography features of Xerox's WYSIWYG computer systems that Jobs had seen. 96.224.42.141 (talk) 00:12, 26 November 2011 (UTC)