• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Popular Culture Without E.T.

I don't care for E.T. much myself, but I enjoy a lot of the films mentioned that only saw the light of day because of its success and I recognise it as a very significant film. The point of these articles, like any alternate history, is to examine how if you pull on one thread of history how events might change. I've done prior articles on Star Wars, The Simpsons, Jaws and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Four very different things but each significant in their own way.

Is every significant film good? Certainly not. There's a lot of innovative techniques pioneered by D.W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation that might not have been widely adopted en masse if not for the success of that film. Doesn't change the fact the film did a lot to popularise the Lost Cause myth, portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and inspired their revival in the twentieth century opposed as they were to black characters portrayed by white actors in blackface as little more than animals.

Is every good film significant? Again, no. It took the better part of three decades before The Night of the Hunter was recognised as great, it failed miserably at the box office and was panned by critics so much that director Charles Laughton never made another film again. Hell or High Water received near universal acclaim in 2016, nominated and won a slew of awards, but only made USD39mm off a USD12mm budget and the director has only made one feature since - straight to Netflix to mixed reviews.

I don't think I've ever really grasped how big a year for film that was.

What I was surprised at was just how packed those Summer months were, I could have probably told you all the films that I mentioned were released in 1982 but would have thought them spread throughout the year. A time traveller looking for a few months off could do a lot worse than summering in 1982 United States.

Sorry Atari, I'm willing to sacrifice you to preserve OTL

Isn't it interesting though to consider how the Console Wars might have developed if when Nintendo arrives on US shores there is already a homegrown manufacturer who they would have to overcome rather than stepping into a vacuum left in the wake of their downfall? Even Sega may have a very different future, at the time of the Video Game Crash they were owned by Gulf & Western Industries in both the US and Japan, the US side was sold to Bally following a downturn in arcade revenue and the Japanese side was sold to a group of investors that built it into the company they would become. If the bubble does not burst they may retain ownership of either company (more likely the Japanese side) and then we might have the bizarre situation of a Japanese video game manufacturer owned by a US conglomerate in the 1980s.

It makes for interesting speculation - I don't know if E.T. starts the genre or not but I feel like it's what inspired the "kids in peril" movies of the rest of the decade, some of which Spielberg produced. Things like The Goonies and Stand by Me are the famous examples. I feel like Home Alone was the pinnacle of that genre; I can't really think of any really big examples after it; maybe if Jurassic Park didn't have the adults in it, but it does, so it's not. But maybe if E.T. isn't about, those movies are just some more of the ones that don't happen, in addition to the ones you mentioned in the article.

Is 1982 the only time a movie like E.T. could become the biggest movie of all time? It feels like kind of an odd-one-out in that discussion. Before it, you have The Godfather which was a massive prestige thing that everybody had heard about. Jaws was the first summer blockbuster (but there is zero prospect that a borderline horror movie would be a fraction as big today as Jaws was in 1975). Star Wars was Star Wars. And then after it, Jurassic Park had realistic dinosaurs and everybody loves dinosaurs. Titanic was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Avatar had legitimately unprecedented special effects work. Avengers: Endgame was the finale of its series everybody had been following for 10 years (I don't feel like it has the legacy you would expect but as @Thande pointed out to me that's probably because I block all comment sections everywhere on the Internet).

E.T. had everything going for it, but it's a family movie with a lot of heart but relatively little action in it, not much in the way of effects stuff. Basically it's got very little of the things that the so-called experts claim that movies in 2020 need to be a major hit, never mind the biggest movie ever.

Combination of a different time and the things it did have going for it. The blockbuster era may have arrived but they weren't ten a penny - aside from Jaws and Star Wars you had The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are similarities between all of them but on the surface level they're very different films, the blockbuster may have arrived but you couldn't define it to any single type of film. This was bore out later in the decade when you had as diverse a bunch as Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Aliens, Top Gun, Die Hard and Batman. You couldn't say what the next huge one would be, even leaving Summer behind briefly who could have seen Beverly Hills Cop as the highest grossing film of a year that already had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Ghostbusters break USD100mm at the box office? Studios had to trust filmmakers to make good films regardless and hope form the dailies you might see what the next Big One would be and even then it was a crap shoot as to whether it would land or not. They didn't sink hundreds of millions into films in the hope of getting the same back. What E.T. did have going for it was one of the two biggest names in Hollywood at the time directing and accessibility to both full families and those who might not have been interested in the other concept movies out at the same time.

You're ignoring the most important pop culture change: no ET means no Mac and Me.

I wish advertisements were as blatant as they were in that, corporations these days have a much more insidious agenda.

Though it does have its uses. For instance, Apple will not allow a villainous character to be seen using an iPhone. In Knives Out Chris Evans is the only person not to be seen using one and is eventually revealed as the murderer.

The opening scene to Stranger Things would have to look for a different inspiration.

I think the whole phenomenon of 80s nostalgia in general would, if it even becomes a thing without the impact E.T. had on wider film and other media. Stanger Things, Ready Player One, the two-part adaptation of It and countless others.

Something generally has to be popular to either 1) inspire others or 2) more importantly, persuade studios to sign off on said others. It's not enough to just exist.

If you asked people in the early 1970s "say they decide to bring back Star Trek and make a film out of it, what would it be like" absolutely nobody would picture what Star Trek: The Motion Picture turned out as - even though the concept of 'human probe sent into deep space goes mad, comes back and turns on humans' already existed and indeed had already been done in an episode of the TV series. The only reason that film was made as the very long, very slow-paced, very effects-heavy and cerebral piece it was was because of the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Indeed, and if you look at the ideas from the mid-70s for the film they were going to make before they decided to make a TV series before deciding to make a film the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey is clear. Sort of pretentious when you think about it because Star Trek was fine with lifting from other films when it went into cinema but instead of lifting from successful adventure films like Planet of the Apes or Star Wars they went for the deeper 2001 and Close Encounters. The tone and look of Planet of the Apes is very Star Trek as well, would have made for a successful film if they went down that route of doing an action packed planetary visit as was seen in many episodes.

It'd be one of them, yes, but as Ryan argues, so's ET.

Between them, Jaws (first modern summer blockbuster), Raiders (major influence for 80s), Jurassic Park (kickstarting CGI effects and ending stopmotion), and Saving Private Ryan (reshaping how war was depicted), Speilberg's really got a record for that and that's not counting the films and cartoons and careers he oversaw as a producer. Bay's Transformers, even, which itself may be more influential than we want to think on subsequent summer blockbusters and exists due to Stevey.

Yeah influence and success aren't always an indicator of quality, especially in recent years. I'm not saying E.T. is the most significant film of the last quarter of the 20th Century, that's Star Wars, but it's certainly in the top five.

Oh, yeah, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? happened almost entirely because Spielberg wanted it to happen.

At the absolute least, the Disney characters are in it because Spielberg wanted them in it and in 1988, even the Walt Disney Company coud not say no to Steven Spielberg.

Indeed, a testament to his powers and they may have been tempted to say fuck off since he worked closely with Don Bluth and the two of them dealt Disney a bloody nose in 1986 with An American Tale trouncing The Great Mouse Detective. I wonder if it would have happened without Eisner however, given he had some funny ideas - an Alien attraction at Disneyland for instance.

I'm just saying, there's, "Is this movie influential?" and there's, "Is this movie good?" and the answer to both questions don't have to be the same.

Lots of people dislike, say, Jar-Jar Binks (not me, though), but the leap forward in motion capture technology that Jar-Jar represented can't really be exaggerated.

Does Gollum happen without Jar-Jar? I don't know, but Andy Serkis in a suit with a bunch of dots on it is probably an easier sell in a post-Jar-Jar world.

Definitely there are plenty of significant films that are absolute garbage, and also plenty of great films that had little impact at the time or since. It's the same with any aspect of history but especially true in the small and cannibalistic world of entertainment.




One thing I realised midway through writing this is that E.T. probably doesn't get made in the universe of that Indiana-Jones-but-James-Bond list I did a couple years back since tensions would be even higher between Ford and Spielberg and as such Mathison might not get to read the script to Night Skies.

Another point I thought of afterwards is that in this Universe Spielberg might actually direct Return of the Jedi. If he's become embroiled in a dispute over censorship with Night Skies like he would eventually become two years later as well as not having made the most successful film of all time, again, then he would not have ascended to godhood amongst the industry and maybe would have been willing to step away from the DGA to make it.
 
Is every significant film good? Certainly not. There's a lot of innovative techniques pioneered by D.W. Griffith on The Birth of a Nation that might not have been widely adopted en masse if not for the success of that film. Doesn't change the fact the film did a lot to popularise the Lost Cause myth, portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and inspired their revival in the twentieth century opposed as they were to black characters portrayed by white actors in blackface as little more than animals.

Even The Birth of a Nation wasn't groundbreakingly innovative so much as it consolidated all the innovations that were going on in silent cinema in the early 1910s around it.

(I don't really know a lot about the history of cinema but I wonder if perhaps we give The Birth of a Nation too much credit sometimes. An important film, certainly, but is it the important film people make it out to be? I'm really not sure. I am sure there are film historians who could tell me.)

Isn't it interesting though to consider how the Console Wars might have developed if when Nintendo arrives on US shores there is already a homegrown manufacturer who they would have to overcome rather than stepping into a vacuum left in the wake of their downfall? Even Sega may have a very different future, at the time of the Video Game Crash they were owned by Gulf & Western Industries in both the US and Japan, the US side was sold to Bally following a downturn in arcade revenue and the Japanese side was sold to a group of investors that built it into the company they would become. If the bubble does not burst they may retain ownership of either company (more likely the Japanese side) and then we might have the bizarre situation of a Japanese video game manufacturer owned by a US conglomerate in the 1980s.

Well, there's potentially an argument to be made that the UK sets a precedent, inasmuch as there was still a surviving computer game industry by the time Nintendo appeared in the shape of Amiga and Sinclair. They even had a mascot who could compete with Mario (Dizzy). Please note that this is anecdotal via the guys who do Sonic the Comic the Podcast.

I have heard an argument that this is why "Nintendo" became a sort of generic term for console gaming for a time while in the UK, people continued to use the term "computer games" rather than "video games" for many years, because of the association with the Amiga and Sinclair. (I never had either, but I call them "computer games" out of habit because I mostly played PC games when I was very young, so all games to me were "computer games".)

Combination of a different time and the things it did have going for it. The blockbuster era may have arrived but they weren't ten a penny - aside from Jaws and Star Wars you had The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are similarities between all of them but on the surface level they're very different films, the blockbuster may have arrived but you couldn't define it to any single type of film. This was bore out later in the decade when you had as diverse a bunch as Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Aliens, Top Gun, Die Hard and Batman. You couldn't say what the next huge one would be, even leaving Summer behind briefly who could have seen Beverly Hills Cop as the highest grossing film of a year that already had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Ghostbusters break USD100mm at the box office? Studios had to trust filmmakers to make good films regardless and hope form the dailies you might see what the next Big One would be and even then it was a crap shoot as to whether it would land or not. They didn't sink hundreds of millions into films in the hope of getting the same back. What E.T. did have going for it was one of the two biggest names in Hollywood at the time directing and accessibility to both full families and those who might not have been interested in the other concept movies out at the same time.

It's not so much "How did it become successful?" because that seems pretty plain. it's "How did it become the most successful movie there'd been up to that point?"
 
Even The Birth of a Nation wasn't groundbreakingly innovative so much as it consolidated all the innovations that were going on in silent cinema in the early 1910s around it.

(I don't really know a lot about the history of cinema but I wonder if perhaps we give The Birth of a Nation too much credit sometimes. An important film, certainly, but is it the important film people make it out to be? I'm really not sure. I am sure there are film historians who could tell me.)

This is a very fair point- I've seen some people trying to argue against the need to view it in film studies classes for exactly this reason and citing other films- other commercially successful films even- that were actually pioneering those techniques.

The problem is, you kind of run into the issue of whether that's just back-projecting our views of what we'd like the influential film to be, rather than being honest as to which film it actually was that did inspire techniques. I mean the same applies to Triumph of the Will which also fused a lot of innovations into one very effective propaganda package (and is basically the blueprint for 'how to present a totalitarian government on film'), but it also applies to films like Modern Times, Metropolis and possibly Citizen Kane as well. It was exceedingly rare before WWII for a film to be both the inventor and the propagator of new innovations in cinematography, just simply because it was so much harder for a film to get mass viewing.

What changed with the 50s onwards is that distribution really hits the point where a film can develop a new innovation and then get spread across the whole of the western cinema viewing audience at the same time. I'm not entirely sure what the dividing line is- it might arguably be the combination of Gone with the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz- but there's a definite point where that line gets crossed.
 
What changed with the 50s onwards is that distribution really hits the point where a film can develop a new innovation and then get spread across the whole of the western cinema viewing audience at the same time. I'm not entirely sure what the dividing line is- it might arguably be the combination of Gone with the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz- but there's a definite point where that line gets crossed.

Americans setting up minimum quotas of their movies to be shown in countries benefitting from their loans?
 
Americans setting up minimum quotas of their movies to be shown in countries benefitting from their loans?

Didn't France try to counter it by taking whatever the American quota was a s screening an equal number of French films?
 
Didn't France try to counter it by taking whatever the American quota was a s screening an equal number of French films?

The real counter was founding the CNC and providing a strong subsidy to producing French movies (we know when people are flexing their soft power because we've been doing it forever) but in the meantime, American movies really made a breakthrough and, while the PCF didn't like that one bit, it seems to have had enormous approval by movie goers.
 
Americans setting up minimum quotas of their movies to be shown in countries benefitting from their loans?

I think its slightly earlier than that- see the massive popularity of American animation on the continent in the late 30s- but that definitely reinforced it.
 
One potential butterfly of no ET: if it gets rid of the Crash of 83 or changes the dynamic somewhat, computer cukture in the post-Crash World might not be as gender-segregated as OTL, with all that portends - no Gamergate, which might be enough to swing enough voters so that 2016 is entirely different.
 
Back
Top