The officially licensed E.T. Finger Light

From the "What the hell were they thinking?!" file, GeekTyrant has found what must be the worst licensed merchandise ever: the E.T. Finger Light...

I'm looking at this and the only thing that I can honestly muster to mind to say is "Oh. My. God."

Fortunately more tactful minds prevailed and this light was pulled in favor of a full-hand version (I spotted it on sale at Toys R Us yesterday) but even so: where the hell was the due diligence on this thing? I mean, this was really manufactured and marketed.

But hey, at least the Atari 2600 game is no longer the worst-ever piece of E.T. merchandise...

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E.T. phones home and dials down destruction on Earth!

Very, very disturbing (yet funny) trend I've caught lately happening on the Intertubes. Some clever chaps are taking 1982's beloved film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and giving it the Frank Miller/The Dark Knight Returns treatment. Namely, producing faux trailers for grim, dark sequels to E.T.

And so far I've found two of these pieces of work!

This first one splices together footage from E.T. with another Steven Spielberg movie, War of the Worlds. Here is E.T. Returns...

Not bad! I like how it takes Tom Cruise's character from War of the Worlds and turns him into the older Elliot.

But the trailer for E.T.-X, made with overwhelmingly original footage, is so crazy insanely ludicrously... AHHHH just see for yourself! If E.T. didn't scare you at the theater before, it sure will now!

Michael Bay should team up with Spielberg and make that 'un after he finishes this next Transformers movie. I would pay just to see the bad E.T.'s crush the Jonas Brothers :-P

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The long-lost deleted scene from E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL with Harrison Ford as Elliott's principal!

Shortly after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial came out in 1982, I heard something very interesting: that among numerous scenes that were filmed but deleted from the final print, there was a cameo appearance by Harrison Ford. He plays Elliott's principal, in a scene that takes place after Elliott goes nuts in the science lab. When Steven Spielberg re-released the movie in 2002 he re-incorporated a lot of the previously deleted material, but Ford's appearance wasn't among the additions. The story is that Spielberg wanted E.T. to be a movie about the children, and the principal's office scene lingered too long on the adults.

So for a quarter-century, I've always been intrigued by this scene. I never thought I'd ever get to see it. And then this morning word reaches me that the deleted Harrison Ford cameo from E.T. the Extra-Terrstrial is on YouTube!

Here it is...

Some thoughts here: I find this to be a fascinating sequence! No audience would fail to recognize Harrison Ford's voice and gestures in this scene. But did you notice how not once do we actually see Ford's face? The focus is still on Elliott and how he's perceiving his predicament. The principal is handled much like how Charles Schulz treated the adults in the Peanuts cartoons (minus the "wah-wah-wah-wah" sound effect).

Whatever Spielberg believed about this scene taking the focus away from the children, I couldn't help but think that it emphasized Elliott's conflict with the adult world that much more. The way this scene is shot, the principal - by taking away what identifies him most as a human, instead becomes an impersonal presence of authority - however soothing his words are - that reinforces this adult mindset that Elliott and the other children are coming to be set against.

Take note also of the very beginning of this clip, as the school nurses apprehend Elliott. Maybe you're wondering: "What's Elliott doing here?" I've seen photos of this over the years but again, this is the first that I've actually seen real footage of it. If you look at the board and the walls, Elliott is drawing what looks to be a diagram of circuitry. This is more of E.T.'s mental influence on Elliott: E.T. had taken apart Gertie's Speak & Spell and he was sending his thoughts about the electrical workings to Elliott, who responded by drawing them on the school walls.

I'd love to see this stuff implemented in a new edition of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at some point.

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