This Film Has Been Rated Ecch: Q. T.: THE QUASI-TERRESTRIAL (part 1)

Friday, July 23, 2021

Q. T.: THE QUASI-TERRESTRIAL (part 1)

E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)
dir: Steven Spielberg

MAD #236, January 1983
w: Stan Hart
a: Jack Davis

So now I'll sum this up for the three people on earth that never saw this movie.

In a California suburb, some kids are having a party, and while Elliot is outside. He hears a noise in the shed, throws a ball into it, and it returns.

After Elliot (Henry Thomas) gets his family to investigate and they find nothing, he still believes something's out there and stays overnight. He leaves a trail of Reese's Pieces to lure E.T. into his room, then shows him around. E.T. starts mimicking his gestures. The next day, he stays home from school pretending to be sick by putting the thermometer under the light to look like he has a fever.

Elliot's brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and sister (Drew Barrymore) come home from school and he makes them swear before he shows them the alien. The mother (Dee Wallace) comes home and they hide it in the closet.

E.T. is left at home alone while Elliot returns to school. That day they're dissecting frogs and the teacher's showing the class how to anesthetize them first. E.T. finds beer in the refrigerator and gets drunk. Since he shares a psychic link with Elliot, Elliot gets drunk too and frees all the frogs. At home, there's an old movie on TV of a guy grabbing a girl and kissing her, so Elliot does that too. E.T. figures out where he is and how to communicate with his home planet, making a primitive phone out of different objects around the house. (Not shown: Gertie comes home, dresses up E.T. like she would a doll, and teaches it to talk), Elliot and Mike come home, find out E.T. wants to get back, and help it make a more detailed phone. Elliot cuts himself on a sawblade and E.T. heals it with his glowing finger.

Mike and Elliot come up with a plan on Halloween to take E.T. out into the woods so he can communicate with his home planet and return home. In order to smuggle him out of the house past their mother, they put a white sheet over him, and tell her it's Gertie dressed as a ghost. As they're walking E.T. outside, he sees people in costume and briefly thinks a kid dressed as Yoda may be one of him.

Elliot takes E.T. out into the woods on his bicycle. He can't make it so E.T. makes it fly out there. Elliot spends the night and the next morning E.T. is missing. The other kids find him and he is mistaken for dead.

The people who have been scouting the area throughout the movie are revealed to be government scientists have finally found the alien they've been looking for and take over the house to study the extra-terrestrial, as well as Elliot to make sure he hasn't been contaminated by it. The alien is assumed dead, but some dying flowers come back to life, so they know E.T. now has too. Now there's a chase as the scientists and police go after the kids as they rescue E.T. and bring him out into the woods to get back home. In this, it's the same spaceship Richard Dreyfuss left Earth on at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

This issue had Don Martin's take on the movies that were parodied in that issue.

My age is starting to show when I don't even know how people listen to music anymore. All I know is it's a digital file in some form, but what's most relevant to this is I know people don't use boom boxes anymore and someone born after 1990 might not know what one is. I don't mean to condescend, but sometimes it even surprises me what people born in 1970 don't know. And Don Martin didn't get boom boxes right either back when they were a thing, so there's plenty of finger pointing in both directions.

E.T. had a glowing stomach when he came back to life. I had this issue when it came out and I remember my father saying, "They gave a 'writer' credit for that?"

First Cracked cover with E.T.

One of the few times they used new material in one of their annuals. EaTing
Giant Cracked #34, December 1982
a: John Severin

Elliot called his brother "penis breath"

The ERA was the Equal Rights Amendment, an attempt to guarantee both genders equality under the Constitution, never ratified.

Another reference to the Parkay commercials, which I posted in the Close Encounters parody, link on right.

Cracked #217, January 1986
w: George Gladir
a: Rick Altergott

E.T. mania had pretty much died down by 1985 but nobody ever said Cracked was hip.

American Express, 9 Lives, Pepsi, Bic