E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is an Academy Award-winning 1982 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg that tells the story of a young boy, Elliott, who befriends an alien being called E.T. stranded on Earth and trying to find his way home. This film was produced by Amblin Entertainment, distributed by Universal Pictures, and originally released to movie theatres in 1982.

20th anniversary edition

An extended version of the movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversary, was released theatrical by Universal Studios on 22 March 2002 in the United States and later that year also on DVD. The new edition adds five minutes to the film's run time, and includes special effects scenes that were not included in the original because of technical limitations or budgetary constraints.

Related Topics:
Universal Studios - 22 March - 2002 - United States

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The two most prominent changes Spielberg made in the 2002 re-release are digital alterations of scenes that were already in the original release: In the scene near the movie's end where the kids are fleeing on their bicycles, all the police officers' guns were digitally removed and replaced with walkie-talkies, because, after the birth of his first son, Spielberg found it too threatening to have guns around the children in the movie.

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The second prominent change is the replacing of the word "terrorist" with the word "hippie" in one scene where Mary forbids Michael to dress up as a terrorist for Halloween.

Related Topics:
Terrorist - Hippie - Halloween

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Also, a couple of full body shots of E.T. were added: He can now be seen running after his leaving space ship (which is flashier and sparkles more in the new version) and later in the movie taking a bath (this scene was shot for the original movie, but did not work out because the E.T. puppet turned out to not be waterproof). Apart from these new scenes with fully animated E.T.s, his facial expressions have also been digitally enhanced in almost all his scenes, making them more fluent and rash.

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Spielberg stated that he made the changes to E.T. to please the perfectionist in him and that he had not been completely satisfied with some scenes and could now go back and change what he could not achieve in 1981 due to limited time or limited technical possibilities, as well as reincorporate scenes he had to cut to meet a certain runtime.{{ref|20edition}} However, the omission of the word "terrorist" and the digitally removed guns are clearly not things Spielberg was unable to do in 1981, but changes made to confine to political correctness following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the debate about the gun politics in the United States in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre.

Related Topics:
Political correctness - September 11, 2001 attacks - Gun politics in the United States - Columbine High School massacre

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The changes of the 20th aniversary edition of E.T. were spoofed in the South Park episode "Free Hat".

Related Topics:
South Park - Free Hat

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