Cast the Expert: The doctors are real doctors. Spielberg mentioned that this was necessary as they would be better at rapidly spitting out terminology that required years of medical school to learn than any actor who'd been simply given a briefing on it. Humorously, this led to some competition amongst local doctors who all wanted to be in the movie.
Colbert Bump: Sales of Reese's Pieces candy skyrocketed by 65% after their inclusion in the film.
Creator Backlash: Steven Spielberg came to regret the edits made to the film for the 2002 re-release and insists that people watch the original version instead.
Creator's Favorite Episode: Ever since the film's release, Spielberg has maintained that it's the one closest to his heart.
Cross-Dressing Voices: Played straight with E.T. in the original version and in the Japanese dub.
Originally, Elliott was supposed to have an Eddie Haskell-like friend named Lance. He still appears in the novelization and the storybook.
Harrison Ford originally had a scene where he played the school principal, but Steven Spielberg decided to cut it, not wanting to be accused of Stunt Casting (even though Ford's face was never shown). Only the 1996 Signature Laserdisc keeps this scene.
Harrison Ford filmed a scene as the principal of Elliott's school, set after he frees the frogs, which Spielberg cut because he felt Ford's presence was too distracting (even though his face is never seen, in keeping with the motif of Mary being the only adult whose face is seen for most of the film).
Two deleted scenes were reinstated for the 20th Anniversary Edition: Elliott shows E.T. the bathroom and gets a call from his mother and fakes throwing up on the phone. E.T. plays around in the bathtub and Elliott thinks he's drowning, but it turns out he's rather enjoying himself. The other one shows Mary tracking down Mike and Gertie during their trick or treating. Gertie (now in her cowgirl costume) spills the beans on where Elliott is, and Mary (smiling, but insistent) tells them to get into the car.
There was a subplot cut in which E.T. was in love with Elliott's mom. He goes into her room and leaves a Reese's Piece on her pillow.
There's a scene of when E.T.'s getting Elliott drunk. Elliott gets sent to the nurse's office and writes the plans for the communicator on the wall.
There was originally an alternate ending showing the boys playingDungeons & Dragons with Elliott as the dungeon master. The camera pans up to the roof, where the communicator is calling out to E.T.
Dueling Dubs: Two Latin American Spanish dubs were made in Mexico City. The first was produced in 1982 at the now-defunct Estudios América, while the second was recorded at Iyuno • SDI Group; Mexico for the 20th anniversary. Interestingly enough, both dubs feature Héctor Lee as the voice of the titular character.
Dueling Movies: With John Carpenter's darker take on an alien encounter in The Thing (1982). E.T. trounced it with critics at the time and at the box office, but nowadays both are held up as sci-fi classics.
Enforced Method Acting: Filmed in chronological order so that the cast could become genuinely attached to the E.T. character. Young Drew Barrymore, in particular, took it the hardest: she was genuinely frightened when she walked in on Eliot with E.T. in his room and in tears during his Disney Death scene.
Follow the Leader: After the movie's release, more films about either friendly aliens or alien visitation started to get made for the rest of the 1980's like Starman (ironically, that film's studio turned down this one in favour of Starman).
In 2002, Wendy's released a set of five toys as a tie-in with the film's 20th anniversary. These consisted of a VHS case with a light-up figure of E.T. inside, a two-sided glow in the dark puzzle, a viewfinder shaped like E.T.'s spaceship, a calendar with three sticker sheets, and a wind-up waking figure of E.T..
Mid-Development Genre Shift: Spielberg came up with a story concept called Night Skies as a followup to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a Sci-Fi Horror/suspense tale in which a human family finds themselves harassed by a malevolent bunch of aliens (often likened to "Straw Dogs (1971) with aliens"), with John Sayles penning a screenplay. But after Raiders of the Lost Ark Spielberg was burned out on violence, and in going through the Sayles screenplay with Melissa Mathison (Harrison Ford's soon-to-be wife), Mathison mentioned that a subplot where the White Sheep of the alien bunch forms a bond with the young child of the family was very powerful, so Spielberg decided to build a new heartfelt story around it, while the darker elements of Night Skies variously ended up in Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984).
Playing Against Type: Prior to the film's release, Dee Wallace was best known for her roles in horror movies such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Howling, and she largely returned to them in the years afterward, making her motherly performance in a family film quite a standout for her.
Role Reprise: When the second Latin American Spanish dub was recorded at Iyuno • SDI Group; Mexico for the film's 20th anniversary re-release, Héctor Lee reprised his role as E.T., and is the only original cast member to make an appearance.
Separated-at-Birth Casting: Robert Macnaughton and Drew Barrymore, at the time of filming, resembled each other close enough to believably play the siblings Michael and Gertie, respectively.
Sequel Gap: Of a sort. In 2019 a commercial for Xfinity premiered during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where E.T. returns to Earth to reunite with a grown-up Elliott (still played by Henry Jackson Thomas Jr.) and meet his family.
Sequel in Another Medium: The film had a sequel novel, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, giving the story of what happened when E.T. went home. It was written by William Kotzwinkle, who had written the novelization of the movie, and was presented as if it were the novelization of a non-existent sequel film, even being released in both a full novel and an abridged "storybook" with extra illustrations.
Gertie's line "I don't like his feet!" was ad-libbed, as was her "Gimme a break!" response to Elliott's claim that grown-ups can't see E.T. You can also hear her prattling away unscripted in the background while Elliott and Michael are showing E.T. maps and trying to get him to tell them where home is for him.
When Elliott insulted Michael (the script didn't actually specify what to say, just something insulting) the script called for Dee Wallace to yell at him angrily to sit down. When she actually heard him say, "It was nothing like that, penis breath!" her inability to keep a straight face while saying "Elliot!" was her entirely genuine reaction, and they decided to leave that take in the movie.
Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg's colleague and friend, suggested the closet hiding scene.
Tie-In Cereal: E.T. had the E.T. Cereal, a chocolate and peanut butter flavored product where the kernels were shaped like the letters "E" and "T".
Uncredited Role: Though the late Pat Walsh voiced E.T., she wasn't credited for the final release.
Shelley Long was approached to play Elliott's mother. She turned it down as she was already signed on for the comedy Night Shift.
Stan Winston turned down the opportunity to work on the film. He would regret doing so. Rick Baker was also attached to the film when it was more horror-oriented, but was kicked off due to budget disputes. The final design used by Carlo Rambaldi is, per Baker's words, heavily based on his design for the alien.
The book "E.T. from Concept to Classic" features many plot points and scenes cut from the script. One subplot from an early draft was to have a rival to Elliott named Lance who wanted to expose E.T. The spaceship was going to land in a parking lot, but it was changed to a forest because that seemed more magical, among many others.
Apparently, the movie first started as an adaptation of the Hopskinsville "goblin" incident, and was going to be much darker than the current result.
The film's screenwriter Melissa Mathison wrote a script for a sequel called E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears where an evil group of E.T.'s people would come to Earth looking for him and torture Elliott and his family for information; but (mercifully, some would say) it never left the drawing board.
Corey Feldman was originally up for a role as a rival to Elliott, a dork named Lance who threatened to expose E.T. The character is in the book adaptation, but was cut from the script. Steven Spielberg felt bad about leaving Corey out and promised him a role in future films he would work on, and he would go on to be in Gremlins (1984) and The Goonies.
Originally E.T. was going to develop a crush on Elliott's mother. Some scenes of this were filmed before this subplot was scrapped. This also made it into the novelization.
Elliott was originally going to lure E.T. into his house using M&M's, but this proposal of Product Placement was rejected by the company's executive, who perceived the movie as having an Audience-Alienating Premise. Instead, Reese's Pieces were used, and Hershey's sold so many Reese's Pieces that they were able to become a major competitor to the Mars Candy Company. M&M's are still used in the novelization.
Embassy Home Entertainment approached Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures for the home video rights at one point. (It took six years for the film to be released on VHS, by which time Embassy had become Nelson Entertainment.)
Steven Spielberg stated that E.T.'s species is more similar to plants than any other kind of creature and has No Biological Sex. Also, a series of trading cards from the 1980s list the family's last name as Taylor.
Approval of God: Surprisingly, Steven Spielberg not only signed off on the game's concept, he actually liked the final game.
Budget-Busting Element: The game cost at least $20 million to obtain the license to E.T. alone. It was developed in less than five weeks, sold less than three million copies overall, and unsold copies of it and other pieces of Atari hardware and software were buried in a landfill in the middle of New Mexico. E.T is widely blamed for the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, but it was just the straw that broke the shovelware-laden camel's back.
Christmas Rushed: Due to the timing of when the rights were secured, Howard Warshaw was only given 5 and a half weeks to make the game to get it out in time for Christmas.
Creator Killer: This game is often credited for the Great Crash of 1983, which annihilated Atari and Warner Bros.'s value.
For the former, while it didn't singlehandedly cause the Crash, it didn't exactly help matters, either. Atari boss Ray Kassar, who had already driven away several programmers that then founded Activision and demanded the game's short development timetable, was ousted from his position and he has not been affiliated with the entertainment world at all since 1983. Shortly afterward, Warner sold off Atari, and the classic developer completely lost all of its dominance when Nintendo, who broke off their attempted relationship and became a brand-new Arch-Enemy, released the NES and ended the crash in 1985, but they were able to hang around for another decade until Atari's inability to recover from the crash culminated in the Atari Jaguar, which finished off the studio.
For the latter, Warner faced serious financial problems due to the losses from Atari, forcing them to divest assets (aside from Atari) to avoid going bankrupt, such as divesting Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment into MTV Networks before selling it to Viacom. Even then this wasn't enough, and Warner was merged with Time by the end of the 80s to form TimeWarner
Genre-Killer: E.T is the mascot of the Great Crash of 1983, which not only reduced Atari to a shadow of its former self for the remainder of the 80s and 90s, but destroyed almost everyone else in the industry, and likely would have sent gaming into a permanent small niche or worse (at least in North America) had Nintendo not stepped up. It's also part of the reason some other Hollywood studios, most notably Disney, hesitated entering the gaming market and fumbled several times when they did, eventually exiting by closing down and/or selling their games divisions to other, better-established companiesnote Dreamworks established Dreamworks Interactive in 1995 before selling it to Electronic Arts in 2000; the studio is now operating as Ripple Effect Studios. 20th Century Fox had three attempts in the gaming market, first with Games of the Century in the early 80s, which closed after 1983-1984; second with Fox Interactive in 1993, which they divested to Vivendi Universal Games (who also consolidated Universal Interactive Studios into Vivendi Universal Games around the same time) in 2003, which in turn was brought by Activision in 2008; and third with FoxNext in 2017, which Disney acquired through the purchase of 21st Century Fox and afterwards sold it to Scopely as Disney did not want to enter the video game market, as they shut down the ill-performing Disney Interactive three years earlier. Disney has since opened up a new games division for its successor 20th Century Studios called 20th Century Games but it functions solely as a licensor of 20th Century Fox IPs like Alien and Planet of the Apes. Universal Pictures's then-parent company MCA purchased LJN in 1985, with that company entering the games market in 1987, before divesting it to Acclaim in 1990. Universal officially entered the games market with Universal Interactive Studios in 1994, but it was transferred away from Universal Pictures to Vivendi's own games division Havas Interactive (which included Sierra) following Vivendi's acquisition of Seagram's entertainment assets in 2000, eventually being reduced to a publishing label for for Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Universal IPs before consolidated into Vivendi Universal Games in 2004. Warner Communications still held a stake onto Atari's successor Atari Games but would fully own the company in 1993 via Time Warner Interactive before selling the company to WMS Industries, who then merged its assets into Midway Games. Midway would eventually be brought out by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (who re-entered the games market in 2004) in 2009. The sole exception is, ironically enough, Warner Bros with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment but much of its growth came from buying Midway Games in 2009.
A game for the Atari 5200, which was said to be more generic but much more playable than the 2600 game, was in development and practically finished, but ultimately pulled due to the terrible reception of the 2600 game, and the 5200 itself not selling particularly well.
Briefly, Steven Spielberg wanted the game to be similar to Pac-Man.
, a chocolate and peanut butter flavored product where the kernels were shaped like the letters "E" and "T".
