YMMV / Explorers

• Adorkable: Ben and Wolfgang, respectively. Two young boys who have an endearing, precocious love for science.
• Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith never, ever disappoints. Further example: the music that plays during the A-Team Montage to build the Thunder Road.
  • Both versions of "All Around The World" (one by Little Richard that was used in the movie, the other by Robert Palmer featured on the soundtrack).
  • Red 7's Less Than Perfect.
  • Night Ranger's This Boy Needs To Rock.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A kid might not get the implication of "My dad taught me how to run. He can't catch me anymore." As an adult, it's pretty wince-worthy realizing what the character actually means.
  • More of a poignant, tearjerking example in hindsight is how both River Phoenix and Amanda Peterson are seen floating through the skies at the end of the film, since both poor souls have died at a tragically young age in real life.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Robert Picardo. Explorers came out a decade before Star Trek: Voyager. It came out years before China Beach.
  • James Cromwell's bigger kids movie was ten years later in Babe.
  • Meschach Taylor before being in Mannequin or the series Designing Women.
  • Taliesin Jaffe as Ludwig.
  • Danny Nucci- best known as Fabrizio in Titanic (1997) as one of Wolfgang's biggest bullies.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Even at the time of release, a number of people opined that the third act reveal that the aliens are wacky pop-culture lovers was a rather lame and unsatisfying letdown after the wondrous, Amblinesque first half. Dante himself is not very proud of it. (Flight of the Navigator, released the following year, is similarly divisive for taking a lighter tone in its back half.)
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Deliberately done in the movie at the drive-in. This is further played with when the Thunder Road floats in front of the screen.
  • The CGI during the dream sequences have not held up all that spectacularly.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: There are a lot of good effects - the spider robot walking for one.

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