Some posit that E.T is mentally deficient for his race.
Why did he get sick? Do his species naturally die if separated from one another, was it to do with the Earth's atmosphere, was it malnutrition, or was it an actual disease? And was he actually dying, and if so, would Elliot actually die if E.T. died, or did Elliot just think that was what was going on?
This was going to be just a forgettable kids' movie about a lost alien, until preview audiences got a grip on its true magnificence and spread the word. It soon out-grossed A New Hope and became the top worldwide moneymaker until Jurassic Park (by the same director).
When the script called for the use of M&Ms, Mars flat out rejected the use of their candy-coated chocolates, stating that they did not want their product to be associated with what they perceived as a grotesque creature. Hershey offered their newer product, Reese's Pieces, in place of M&Ms. The result: a 65% profit increase after their candies were prominently featured in a movie which even today is universally acclaimed. Hershey even capitalized on the popularity of their product by making commercials featuring an alien asking for the candy.
Award Snub: It was nominated for the Best Picture and Director Academy Awards, but lost both to Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Attenborough even stated in his acceptance speech that he believed E.T. should have won, since it was truly the better film. This was at least partly due to a rather sleazy Oscar campaign by Columbia Pictures, where they more or less stated that a vote against the film was a vote against Gandhi himself.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The frog dissection scene in Elliott's school, especially when Elliott decides to release all the frogs. It's crazy, unexpected and never gets mentioned after Mary's phone call with the school.
Catharsis Factor: Elliott and E.T.'s goodbye at the end is one of the most emotionally powerful moments in cinema.
Designated Villain: The government agents, on purpose. It's no crime for them to investigate a possible alien invader who could be dangerous to humanity. While E.T. is entirely a peaceful creature, they had no way of knowing that from the beginning. However, the film is told from the children's point of view, and they have no idea what the agents want with E.T. This is best shown in the hospital scenes, where Gertie think the doctors are hurting E.T, while adult viewers can see they're trying to resuscitate him.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Since the way the government agents menace Elliot and his family in this movie casts the federal government of the USA in a rather less-than-flattering light, this movie generally passed muster with censors in the Soviet bloc and was approved for importation. Common reactions among the audiences in these Communist countries that actually got to see it, however, tended to be "So... it's not so different from how our government treats us here, then?" and "Wow, that's a nice house and car they've got there; are all those capitalist Americans so rich that even a divorced mother of three can afford such luxuries?"
Ensemble Dark Horse: Drew Barrymore gets a lot of attention for her role as Gertie.
Epileptic Trees: The amusing, innocuous scene where ET recognizes someone in a Yoda costume (or at least mistakes him for a similar-looking species) spawned a thousand online theories about this movie and Star Wars. Taken even further when, to pay Spielberg back, George Lucas put ET's species into a crowd shot in The Phantom Menace.
Fanfic Fuel: Now that a reasonably peaceful first contact has been made, will ET’s species make more communications with Earth? Also, what happened to Keys at age 10 specifically that made him wish to meet an alien, and is it connected to his line “He came for me too”?
Harsher in Hindsight: Elliot's family has an Atari 2600 on top of their TV in several shots, and it's implied the kids play Atari games. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrialwas one of the games responsible for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and put a severe early dent in the E.T. name as well as haunting Warner/Disney exec Frank Wells and E.T. director Steven Spielberg.
Memetic Mutation: The iconic image of the silhouetted bicycle flying in front of the full moon has been spoofed to there and back.
Narm Charm: Elliott's "I love you" speech right before E.T. gets better may be Sickeningly Sweet, but it's still guaranteed to get the audience crying.
Once Original, Now Common: There have been tons of "child + non-human companion" films which repeat most of this film's tropes, so it now seems less innovative than it did at the time.
Six-year-old Drew Barrymore as Gertie, with recognizably the same face she has as an adult.
Erika Eleniak, who would later be known as Shauni in Baywatch, in the role of Elliott's classmate on whom he has a crush. Also a mild case of Dawson Casting — a 13-year-old girl playing 10-year-old boy's classmate.
C. Thomas Howell as Tyler (one of Michael's friends) — only a year before he famously played Ponyboy Curtis in The Outsiders.
Signature Scene: The scene where Elliott and E.T. fly on a bicycle in front of the full moon, which literally became Spielberg's signature in the form of the logo for Amblin Entertainment.
The red light on a rail in the opening sequence. Its replacement is about the only thing in the 20th Anniversary Edition that never seems to raise any complaints from its critics.
When the bikes take flight during the climax, the bikes visably don't have handlebars in some shots.
A mild example on the blu-ray. The movie looks great, but in some wide shots (such as when Elliot introduces E.T. to Michael) you can tell it's a guy in a costume. It's apparent because in the next shot it's the expressive E.T. puppet, and the costume has a mask with a blank stare.
Many of the effects in the 20th anniversary edition don't really hold up outside of the enhanced ship shots, the CGI E.T. shots in particular stand out as looking very early 2000s, but no one was fooled with the digital editing used on the shotguns even when it was released.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A response generated by the edits for the 2002 20th Anniversary edition, which included replacing guns with walkie-talkies and changing "terrorist" to "hippie." Steven Spielberg later stated that editing the movie was a mistake and restored the original version for the Blu Ray release.
Ugly Cute: E.T. himself pretty much defines the concept. Any description of him sounds hideous, but he's obviously not without his charm.
Jock older brother Michael's introduction has him playing Dungeons & Dragons without hinting at him having any geeky or creative Hidden Depths, which firmly grounds the film in the early 80s (the height of D&D's popularity as a fad) for fans of the film who are role-players.
Elliott's neighborhood was still partially under construction at the time of filming (as shown during the climactic bike chase), and without the current grown-in trees and bushes, it still had a raw, "Monopoly house" look. The park with the iconic caterpillar-shaped play structure then had a full view of hills in the background; nowadays the hills can barely be seen due to all the trees, as shown in the video. On top of that, a wildfire had struck the area not long before construction first began; the prominent hillside behind Elliott's house still had a thin, yellow to light brown chaparral cover as opposed to the deep, greenish-brown of fully grown California chaparral.
The film came out when Dungeons & Dragons was still a relatively new creation, and thus it hadn't picked up the reputation of being a game for geeky losers. (Compare it to Stranger Things, a show heavily influenced by E.T. that was made decades later, where the main child characters who play D&D are also the school's nerds) Try to find another instance in media where the game's portrayed being played by rowdy, popular jocks (although in the 2010s onward, the game's public reputation has started doing a 180°, so maybe the movie was actually ahead of its time).
In 1982, a teenager going trick-or-treating as a terrorist would've been stupid and offensive. Post-9/11, it'll more than likely get you arrested, or at least a very stern warning. Partly justified if one was escorting his younger siblings like in the film.
In 1982, Mary leaving Gertie home alone for a few minutes while she went to school to pick up Elliott wasn't considered too unusual or inappropriate. Today it may warrant a call to Child Protective Services.
Today, Elliott would likely have been in a lot of trouble for kissing the girl in class, possibly even with the police. Schools have become extremely strict about student interactions, going overboard in the minds of some. Well, at least as far as American schools is concerned, anyways.
Visual Effects of Awesome: With the exception of the light rail example, the special effects still hold up nicely to this day.
That common story about how Atari produced more copies of the game than there were consoles in existence? Believe it or not, it's not completely true. While it is definitely the case that Atari over-produced the game, the install base was actually estimated to be about 20 million when the game came out, decently above even the largest estimates of produced copies of the game which pinpoint about 6 million even in the worst cases. There is some merit to it though — while the install base was estimated to be that large, it's not far off to assume there were much fewer active users by that point in time, and though it is not verifiable, it's completely possible that there really were more copies produced than that number, and no matter which way you slice it, Atari still produced far more copies than they could realistically ever hope to sell. The game that Atari produced more copies of than consoles on the market was actually their Porting Disaster version of Pac-Man.
Any gamer worth their salt "knows" that this game is so legendarily horrible that it was single-handedly responsible for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983... except it wasn't. Sure, Atari's rushed production of E.T. was The Last Straw that culminated in the crash—especially after the backlash from their similarly rushed Porting Disaster version of Pac-Man earlier that same year—but many other factors already existed before E.T. was released, such as console saturation on the market and a lack of quality control on consolesnote Consoles were most affected by the 1983 Video Game Crash, and indeed Activision managed to survive the crash by jumping ship to personal computers like the Commodore 64.
Critical Backlash: While nobody's saying the game is very good, quite a number have stated the game isn't as horrendously terrible as game critics and the general public make it out to be, and not even the worst game on the Atari 2600, much less the worst game of all time. It's at least functional and playable (which is especially commendable considering it was such a severe case of Christmas Rushed), although repetitive and bland. There are a number of people who feel that, considering the pathetically-tiny development time, it's not that bad once you know what you're doing.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: The number of fans are limited because of the game's poor reputation and infamy—though there are more nowadays than there were in the 1980s—but among not only fans but gamers as a whole, do not say with a straight face that this game single-handedly caused The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. This was the accepted opinion in the 1980s after many gamers lost trust in Atari over their handling of the game, but it has since been widely recognized that E.T. was the nadir of already-existing problems that culminated in the crash, not the cause. The real factors were console saturation on the market, heavy competition from personal computers, and lack of quality control on consoles resulting in many poor-quality games, some of which being pornography disguised as "games" like Custer's Revenge. All of these factors existed before E.T. was released.
Mis-blamed: The game is often mis-attributed as the sole cause of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and subsequent closing of Atari Inc. While it certainly did contribute to both, the Crash was mostly the result of a bloated market of far more hackneyed games licensed from every conceivable copyrighted property, while Atari's eventual closure was caused by a number of factors.
Presumed Flop: The game is infamous as the Trope Maker for The Problem with Licensed Games. It is considered one of the worst games of all time, if not THE worst, and is often blamed for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. This is further exacerbated by the urban legend that Atari buried millions of copies in a New Mexico landfill. That urban legend does have some truth to it, so far as an Atari landfill existing, but in reality the game actually sold 1.5 million copies (even after seeing hundreds of thousands of copies returned), making it the 8th-most successful game on the Atari 2600. This trope is also somewhat zig-zagged, as over time, critics and audiences alike have come to acknowledge it had a very rushed production schedule and that many of its flaws were present to varying degrees in most Atari games. As for being the cause of the crash, while it's still considered a factor, most have come to see the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man as the bigger contributor... which itself is still the best-selling game for the system at almost 8 million copies.
Scrappy Mechanic: The holes. While a few of them do contain items needed for completion, they're also a big point of frustration. Marked by but a few darker pixels, it's easy to accidentally fall down one. Getting out can also be difficult because you can accidentally reappear on the surface on top of the same hole.
So Okay, It's Average: Ironically, the game seems to have undergone Critical Backlash in recent years, with people questioning if the infamous "Worst Game Ever" reputation really holds up, with quite a few younger critics pointing out that while the game might not be "stellar", it is just as hard to declare it truly "awful", as it is actually functional enough to play from start to finish without any major glitches. Same critics also point out that while the gameplay might admittedly be a bit confusing and abstract without having the manual to consult, it is, once the player actually knows what to do, just sort of tedious and boring rather than infuriatingly bad. In addition, people who complain that the game is confusing usually show a lack of familiarity with this era of gaming, as it was too hard to program any decent tutorialization on such a limited platform and it was usually the expectation that the player would read the manual if they needed help.
. On top of that, a wildfire had struck the area not long before construction first began; the prominent hillside behind Elliott's house still had a thin, yellow to light brown chaparral cover as opposed to the deep, greenish-brown of fully grown California chaparral.