EXPLORERS (1985) is jerry-rigged with enough juice to hurtle us all back to our childhoods. It casts the spell of empty washing machine boxes turned into spaceships, comic books cracked open after bedtime, missions planned with friends via walkie-talkie. The film was promoted as a summer tentpole, but it's really an autumn one, Ray Bradbury by way of The Wonderful World of Disney. An autumn release would've also permitted the filmmakers to finish the movie, slapped together in such a state that its director would introduce a screening in 2008 by joking, “Welcome to the rough cut of Explorers.”
Eric Luke grew up in the northern California town of Los Altos Hills. His father and mother were computer programmers, Luke’s dad working for NASA at Ames Research Center. When Luke was in sixth grade, his father introduced him to the science fiction magazine Worlds of If, and around the same time, he started making movies on the family's Super 8 camera, using his brother and sisters as cast members. Luke's love for filmmaking took him to UCLA Film School. His studies culminated in a 24-minute thesis titled Dark Ages, in which a samurai wanders a post-apocalyptic wasteland with an AI companion shaped like a golf club. Luke's short was a finalist in several student film contests, but Hollywood hardly beat a path to the UCLA graduate's door. He recalled, “At that time, there were not industry people closely associated with the film department, and in fact, there was not this feeling of the agents or producers coming to the screenings at the end of the quarter to see if there was any hot young filmmaker. That was way in the future. So we really produced our films and got out of film school and hit the street and there was a feeling of, ‘What do I do now?’”
Working part-time at the science fiction/fantasy bookstore Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica, Luke started writing screenplays for feature films. Attack From Outer Space was his spin on fifties science fiction movies, with a hot rodder racing aliens. Cold-calling landed Luke a literary agent, but with bills due, he was working for Private Stock Effects, an effects house in North Hollywood. Promoted to camera assistant on Jaws 3-D (1983), Luke was thinking about garbage cans on his drive home. He recalled, “I used to sit in an empty garbage can and pretend with my brother and sisters that we were launching it into space. So the idea was to recapture that childhood feeling when anything was possible, when your imagination was more real than the world around you …” The script took Luke a year to write. His conceit was that three boys secretly build their own spaceship from designs transmitted to them in a shared dream. Rather than magic, Luke wanted his story grounded in real science.
He drew inspiration from one of his favorite movies, director Fritz Lang’s visionary Metropolis (1927). Its main characters represent three dimensions of the human experience: the heart, the head and the hands. This formula had served science fiction well, as Gene Roddenberry depicted Captain Kirk as the heart, Mr. Spock as the head, and Dr. McCoy as the hands of Star Trek. Believing he'd alienated readers of Attack From Outer Space by setting the second half in the stars, Luke kept two-thirds of his new script on Earth. His agent still had no idea how to sell it. Luke might have gone back to a blank page if not for Brenda Beckett, who was leaving the agency that represented him to launch her own. Needing clients, she took a gamble on Luke and his script, titled Explorers. Beckett sent it out as a weekend read. Only one reader responded. David Bombyk, head of creative affairs for Edward S. Feldman Productions. Feldman had moved from a prolific career in film publicity to producing movies, like the melodramas The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and its 1978 sequel. Bombyk thought the first 65 pages of Explorers were fantastic. But once the story shifted into space opera, he recognized familiar territory—and a costly one. When the two producers submitted Explorers to buyers, they offered only those 65 pages, like sellers showing a home with the second floor roped off.
David Kirkpatrick, vice-president of production at Paramount Pictures, was introduced to the material by his boss, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio’s president of production. Kirkpatrick recalled, “I remember getting a call from his office. So I went down, and he handed me just about thirty pages of Explorers. The title had been ripped off, just these itty-bitty pages … And I read those pages and I knew immediately how excited he was by it.” By the end of the day, Paramount had acquired the script. Luke singled Kirkpatrick out for shepherding Explorers through the studio development process. He recalled, “At one point they were saying, ‘These kids need to be more hip.’ And I kind of went and wrote that and brought it back, and he said, ‘Where are my kids? What have you done to my kids?’ So he really had a personal stake in it.”
From the moment it went out as a weekend read to the weekend it reached theaters, the third act of Explorers never stopped drawing scrutiny. Luke recalled, “My first draft had them going to Mars and getting marooned there, having to go on a boy’s adventure to get back home. The Martian civilization was dying, much like H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon with the Selenites. The kids are going there to help them somehow. The first dream is a call for help, so it’s dramatic. It says, ‘I am in danger, come and help me,’ which propels you. It’s not just a weird concept in your brain that you build a spaceship from. You’re actually building the spaceship in order to do something.” Instead of a red planet without atmosphere, a draft by Luke dated December 1983 climaxes on a thriving blue-green planet. The boys meet three aliens and explore the planet with them as a 15-foot-tall creature gives chase. They realize their new friends are just kids themselves, and the creature is their furious father.
When Paramount—where the buck stopped with chairman Barry Diller—deemed Explorers ready to submit to directors, Luke and Kirkpatrick were booked on a flight to Germany. Kirkpatrick recalled, “Wolfgang Petersen was going to direct the movie … And it was subject to us seeing The NeverEnding Story, which after Das Boot was very well received around the world. And I like Wolfgang. But when we saw the movie—and it wasn’t quite finished yet—unlike E.T., it didn’t have an American feeling to it. I think Barry Diller called him to say they’d seen the movie and thought it just wasn’t right for him.” Explorers was also submitted to Lawrence Kasdan, who was co-writing Silverado (1985) with his brother, Mark, with plans to direct. Not wanting to miss his opportunity to make a western, Kasdan passed, but told Luke he found his script refreshing. Kirkpatrick cited a rumor that Steven Spielberg had obtained the partial script, but rather than direct or produce it himself, slipped the 65 pages to Katzenberg, along with a suggestion for the perfect director.
Joe Dante had gotten his start cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures before directing Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981). The hits would keep coming. Dante recalled, “I had just finished making Gremlins, which was a very arduous movie to make. Luckily it turned out well and the picture was a huge hit. So all of a sudden, for the first time in my career—the only time in my career—I was on the A-list … And they sent me this script called Explorers. I did want to take a break after Gremlins, but this movie, the script just charmed me. To me, after doing so much intensive special effects on Gremlins, I thought, ‘How complicated could this be? Three kids in a spaceship.’” Paramount didn’t just send Dante a script. They sent Darlene Chan, a junior production executive, along with it. Chan recalled, “It was such a hot script, it was one of the scripts that had a number that was shadowed on each page so that you couldn’t make a copy of it. Because we would know that Number 12 was something you had read if it got out somehow. So I was dispatched to drive over to Warner Bros. and instructed to wait outside his door while he read it. Joe was done with it in like, forty-five minutes to an hour. I was really shocked. He opened the door, popped out, gave it to me, and just said, ‘Thanks! Thanks for coming!’ And that was it. So I go back to Paramount and everyone’s asking me, ‘So? What were the tea leaves? What were you thinking he thought?’” By the end of the business day, Dante had called Katzenberg to accept the job.
In July 1984, the month that Gremlins crossed the $100 million mark at the box office faster than any other movie in the history of Warner Bros., Joe Dante was announced as the director of Explorers. Expectations couldn’t have been higher. With Edward S. Feldman and David Bombyk as producers, Dante’s producing partner Michael Finnell came aboard as an executive producer. Finnell recalled, “It was right after Gremlins and it was like, ‘Do we really want to jump into another big effects movie right away?’ But we read the script and up to a point, the script was really good. It was a great concept: these three kids building their own spaceship and going into outer space. But it didn’t really have an ending.” For Gremlins, Dante and Finnell had been allotted a year of pre-production to figure out how they were going to make the picture, and another year of post-production to fine tune it. For Explorers, Katzenberg wanted the movie in theaters for the summer of 1985. This would require Dante to start shooting in October, in a mere three months. Rather than rush a director of Dante's prestige, Katzenberg asked him whether he thought a summer release would be nice. When Dante allowed that, ideally, it would be, he realized he'd just agreed to race Explorers to a Labor Day finish the following year. As for Dante's conviction that the script's ending needed work, Katzenberg reassured him he could fix it while the film was in production. Dante recalled, "It got to the point that this picture would either get made with me or without me—they weren't going to wait. And although I felt the time schedule was not to my liking, I just wanted to do it, so I did."
At a production budget of $23 million, Explorers was more expensive than two competing films from Amblin Entertainment, The Goonies (1985) and Back to the Future (1985), budgeted at $19 million each. Without a summer tentpole of their own, Paramount went all in on Explorers. Open casting calls commenced immediately, in August 1984. The search was led by Susan Arnold, who would cast four of Dante’s pictures, including Gremlins, before becoming a producer. Arnold had three months to cast the roles of Ben, Wolfgang and Darren—three actors, each roughly twelve years old. Estimates placed the number of boys who auditioned at four thousand. Dante recalled, “We saw a lot of kids, some of whom were fairly well-known in the business, but none of them seemed to quite have what I was looking for. And then one day a kid came in with his friend …” Ethan Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, but grew up in Princeton Junction, New Jersey. He started taking acting classes at McCarter Theater in Princeton, and booked his first professional acting job at age thirteen in a production of Saint Joan. Hawke had a friend named Brandon he’d met in acting class. Brandon already had an agent and took the train to New York for casting calls. Hawke started tagging along.
According to show business legend, Hawke didn’t plan on reading for Explorers, but once the casting director got a look at him, he was asked to audition. One call back led to another, and Hawke ended up in Los Angeles, where he recalled seeing Danny Nucci—who'd be featured in Just One of the Guys (1985) and briefly in Explorers—at the casting call. Peter Billingsley was there too. Unlike most others auditioning, he had a starring role in a hit film, playing Ralphie in A Christmas Story (1983). Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, the twin towers of teen magazines in the late eighties, also auditioned. Hawke, with no film or television credits to his name, booked the role of Ben. River Phoenix was a series regular on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on CBS. He was circling the role of Darren, a motorhead who escapes physical abuse at home by helping Ben and Wolfgang build a spaceship. Dante recalled, “He was perfect for it. In his screen test, he had a T-shirt on with a little pack of cigarettes in the cuff, and was really good. He was a really good actor.” As evidence of how deep the pool of young talent was that summer, Dante found someone he liked even better for the part: Jason Presson, who'd played a traumatized nine-year-old in The Stone Boy (1984) opposite Robert Duvall and Glenn Close. Rather than lose Phoenix, Dante offered the actor the other open part, the young scientist Wolfgang. Hawke recalled, “The first time I saw River Phoenix, I looked out the window and River was practicing his character's walk. He was thirteen years old and he was trying different walks in the parking lot. And I went out there and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he told me. And I said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘Well, I'm just not like Wolfgang at all, and I've got to figure out who Wolfgang is.’ And that's the kind of normal thing for Robert De Niro to say in 1984, but not a thirteen-year-old kid.” To play Lori, the object of Ben's earthbound fantasies, Dante cast Amanda Peterson, a fourteen-year-old film and television professional.
With the ending still unresolved, Dante wasn't about to cut his writer loose. Luke recalled, “He included me in the entire process, where I said, ‘I actually want to stay on this through production and through post-production.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely.’ So it was like the best film school in the world for me, apprenticing myself to him … I went with him up to ILM, I sat through the sound mix, all the way up to the release I was really just sort of shadowing him and had nothing but good memories.” To arrive at the name Thunder Road for the spacecraft the boys build, Luke had been inspired by Side 1, Track 1 of the album Born to Run. Notified there might be a problem, he volunteered to help. “They said, ‘We don't think we're going to be able to get the rights to call it the Thunder Road.’ And I said, ‘Can I write a personal letter to Bruce Springsteen, because that's one of the anthems of my youth.’ And I wrote a really heartfelt letter to him, about, as I was growing up, I used to just drive all night and play that on the car stereo … and this really speaks to me. And he wrote back and said, ‘Yeah, go ahead and use it.’”
John Hora, who’d lit The Howling and Gremlins, as well as Joe Dante’s gleefully unhinged segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), would serve as director of photography. Dante explained, “Whenever I work with a DP, I like to show them things in other movies I like. And with John I said, ‘I like Stanley Cortez. I like Joe Biroc. I like Mario Bava. If a movie’s in color, it should be in color.’ And so we, together, sort of worked out a template of what visuals we liked, and it would alter from picture to picture, but I was never dissatisfied with anything John ever did.” Dante's confidence that Explorers would be a simple production—“three kids in a spaceship”—was starting to look foolishly optimistic. Omnibus Computer Graphics, the makers of computer animation for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), was tasked with designing and animating two dream sequences set in a pixelated universe. Industrial Light & Magic, which had Cocoon (1985) and Back to the Future on its plate, was retained to provide 140 visual effects shots for Explorers. These illusions included a spherical force field, spaceships, and flight sequences involving the young cast. Special effects makeup designer Rob Bottin had worked for Dante on three prior occasions, each time with a considerably larger budget than the picture that had come before. His job was to design and build aliens that could perform live in-camera. Making the impossible possible fell to Ralph Winter, the film's visual effects coordinator. He summarized, “Explorers was amazing in all the things we were trying to accomplish in a short period. Not only did we have very complicated visual effects being done at ILM, but there were also computerized dreams being done by Omnibus and mechanical effects that were called for on almost every page of the script … We also had exotic makeup, aerial plate photography, location work, studio work, night work—you name it and we did it.”
The movie-within-a-movie playing during the drive-in sequence ended up in the film by default. Dante recalled, “We originally were going to use some scenes from a 1960 Japanese movie called Battle In Outer Space, but Toho Studios wanted more money for the use of the scenes than I think they spent to make the entire movie. It did have a semi-cheesy quality which seemed to be appropriate for what we wanted, but it got to be too expensive.” Robert and Dennis Skotak had worked with Eric Luke at Private Stock Effects before co-founding their own company, L.A. Effects Group. The Skotaks were brought in to make Starkiller, a spoof of science fiction imports. The director recalled, “The effects they gave us were really not bad. They were actually kind of ingenious. They did all of the laser beams with ghost glass so that everything they handed us was done in camera. They did quite a few shots and I was impressed with the quality, especially considering how fast they did it.” Robert Picardo performed Starkiller’s dialogue in Italian and Karen Mayo-Chandler in French, both dubbed to English, while her father, played by production designer Robert F. Boyle, delivered his dialogue in English. Dante recalled, “Then we just did some wild lines on the set and stuck them in so that they’re completely out of sync, and it just looks like those dubbed Italian pictures I used to see in the 1960s—stuff like Wild, Wild Planet and Planet on the Prowl.”
Designing and building the sets fell to Boyle, who also designed the alien spacecraft. Boyle, art director of It Came from Outer Space (1953), went on to become Alfred Hitchcock's production designer starting with North by Northwest (1959). Dante recalled, “Yes, and he also did the ever-popular Abbott and Costello Go to Mars … some of this picture does look like Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. Actually, Bob—like all of us—didn’t have a lot of time, and he told me that what he enjoyed most about doing Explorers was the idea that he never knew what he was going to come up with each day.” Dante continued, “The interiors that Bob designed were like the inside of a Bessemer converter, suggesting that the aliens went directly from the industrial age to the space age without a computer age. It was as if these people were running things on dreams or something.” The art department was so rushed that the boys climbed inside the Thunder Road while the cement beneath it was still wet, and the ship began to sink.
Boyle built worlds. Rob Bottin built nightmares. He made a career of it, creating the visceral alien lifeforms for The Thing (1982). Bottin recalled, “When Mike Finnell first contacted me, I guess he thought maybe I could come up with something really weird because he said, ‘We’re thinking about having creatures with sixteen legs and seven eyes and all that kind of stuff.’ But when he told me I only had two or three months to create these creatures I said, ‘Mike, you don’t get sixteen legs in three months.’ He immediately got depressed, so I said, ‘Listen, I’ll come up with something, don’t worry.’” Bottin had the added challenge of creating creatures that could perform dialogue. The designer added, “I am very fond of doing puppets because you can make them more outrageous, but for Explorers I thought that maybe we could use actors in suits if we could get really good performers. Then, also, I wanted to do a really way-out makeup design that would be nothing like anything anybody had ever seen before—which, Joe says, is my credo.”
Explorers gave Bottin the opportunity to try a concept he'd been toying with: placing a half-mechanical headpiece on an actor, extending the character's facial features. The headpiece would be integrated with makeup appliances designed to disappear into a single, unified face. Bottin recalled, “I took a series of drawings to Joe and Mike, and I said, ‘Let’s do guys in suits.’ And they both looked at each other and said, ‘Guys in suits? We thought you’d be the last one who would want to do guys in suits. What’s a guy in a suit going to look like, the Creature from the Black Lagoon?’ But then I showed them many, many sketches from myself and different artists that I work with, and they thought the body shape of the alien was hysterical … Joe loved the sketches and, out of all of the ones that were done, chose the one that I did the very first day that I had even thought about it. It basically looked like this little happy face with two eyestalks on it, and he said, ‘That’s cute. Boy, it doesn’t look like what was described in the script, but it’s pretty neat. He looks kind of goofy.’”
Cinematographer John Hora recalled, “The biggest challenge was that the script I read originally—after the kids got to outer space—I thought they were going to meet some gross creatures that looked like piles of oysters. It was something like Alien but a little friendlier. And they had me come to a meeting to choose the colors for these monsters. And Rob Bottin unveiled these comic book characters with bubble gum colors of green and pink. And I couldn’t speak, which is rare for me. And they said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I guess I don’t have a clue what this movie is about.’”
After approving Bottin’s goofball concept of aliens as couch potatoes, Dante and Finnell departed to Petaluma, California to start principal photography on October 15, 1984. Back in Los Angeles, Bottin and lead sculptor Henry Alvarez refined the designs and sculpted a pair of half-scale heads. Bottin's design left him with a foot of space to fill between the alien's mouth and its eyes. His solution was to give the face of the male alien, Wak, wrinkles. Bottin shot a test photo of a stand-in wearing Wak’s head and mailed the photo to Dante. The designer recalled, “I got this phone call from Joe, and he said that he loved it and that it looked promising. But then he added, ‘Yeah, Rob, I think it looks really promising but the art director, Bob Boyle—you know Bob, he did The Birds—well, um, I don’t know how to break this to you, but he thinks Wak looks like a giant scrotum.’ I said, ‘What?’ And Joe said, ‘Yeah, Bob thinks Wak looks like a giant scrotum with a smile—a smiling scrotum.’ I had pictures to refer to as we spoke over the phone, and I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe Bob should look at somebody else’s scrotum, because he’s obviously seeing something I’m not seeing.’” Dante stuck with Bottin's concept. Believing wrinkles made Wak look too old, he challenged the designer to find another way to fill out the creature's face.
Leslie Rickert was cast as Wak’s sister, Neek. There was no question who Bottin preferred to play her brother. Robert Picardo had performed on Broadway opposite Jack Lemmon in Tribute and appeared on an episode of Taxi before meeting Joe Dante, who cast him as the werewolf Eddie Quist in The Howling, and Rob Bottin, who created the character’s makeup. Picardo took some convincing to board Explorers, primarily because Bottin’s makeup for this show initially had him acting blind. The actor recalled, “I knew I would go nuts if I couldn’t see. But then Rob came over one day with the mechanical eyestalks and I decided to try them on. Actually, I said yes based on a combination of things. First, when Rob gets excited about something, his enthusiasm is irresistible. Plus, he brought the mechanical eyes and made me put them on. Then I started to move around the room and he started laughing, and when he started laughing I decided, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it.’”
Picardo, or “Bob” as Dante and Bottin called him, insisted he be able to see inside the makeup. Bottin hit on another idea. The designer recalled, “Freckles afforded pretty clear vision. It was like a camera looking through a chain link fence and the focus is on something in the distance and the links disappear. So when Bob looked through the freckles he had something of a pattern over his eyes, but pretty good vision.” The freckles also helped Bottin fill in the foot of space between Wak’s mouth and his eyestalks. Costume designer Rosanna Norton, who’d dressed Sissy Spacek for the prom in Carrie (1976) and armored the warriors of Tron (1982), connected Wak’s head to his body with an appliance the alien wore like a necklace. Norton referred to it as the “outer space purple hotdogs.” When Picardo climbed inside Bottin’s suit for the first time, it was so heavy that Wak’s posterior practically hit the floor. Norton came to the rescue. Bottin recalled, “Thank god she was on the movie because she immediately looked at the suit and came up with an idea for what became known as ‘the big diaper’—which was a harness inside the suit that Bob had to put on first. Basically, it was held up by his shoulders like a backpack and, by using buckles and canvas running up into the tail and back and under and around, it kept Wak’s behind up in the air about three feet out from Bob. Rosanna really saved the day.”
Production returned to Los Angeles for more location shooting. Burbank’s historic Pickwick Drive-In doubled as the film's outdoor theater. Aviation High School, shuttered in Redondo Beach, was dressed as “Charles M. Jones Junior High School,” the school’s name a tribute to Chuck Jones, the animator who created most of the Looney Tunes characters. Interiors were filmed on the Paramount lot, with Dante and Finnell saving the alien spaceship and its crew for last. Bottin’s team completed the suits for the aliens on the day they were needed on set. Wak’s fully mechanical head weighed five pounds and required fifteen cables to operate the eyes, eyebrows, and ears for close-ups. A head made of fiberglass was used for long shots. By far the most strenuous scene for Picardo required him to boogie to the Little Richard tune, “All Around the World,” while clutching a saxophone. The actor recalled, “That was the scene I am most proud of in the film. It was also very hard to do. The saxophone was heavy, the costume was heavy, and I was sweating like crazy.” Picardo compared a minute-long take to a mile-long sprint, and cited his jogging regimen for helping him survive the performance. “To kick a leg up when I sang and danced, for instance, was one of the hardest things I did. It was like somebody had strapped your leg to a wall and you’re trying to kick it, moving that weight. As a result, you have to overact. I was acting for all I was worth underneath that stuff. If I was moving an inch, you can believe I was acting a mile.”
Dante added, “Bob Picardo is the kind of actor that makes the difference between a well-designed costume and a creature with personality … We had sketches and we had plans and we had hopes, but when we put Bob inside the suit, the character just evolved from something that was not really in the script or in the sketches—it just emerged there on the stage. And that entire section of the picture was expanded, just because when we started working with Bob we tried to make more time. He had a great sense of how the character should be.” Going into production with only seven pages of material in which the boys interact with the aliens, Picardo's ad-libs pushed the assembly cut to three hours. Dante and his editor got to work. The director recalled, “I had met Tina Hirsch at New World Pictures when I was doing trailers with Allan Arkush and she was in the next room cutting—I think it was Big Bad Mama. We became very friendly, and when it came time to do the Twilight Zone movie, I asked Tina if she would do the editing. That worked out, so we went on to Gremlins. And so Tina edited Gremlins and that turned out to be a big hit and that was good for everybody, and then I asked her to do Explorers, but because of the time crunch, it became apparent she wasn’t going to be able to do the entire picture.” John Wright, an assistant editor on The Bad News Bears (1976) whose work Dante and Finnell were familiar with, was asked to edit the scenes aboard the alien spaceship.
Two weeks before Explorers began shooting, Paramount's top executives—Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg—had resigned. Finnell recalled, “I get a call from Jeffrey, and he says, ‘Michael and I are leaving … we’re taking over Disney Studios.’ And I said, ‘Well, congratulations to you. But where does that leave us?’” A financier pulling the plug or a lead actor dying could kill a movie in the middle of production, but studio regime change could poison it on its way to theaters. Finnell continued, "And then the guy who ended up running Paramount was a guy named Frank Mancuso. And he had been the head of distribution at Paramount. And the problem was he was a distribution guy, so to him, it was all about release dates and dealing with theater owners, and he had really no concept of the actual filmmaking process, which Jeffrey Katzenberg definitely did.” Dante and Hirsch had done little more than assemble a rough cut when Paramount’s new leadership moved up the release date from late August 1985 to early July. The studio instructed Dante to lock a picture he'd just started editing. A test screening was hastily convened in Arizona. The director recalled, “It was already a disaster. Here’s an unfinished movie being shown to kids who are seven to ten years old, and they’re giving preview cards out. And these little kids are dragging these preview cards around at the preview, and the movie has no ending. It stopped. The movie we previewed, the effects aren’t finished, and you can’t possibly tell what’s happening.”
David Kirkpatrick added, “I remember Lorraine Feldman, who was Ed’s wife—always very nice, socialite, and mom, great kids—she came up to me and said after one preview, ‘This played like a bomb!’ I never heard anybody be so vocal.” Long before production got underway, Eric Luke had arrived on the idea of the boys meeting aliens who are revealed to be children themselves. Dante ran with this, settling on a climax in which the aliens communicate with the boys in what they think is their language: the television and radio signals of the fifties, which they've been receiving in space. Rather than a spiritual communion with extraterrestrials, the boys receive their own B-movies, TV theme songs and commercial jingles performed for them. Luke stated, “Back then, there wasn’t a lot of sampling yet, in music, and what Wak is doing in effect is sampling science fiction movies and playing back cuts from them, and creating new music, or new narrative out of them. And the kids—speaking the same language of science fiction and science fiction movies, especially with Ben—are really communicating through Earth culture, Earth pop culture.” When Wak greets Ben with a Bugs Bunny impersonation, the test audience sat through it in stone silence.
The success of Gremlins had earned Dante final cut on Explorers, leverage now meaningless without the luxury of time. The director wrote a letter of resignation to Paramount, but never submitted it, not wanting to let his cast and crew down, particularly his young actors. With reels already being printed, all Dante could do was remove a half hour’s worth of scenes. In a Q&A at the New Beverly Theater in Los Angeles in September 2008, Dante confided, “It’s not so much specific things I would’ve done differently. Certainly, a lot of scenes are just not finished the way they should be. You’ll see Mary Kay Place in the picture. She’s got like two shots, and she had a huge part as the mother. Lawrence Pressman had a part as the father—he’s not in the movie at all. The scene where they’re flying around the drive-in, there’s a kid in a car who says, ‘That looks so fake,’ and he actually used to be Ethan’s brother in the movie. I mean, there was a whole family subplot that was completely missing.” Dante had attempted to work in a theory by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that held humanity would one day be connected in a world mind. Fragments of this idea survive in Dick Miller's scenes as a pilot whose encounter with the Thunder Road rekindles dreams he had as a boy, but Dante ran out of time to develop the theme fully. He continued, “Then you’ll notice at the end of the movie there’s a scene by a tree and they have some dialogue, the kids. It’s completely relooped and has nothing to do with what they were originally talking about. The big disappointment for me is that the last five minutes of the movie are just completely not what they were supposed to be.” Dante later admitted his biggest regret was trimming the adolescent romance between Ben and Lori. In a sequence that was to take place immediately after the test flight of the Thunder Road, Lori invited Ben and his friends to her birthday party. He presented his lady love with a moon rock ring the boy thought was amazing, and she pretended to like it. In the dream sequence that concludes the film, Ben was supposed to take Lori's hand and see that she was wearing the ring. Dante dropped it all at the eleventh hour.
Explorers opened July 12, 1985 in more theaters than any movie then playing in the U.S.: 1,750. Most reviews leaned negative. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel concluded, "Unfortunately, in Explorers … the human kids are far more interesting than the aliens they meet. Maybe the movie's script is making the wry comment that it's not so interesting 'out there,' but I doubt it… We get all revved up to go on this mission with three very different and attractive kids, only to have them wind up confronting a couple of creatures that are about as appealing as the cheap fuzzy animals you win at a country fair." Siskel gave the film 2½ stars out of 4. Roger Ebert echoed this appraisal in the Chicago Sun-Times, “This movie takes a deep breath and plunges headlong into the unknown, and belly-flops into a universe full of Jell-O. What an anticlimax. It begins with three brainy kids figuring out a way to conquer gravity and fly to the stars, and it ends with a bunch of sideshow aliens who repeat material they’ve learned by watching television. This is the cinematic equivalent of the chimp that learned to play chess and won a gumball.” Ebert gave Explorers 2 stars out of 4. Reviewing it on their syndicated television show, the nation’s two most popular film critics turned two thumbs down. In LA Weekly, F.X. Feeney saw something other critics missed. “What will 12-year-olds make of it? My suspicion is, they’ll love the first half and be somewhat shocked by the second—which is when most adults will be waking up with a start and enjoying the film greedily. But perhaps I’m not giving 12-year-olds enough credit: the hopeful adolescent and the cynical adult in Joe Dante are both fully alive on one magic, Mobius-strip-like continuum. He’s made this film on the assumption that the same is true of everyone in his audience.”
Blending 1950s nostalgia with 1980s visual effects was the recipe for what became the highest grossing movie of the year. That movie was not Explorers. Instead, Back to the Future seized the zeitgeist and in its second weekend of release, sold nearly three times as many tickets as Explorers did in its debut. Joe Dante’s follow-up to Gremlins spent two weekends among the top ten grossing films in the country, but by its third weekend, summer had moved on without it. The director, his lead actor and the screenwriter each offered their post-mortems in 2020. Dante reflected, “The thing about this picture that sort of escaped us at the time, and now seems to be so obvious in retrospect, is that when you have a hero who is expecting to find the secrets of the universe by going to outer space and meeting aliens who can tell us everything and explain everything, and then finds out … they're just kids, just like them, and so our hero is disappointed. And as a result, I think the audience is disappointed, because we identify with Ben and we want what he wants and we want him to be happy, and when he gets into space and discovers nothing but goofy aliens who know nothing but pop culture—which is just as empty in outer space as it is on Earth—it’s hard to see why people wouldn’t be disappointed with it. This comes on the heels of E.T. of course, where the idea was that the alien comes down and ennobles everybody, and you look into outer space and you see God, and this is obviously the opposite of that. And that didn’t seem to be particularly what the audience wanted.”
Ethan Hawke took an even deeper dive into the film. “There’s actually something profound about the movie that’s very hard to absorb, and it’s why I’m so proud of it. The movie is kind of about how everything in life is a little disappointing, and that if you don’t enjoy the moments of it and the reality of it, whether it’s New Year’s Eve or prom night or whatever your version of the Oscars is, we create these things—seeing aliens—that are going to change our lives and make it have all this meaning. And in truth, it already has meaning. And so these things often seem empty. And Explorers is kind of about that. ‘The Adventure Begins In Your Own Backyard.’ Your own backyard is amazing.” Eric Luke offered a theory for why the film has endured. “Explorers was really one of the first of those movies on VHS—not the first, but part of the VHS generation—where you bought a movie and kept it at home and watched it again and again. And there wasn’t an Internet that was full of an infinite amount of entertainment, and if you’re bored with something, you switch to something else, and you’d never watch something twice. Whereas a VHS tape, you come home from school and you pop it in, because you remember having a good time. So I think it sort of made its way into people’s consciousness as they grew up because they’d seen it multiple times as part of their childhoods.”
In 1984, Joe Dante was heavily in demand, and in a perfect world, Paramount would've given the director of Gremlins until September 1985 to finish their science fiction adventure. Explorers wasn't made in a perfect world, it was made in Los Angeles. With two more months to work on the picture, Dante could've upgraded it in two critical areas, but ironically, his rough cut works just well enough in those areas not to hurt the film. Most of the adult characters had their roles cut, but that's not far from where adults tend to be in the life of a 12-year-old boy, whether in a Peanuts comic strip or real life. Their omission rings true to the latchkey world of the story. James Cromwell and Dana Ivey, cast as Wolfgang's hyper-focused scientist parents, made the final cut in what feels like no accident, their characters textured enough to survive an editing process that had no time for underwritten ones. Dick Miller, whose avuncular presence outlasts his screen time in Dante's films, as well as those like The Terminator (1984), survives as a tantalizing figment. Rather than shadowing the picture as Ben's sage, Miller is at his best doing what he always does, providing grounded support in one scene before slipping into the shadows.
The simplest fix for Explorers would be restoring what it's missing most: the little romance between Ben and Lori. Reinstating the birthday party scene would've given Lori the agency she lacks in the finished film. Even without it, there's enough evidence that the filmmakers understood the interior life of boys. The first thing Ben does when the trio figures out how to control the inertialess sphere isn't to explore the cosmos, but to peek inside Lori's bedroom. Her presence in the final dream sequence implies she's receiving the alien signal in her dreams too, and instead of remaining an object, is game to join the next mission. With Lori, you get Ben. And Wolfgang and Darren need Ben to bring them together in this star trek. Lori isn’t the heart of Explorers—she's its pulse. Unfortunately, the material doesn't allow Amanda Peterson to prove she could hold her own with Hawke, Phoenix and Presson. She got her closeup in 1987's teen romantic comedy Can't Buy Me Love.
The cinematic treasures of Explorers are plentiful. Eric Luke's concept had been hiding in plain sight for years, through a decade of Disney live-action films like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) or Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), which Luke reverse engineers for the ‘80s. Many a boy had dreamed of building his own spaceship, but no filmmaker had made that dream plausible. The Thunder Road is the most purely lovable spaceship in the movies. The craft doesn't just resemble something built in a junkyard. It's one we watch assembled in a junkyard. We know which character picked each part. We watch those parts being installed and tested. ILM’s Nilo Rodis designed the Frankenstein vehicle, and set designers Les Gobruegge, Donald High and Eugene C. Nollmann II built it. Jerry Goldsmith's musical score carries Explorers to a place the film alone wouldn't reach. He’d composed emotionally rich music for pictures like Chinatown (1974) and First Blood (1982), but excelled in the science fiction genre, his scores for Alien (1979) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) suggesting that Goldsmith was waiting to compose music for a Ray Bradbury yarn. Explorers is his masterpiece, a score so rousing it lets us forgive every implausibility in the story. Rob Bottin's aliens, which evoke cartoon characters like Woody Woodpecker or Chilly Willy, were a step beyond those he'd built for The Thing because they had to speak. Robert Picardo's manic work under Bottin’s makeup deserves mention alongside Tim Curry's Wadsworth in Clue (1985), another highly anticipated Paramount picture mismanaged by the studio that year.
That said, the commercial failure of Explorers makes sense in retrospect. The filmmakers have blamed Paramount's decision to open their movie the weekend MTV telecast the star-studded Live Aid concert. Back to the Future, then in its second weekend of release, wasn't hurt a bit. The real damage came from Universal, which re-issued E.T. the second weekend Explorers was in theaters. This was calculated to remind audiences they should accept no substitutes when it came to kids on bikes meeting visitors from space. E.T. was about an alien who encounters children. Explorers is about children who encounter aliens.
Video rental category: Science Fiction
Special interest: Kids on Bikes
This production history is sourced from Max Every’s article “So I’m You, Right?: A Look Inward at Explorers,” Elijah Drenner’s behind-the-scenes documentary The Thunder Road: Making Explorers (2026), and A Science Fiction Fairytale: The Story of Explorers (2020), all included on Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray release of the film. Also cited is Adam Eisenberg’s article on the film’s visual effects, published in the August 1985 issue of Cinefex 23.
