EXPLORERS 

Inner Space for Kids

A boy’s adolescence is often filled with wonders, surprises, hidden treasures, and hair-raising adventures; it is also a treacherous passageway between childhood and adulthood, when some boys refuse to put away their toys. They often disappear into a Never-Never Land of the imagination. Most people would agree with Winston Churchill, who felt that life begins when you grow up, not when you are growing up. Joe Dante’s 1985 film, Explorers, dismisses Churchill’s statement with rolling eyes, a wise-guy shrug, and a flippant “What’s up, Doc?” Explorers strongly asserts that growing up is indeed part of life; further, it is a time when the young form and test their values, ideas, and dreams about the world. Dante and his screenwriter, Eric Luke, accomplish this task by focusing on three elements: building a spacecraft, adolescent characters, and the destination of the voyage.

The film’s plot is reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), a story about teenagers teaming up with an adult in order to build a rocket ship that will take them on a voyage to the Moon and back. Dante’s kids in Explorers go Heinlein one better by taking an interplanetary trip in a home-built spacecraft, constructed from the junkyard remnants of an amusement park Tilt-a-Whirl, an old television screen, and old tires. The best toys--like the best inventions--are built from old parts, yet re-designed for new purposes.

Building the spacecraft begins when one of the boys, Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke), has a dream of a mystical circuit board, the talisman at the technological vanguard of the time. Unbeknownst the boys, the dream comes from a space alien who shares with Ben an insatiable curiosity for the unknown. Ben’s friend, Wolfgang (River Phoenix), experiments with the design and realizes he has an inertial device that creates a force-field bubble he can control and vector with his computer. If only they could build a ship, and explore the galaxy like the Metalunans in the science-fiction film, This Island Earth (1955). Their new-found friend, Darren (Jason Presson), comes up with the idea of procuring the parts from a junkyard. The most exhilarating point in the film is when the boys build their spacecraft and name it after the Bruce Springsteen song, "Thunder Road." This sequence embodies the spirit of invention and innovation: giving birth to a dream, building the dream, and living the dream.

The characters who build this dream are really atypical adolescent types. They eschew pastimes like sports and fighting for a position in the pecking order of adolescence. Ben, for example, who attends Charles M. Jones Junior High School (an in-joke referring to the legendary Bugs Bunny animator) can’t hold his own in a fight with the school bully. He also can’t win the hand of a beautiful girl he adores. Ben lives a sheltered life in a suburban home with his doting mother, and has issues with maturity, but he has a powerful imagination that can traverse the galaxy, with a little help from his friends.

Wolfgang, Ben’s science- and technology-obsessed friend, lives in a crowded home with his scientist father, mother, siblings and a pet mouse named “Heinlein,” who likes to say "Go to hell" with a computer-enhanced voice. Wolfgang tinkers with electronic gadgets and can program a computer; however, he’s unable to master the complicated algorithms of a social life. Consequently, he’s lonely and has difficulty finding someone who understands his eccentricities.

Finally, Ben and Wolfgang meet up with Darren, who saves Ben from further humiliation by the school bully. Darren is an outsider similar to Huckleberry Finn. Darren’s father, for instance, is unemployed, drinks a lot of beer, lives in a wretched house, and has a girlfriend. In many ways, Darren’s background makes him very perceptive about life, and he supplies some of the film’s subtle wisdom.

After building the spacecraft, the boys zoom through town, and through a drive-in movie theater, becoming part of the Corman-like drive-in sci-fi feature, Star Killers--complete with a corny monologue from one of Dante’s troupe of actors (Robert Picardo). The boys also encounter a government helicopter that mistakes their ship for a UFO. The pilot of the helicopter (Dick Miller, a character actor in Roger Corman's films), who has had similar experiences as a child, tracks the kids down, but the kids run away, board the ship, and take an interstellar voyage--not to the unknown but to the known.

When the kids finally encounter the aliens, they’re astonished to discover that the aliens are fond of American pop culture, having received transmissions of television broadcasts that travel at the speed of light. They endlessly regurgitate I Love Lucy re-runs, Ricky Ricardo's dialogue, Ed Sullivan, Elvis Presley, sit-coms, old B-movies, comedy routines, and even a loud and brassy “Veg-o-Matic” TV commercial. Ben, the dreamer, is clearly disappointed--as were many kids who saw Explorers when it was initially released--because he had expected to see something new and “out of this world.” Instead, the aliens, Wak Wak and Neek, tell the alienated Ben that although they love Earth’s culture, they’re afraid of Earthlings. Then the aliens show Ben clips of science-fiction movies like War of the Worlds (1953), the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and the Thing from Another World (1951). All of these movies feature human beings killing space aliens, presenting the boys with a different cultural point of view. Finally, the Earth kids leave when they discover that the aliens are really kids who have been joyriding in their parent’s spacecraft. A communication gap not only separates the generations, but pervades the galaxy as well.

Dante’s Explorers usually falls into the 1980’s genre of kids’ movies, but it doesn’t entirely fit the mold. The film examines the sheer joy of the young discovering something strange and inspiring; it takes seriously the need for kids to realize their dreams, casting off over-protective adults as they bravely venture forth into the world of the unknown; and it explores how a kid’s world is built from the pop culture debris of music, comic books, cartoons, electronic gadgets, computer programs, games, science-fiction novels, and movies. Although the film is similar in premise to Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), it doesn’t leave the kids stranded in adolescence. The film, Explorers, unlike E.T., refuses to deliver a sentimental story that idolizes childhood. Rather, it calls on kids to realize the complexities they will be facing as adults.

John Kern