Open spoilers ahead about Roger Rabbit and ET. You have been warned.
We (the family) were driving to see Momma’s family up in New Jersey one Thanksgiving. Our six year-old was in the back with a little DVD video player, so Daddy fired up a couple of favorites from when he was younger.
The first was Roger Rabbit. Oops! There’s a lot of innuendo in this one… might be a while before we pull it off the shelf again. :o (Iconic Movie Moment: Roger taking a drink).
Well, the next was ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, which she adored from the get-go. She was all happy and “look, momma” and excited about ET. Momma was sitting beside her.
So we’re driving up I-81 through Harrisburg and I hear GASP! “What’s wrong with ET? Oh no!” “He’s going to be OK, isn’t he?” “No!” … comments like that throughout the sickness/army scene.
Then ET dies. My little girl is highly upset, her hands clenched around the DVD player, holding it tightly (she has it in her lap this entire time). “This is a bad movie! This is a BAD movie!”
“Sophie, do you want to stop?”
“No!”
So ET comes back to life. And she is thrilled, her emotional high as deep and meaningful as her low of 2 minutes earlier. And it’s back to the “Look, momma”'s and “Awwwwwww!”'s, and Sophie is happy, cheering Eliot and ET on as they escaped the “astronaut guys”, flying up in the air on their bikes, landing in front of the spaceship.
“Momma? What’s happening? ET isn’t leaving is he? I don’t want him to go!” And she was upset again, but not nearly as upset as earlier.
I’ll… be… right… here.
The spaceship flies off, the music swells, and the credits start to roll. Sophie does two things:
- Refuses to turn off the credits, watching them the whole way through.
- When they are done, and the DVD is at the menu, she looks up…
“Can I see it again?”
So she did, but after a long talk about the movie and what she saw, and What It All Meant. We pulled into a hotel and hooked the DVD player up to the TV so she could see it “big screen”.
ET was the movie for the next two weeks.