I Hope The Kids From E.T. Are Okay

I think sometimes about the kids from E.T., but not about when they were young. I think about them now. And I don’t mean the actors, I mean the characters. How does such a profound experience as a child affect the grown-up you become?

Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in the movie, recently turned 50. So Elliott must be around the same age. How often does 50-year old Elliott think about the days that the movie covered?

Is this experience something he can even talk about? Who would he talk to that wouldn’t think he’s crazy? His sister Gertie was so young that she probably doesn’t have many concrete memories from this time. I imagine she’s perhaps a mid-level marketing executive now and never really thinks about E.T. Maybe he could talk to his older brother, Michael, but in my head-canon, Michael died in a drunk driving accident in college. RIP Michael.

For a while, Elliott’s mom was the reliable adult he could talk to who remembered E.T. and validated his memories, and the two of them bonded over that period. But as time passed, the alien came up less frequently, and life’s focus turned to the more mundane everyday topics and concerns. Sadly, she died of breast cancer when Elliott was in his thirties.

When Elliott was a single guy trying to find someone to spend the rest of his life with, on which date did he bring up the time he was psychically connected to an alien who took him flying on his bike? That’s a pretty big life event you might share with someone you’re getting serious about. But you can’t just spring that on someone and expect them to stick around. I imagine he probably tried it a few times before deciding that this just isn’t something he can share with anyone, even a potential life partner. So he keeps it all inside.

Perhaps over time Elliott convinces himself that he just made up E.T. after his parent’s divorced. Maybe he gets therapy, decides it never really happened. The alien must have been a coping mechanism. (Steven Spielberg apparently made up an imaginary alien friend after his parents divorced, providing inspiration for the movie. Or did he?)

Maybe Elliott decides to look up Keys, the scientist Peter Coyote played who always wore his keys dangling on his belt. He does some Google searches, finds that Keys retired and became a frequent guest on Art Bell for a few years. He published a couple books about aliens and did the ufology convention circuit, but beyond that community, he was never taken seriously. Now he lives in a retirement home where he spends his time watching Ken Burns documentaries.

I’m not really in need of an E.T. sequel, but I have some thoughts about how all this could be a jumping off point for one. It’s not about childhood, but an exploration of the struggles of mid-life and what happens when E.T. — actually his son who looks just like him — returns and seeks out Elliott in an age where online amateur sleuths make it hard for an alien to hide for long.

And of course Gertie and Keys fit into the adventure. Because we’ve got to get the old band back together.

Tom Hanks is a DJ

Why are we not talking every day about the fact that Tom Hanks is a DJ with an internet radio show called Songs From The Back of the Station Wagon?

It streams on Boss Radio 66, an offshoot of freeform radio station WFMU. The streaming station plays a lot of forgotten rock music from the 1960s, the sort of tunes that a person of Hanks’s age might have heard from, well, the back of the family station wagon.

He’s only done three monthly episodes so far. Here’s the most recent episode, a Halloween special from a couple weeks ago:

That’s David S. Pumpkins himself introducing and interjecting on the spook-a-nanny playlist.

Freeform radio is a format where the DJs play whatever they feel like. There is no station playlist, and no corporate interests telling them what to play. The songs aren’t random, as each DJ brings their own interests and personality to what they play. So as you get to know each DJ’s tastes, you have some expectation of what you might hear.

Freeform radio started in Berkeley in the 1960s, but I first encountered it in the ‘90s when I heard Meg “Megless” Griffin playing whatever she wanted on New York radio. Then I heard Vin Scelsa’s weekend show Idiot’s Delight on WFUV and I was hooked. It was a perfect blend of music and talk, and introduced me to music I wouldn’t hear anywhere else.

When Howard Stern moved to Sirius in 2004, I went to a promotional event where he gave away free Sirius radios, so I gave the satellite service a try. I was delighted to find that they had a freeform station called Sirius Disorder, where both Meg and Vin had shows until Sirius merged with XM in 2008.

Vin retired his terrestrial show in 2015, but for his last several years I used an app to automatically record the livestream every week, and now I have a library of hundreds of episodes on my computer. There’s also a website called Vindication that has episodes going back to 1976.

All of this brings me back to WFMU, America’s longest-running freeform radio station, and their streaming station Boss Radio 66. The streaming station has a little more structure than pure freeform, because the theme is specifically “Obscuro rock ‘n’ soul hits from the ‘60s.” But if you like rockabilly, surf music, and garage rock, you should give it a try.

WFMU and Boss Radio 66 can both be found on TuneIn Radio. And if you have a smart speaker, you can just tell it to play either station by name.

Meg Griffin can be heard on SiriusXM’s station The Loft, where she has a freeform show called Disorder.

And DJ Tom Hanks can be heard on Boss Radio 66, and on demand via Mixcloud.

Movie Trailer: Wild in the Streets

A few times an hour on Boss Radio 66, they play movie trailers and jingles from the ‘60s. The other day, I heard a trailer for a 1968 movie called Wild in the Streets, starring Shelley Winters, Christopher Jones, Diane Varsi, Hal Holbrook, Richard Pryor, and Ed Begley.

I’d never heard of it before, and it sounds absolutely bonkers. It’s about what happens when the age of eligibility for national politics is lowered to 14, and the front man of a rock band becomes president. In the trailer he declares:

This is followed by footage of an “older” woman being dragged into some kind of prison camp as she maniacally shouts My Country ‘Tis of Thee and tries in vain to escape over a barbed wire fence.

As the trailer says, “If you’re under 30, you’ll want to see it. If you’re over 30, you’d better see it.”

And that’s it for another newsletter. I know this edition was a bit eclectic, but I prefer to think of it as freeform. Thanks for reading. See you next time!

David