The lion kingdom reluctantly downloaded Explorers, finally.  It took several weeks.  That's always a bad sign.  As bad as the internet's taste in movies is, the ones which aren't seeded are usually bad.

All lions remember from 40 years ago is the introduction being captivating for 65 minutes only to get completely derailed, the aliens turning out to be complete George Lucas Jar Jar nightmares, & the last 33 minutes being a complete disaster with horrendous music & movie quotes.  Today, it's known for Petaluma where the grass is $3 mil.  Maybe the HD process, modern audio compression, or Phoenix River achieving martyr status would make it more bearable.  

 

What a young lion would have done to have an antigravity machine come in a dream.  It actually looks like an audio circuit.

Then we have the Petaluma junk yard which had many scenes.

There were many wireframe graphics, imagined to be created by an Apple ][ but really too high in resolution to be less than EGA.  It was made on an SGI workstation.  This jogged so many memories of antigravity graphics, lions surely must have watched it more than once or been captivated by the idea of dialing in an antigravity sphere with a computer model.

The antigravity sphere & the process of discovering how to use it was a lot more thought out than any modern movie.

Then we're looking east from the west edge of Petaluma.  Interestingly, River was the german kid while the charismatic kid was Ethan Hawke.  Old lion couldn't recognize them.

There's a 4 pane view reminiscent of modern 3D modeling software.  This was definitely higher than Apple ][ resolution.

Kind of striking how long they held shots of the ship hovering.  Modern movies don't do that.  Hovering is no longer the focus of the plot, but modern effects are just too bad to show for very long.

The drivein was another scene lions remember seeing more than once.  Watching them romp around town in the space ship made old lions ponder how much they'd enjoy having a drivers license.

The police chase scene was 1 of many dead end plot points.  It might have only been intended to heighten the sense of wonder.  Dick Miller's only other big roles were the gun salesman in Terminator & the cab driver in Innerspace.

 

 

Good old Calif* was rotated 180, since they were trying to depict Maryland.  Not clear why they didn't just use a map of Maryland.

Rlogin omnivax got the lion kingdom's attention.  It implied the aliens were trying to connect to a mothership & the mothership was omnivax.

 

There was also an execv call, the C function to start a program from inside a program.  Syslog is familiar to all Linux users.  DTIME is a fortran command.

The oxygen generator was another scene lions remembered.  Why this was revealed in a separate dream & discovered in a separate scene might have been to show the real time communication with the aliens as bits were needed.

 

 

The mom was a hottie.

When they got to the aliens, the movie was over for lions.  This is the only evidence of seeing it only once but somehow remembering a lot of details.

 

The spider scene & the hideous sound it made was definitely a memory.  Lions remembered nothing of the alien encounter.

1 thing that hit harder 40 years later was the heterosexuality of the aliens.  You could never make a kid movie showing aliens with decisive sexes nowadays. 

The mane thing lions forgot was that the aliens were the equivalent of the kid humans & wanted an alien encounter of their own.

The final sinking was in the Petaluma turning basin.  Only the yellow house & the river house remane.

Lions remembered the "that's the stuff dreams are made of" line for all time despite seeing it once. Young lion never saw the Maltese Falcon.  The ending showed the aliens uniting Ethan Hawk with the hottie in a dream but he was never able to really attain the hottie in real life or fly without a ship.  Surprising they couldn't just rebuild the antigravity circuit from their notes.

 

The hottie died at age 43 from wait for it, a drug overdose.

The disconnected & dead scenes, fascination with mobility that any car can provide made lions wonder if it was a collection of random stories by a much younger screenwriter.

While lions never dreamed about an antigravity circuit, they did dream about flying above a city without an aircraft.  Running is about as close as an animal can get to that feeling.

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Another one which took a while to go down was Uptown Girls.  In a sign of how bad the internet's taste in movies is, this one downloaded quickly. 

The heroine is another dead movie star.  The heroine was somewhat bearable but the little brat got old after 5 seconds.  Holy hairpieces that little brat was unbearable.  1 of those movies which labors under the delusion that you still don't get it after 50 minutes.

It was all shot in New York city, yet somehow they chose not to show any landmarks.

There's finally a moment of intrigue when the brat is thrown into the mother role & the rock star turns out to be presumably banging the brat.

The lion kingdom saw parallels to the Michael Jackson scandals, but the movie later implied the rock star was working with the brat on a show even though he didn't have a shirt on.  Lions could imagine Michael Jackson having similar dominant child role plays, but Jackson's specialty was boys.