Today marks the 20th anniversary release of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. While we’re sure it’s still the same heartwarming tale of a squooshyheaded (see Ann Coulter reference below) alien turning on his heart light, Spielberg felt compelled to make some edits for this release. Edits which, in our self-important opinion, are silly.

Digitally removing guns from the hands of government agents chasing an alien to replace them with walkie-talkies? We’ve seen the X-Files, damnit, and we know that agents always break out the guns when they are chasing aliens, vampires, and other creepy-crawlies. Seriously though, what’s the harm in showing government agents properly using the tools of the trade? You may hate handguns - that’s perfectly fine - but agents do, in fact, use them. No wanted person has ever been stopped by pointing a walkie-talkie at them.

Second - this change had apparently been made for the video release as well - what is the point in having the mother tell her son he can’t go out on Halloween looking like a terrorist, and then changing “terrorist” to “hippie.” Spielberg says it’s due to the current post-9/11 environment, and while his heart may be in the right place, if the kid looked like a terrorist, he looked like a terrorist. Or is he saying that hippies look like terrorists?

Also, in this post-9/11 country of ours, it isn’t exactly cool to be a pacifist hippie either.

Peace, out, people.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 22nd, 2002 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Movies and Music and Media, People So Dumb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.