Spielberg’s 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was yet another one of his films that would hit America like a bomb, influencing the development of family movies in its wake. Some of the movies that followed were cynical knock-offs – Conan’s favorite prank film Mac and Me – while others would merely note Spielberg’s style and copy his sense of nostalgia and wonder to create their own science-fiction tinged stories. Joe Dante was just coming off the Spielberg-produced 1984 film Gremlins when he was handed the script for Explorers. One of the reasons the script was purchased? Kids were flying around on bicycles, which leads to the sense that studios just wanted another E.T., but Dante’s spin on it makes Explorers an altogether stranger film.

Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke), a geek at the edge of puberty obsessed with science fiction, dreams of flying and circuit boards, leading him to create a team of schoolmates to realize the schematics in his head. As they struggle with their family issues, they create a junkyard spaceship with which they can watch late night movies at the drive in and fly into outer space to meet the aliens who summoned them.

Explorers is yet another victim of studio meddling. The studio rushed the film into production, then rushed the editing process even moving the release date from late August up to mid-July. Dante has commented the production was so rushed that paint was still drying around them and the kids were sinking into the concrete floors. After showing a rough cut to the studio, they told him that was fine and to stop editing. On top of that, Dante and writer Eric Luke were literally changing the movie as they filmed. Subplots were dropped or cut out completely, and Explorers has a strangely unfinished texture that might have been polished off. Depending on your point of view, the final act of Explorers suffers or benefits from a series of tonal shifts that come out of nowhere to have one of the strangest non sequitur finales that still feels like pure unadulterated Dante.

Explorers is available to stream on Hulu Plus.