E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) (with Noel Brown)

Episode 106 marks Chris and Alex’s first foray into the filmmaking career of Steven Spielberg as they take on the director’s 1982 science-fiction fantasy E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To help explore the film’s status as a landmark of popular U.S. cinema is special guest Dr Noel Brown, who is Senior Lecturer in Film and Programme Leader for Film and Visual Culture at Liverpool Hope University. Noel has published extensively in the areas of children’s cinema, family films, and animation, including the recent monograph Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s (2020) and edited collection The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (2022). Listen as the trio discuss the origins of the ‘family film’ as a prestige category within histories of Hollywood cinema; the contributions of Spielberg, George Lucas, and E.T. to the reinvention of cinema as family entertainment; emotion and strategies of ‘relatability’; dual address, disposability, and the darkness of Spielberg’s stories; outsiderdom and alienation in relation to the realities of American childhood in the 1980s; puppetry, animatronics and the materiality of VFX; traditions of gender performance and radical renditions of masculinity/femininity in animation; and how E.T. navigates the experience of loss and the ability to feel again. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**