Explorers

Ben Crandall, an alien-obsessed kid, dreams one night of a circuit board. Drawing out the circuit, he and his friends Wolfgang and Darren set it up…

• Director: Joe Dante
• Genre:Adventure / Family / Fantasy / Sci-Fi
• Runtime:107 minutes

Cast

Ethan Hawke : Ben Crandall

River Phoenix : Wolfgang M?ller
Bobby Fite : Steve Jackson

Bradley Gregg : Steve Jackson’s Gang
Georg Olden : Steve Jackson’s Gang

Ben is obsessed with aliens, and one night he has a dream about a circuit board. He proceeds to draw out the board; with the aid of the brainy Wolfgang, the two friends begin to assemble the device. After a fight at school, Ben meets Darren, a new kid in the neighborhood that appears to be tough. The three continue working on the circuit board. All three have a recurring dream which includes seeing each other and flying about a giant version of the circuit board.

During the film, they go to a drive-in movie. (The sound effects of the drive in movie were actually the sound effects from the Atari 2600 game Yar’s Revenge.)

They quickly discover that the circuit board enables the creation of a sealed bubble that can be remotely steered. Its force can push through the ground and allows space travel.

The first bubble is made in their workshop, and is about three inches in diameter, and makes holes in anything that it goes through. Their next experiment is away from town. The bubble is about five feet in diameter, which forms around one of the boys and gives him a scary, unexpected flight.

The three build a home-made spacecraft out of an amusement ride seat (a “Tilt-A-Whirl”), with windows from washing machines and televisions. As the boys look through the junkyard for the pieces for the ship, the sled rosebud from Citizen Kane can be seen sitting at the top of a pile. Darren names it the Thunder Road, after the Bruce Springsteen song. They install three breathing apparatuses. Two of these apparatuses are each a small medical mouth-and-nose transparent oxygen mask coupled to the air supply by a thin transparent hose. The other is a wider single corrugated black hose linked to a scuba diving full face mask of the type with two flat eye windows and an inner mouth-and-nose mask. Read more

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