By ALAN SCHERSTUHL
Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Letters to E.T.
Author: Sad kids who never learned their lesson from all those unanswered letters to God.
Publisher: Weekly Reader Books
Date: 1983
Discovered at: 2nd Chance Thrift, 7740 Wornall
The Cover Promises: On Sunday mornings, E.T. slips into his lover's favorite shirt and lounges with the Sunday Times and a stack of fan mail.
Representative Quotes:
From Jonah:
“I liked when you were riding on the bike, and thanks for not dying.”
From Kirk:
"I am a 13 year old boy who used to be closed off to the world. I didn't care about grades, I just didn't care that much about life. About the only things I did care about was God, Drawing, and if my D&D character could get passed 3rd level.”
Composed by troubled kids, lonely retirees and maybe a prisoner or two, the correspondence collected in Letters to E.T. does much more than just remind us how much more personal a letter feels than a mere phone call home. It shows us that, for an alienated society not yet distracted by the Internet, penning letters to a fictional, sack-of-potatoes alien became, briefly, a sort of secular prayer -- an attempt to commune with something grander and more mysterious than our workaday world.
Stranger still, it demonstrates that if you just have enough faith -- and if some bean counter determines that the publication of a cash-in book of crazy mail seems likely to recoup its cost --that fictional, sack-of-potatoes alien might acknowledge you.
Some letters are heartbreaking.
Some are packed with misinformation.
Some thoughts demand to be written in letter form. Imagine trying to express the following out loud. Or to a living creature. Or through a Speak-and-Spell pointed to the heavens.
Some writers, like Reabe, address their letters to famous non-fiction person Steven Spielberg. Most flatter him. Michael insists that Raiders of the Lost Ark should have won Best Picture. Others testify to the the success of his early experiment in product placement by going on about Reese's Pieces.
The entrepreneurial Stephanie can no longer see white space without imagining advertisements.
For some, words alone can't capture the feelings E.T. rouses. Doug Short has captured a noble friendship.
NOTE: E.T. Is in the middle of saying “Don't go there, sister!”
Here, a child has immortalized Spielberg's penchant for enormous, self-aggrandizing belt buckles.
And here E.T. throws gang signs with his pals in Oasis.
Shocking Detail: One tiny tease attempts to trick E.T. with big talk and a fake phone number.
Highlight: In Spielberg's introduction -- itself written, bizarrely, as a letter to E.T. -- the beloved director acknowledges the devotion of his alien's fans. Then he finds the most polite way possible to announce he's planning to throw this book away.
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You make valid points all of them. I think that we want to be heard as much as we don�t want to leave comments in the wrong circumstances. It�s a human response to a human problem � as contadictory as we all are.
American film lover, Spielberg dropped out of helping with the 2008 Olympics because of the Darfur conflict.
Dear Mister E.T.
My name is Tara and I am 7. I loved your movie but my brother said that you were a puppet so I smothered him with his Yoda pillow and buried him face down in the backyard. Was that wrong?
Hi guys, it's me, Kirk, the kid from the book. Yep, it's really me, 26 years later.
I'm 39 years old now and I just want you all to know that it's true: watching E.T. as a kid changed my life completely for the better. I've got a kick-ass delivery job at Little Caesars now, I play drums in an awesome Culture Club cover band (book us for your next wedding!), and me and my life-partner Miguel are well on our way to getting our collective weight below 500lbs, thanks to Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet.
And my D&D character is 8th level now, suck on THAT, losers!
Dear E.T.,
I loved your movie so much that I saved my allowance for 14 weeks in a row and bought your Atari 2600 video game. WTF, man!
"Write when you find work"? Not "Best wishes for your continued success"? Steven, you're such a cad!
FOOL! E.T.! You have abused your power. And Justice will be meted out ....
Your eyes sparkle, as if you believe Sarah Palin is winking only at you. You feel, you feel, faint. You wake up.
Where are you, E.T.? WHO are you, E.T.? Consider this: New E.T. possesses STR-3, INT-3, WIS-3, etc.... I will grant you but one spell: COLOR SPRAY. But ... you now are bound within a Thomas Kinkade painting, so cast away, FOOL. Bwahaaahaaaa.
Deark kirk,
your D&D charcatce will never get "passed" third level. You have 0 charisma and intelligence lower than a gelationous cube. In a footrace gray ooze would beat you.
Sorry to tell it like it is,
E.T.
Thanks to everyone who has written to me over the years. I apologize for the tardiness of this reponse. We have lots of plants to collect up here in space, and then we're always having to head back to the last planet to pick up any of us who got left behind. Remember all the rigamarole I went through trying to get back home? That was just hazing. They were messing with me, you guys.
I mean, think about it. We land, we get chased off, I don't make it back. You think nobody noticed? You think there's not a headcount? In a spacheship like that, any shift in biomass results in the engineers having to recalculate everyting. They knew, guys. Believe me!
Anyway, big ups to all my shortiez. Thanks for the love and always remember that I'm bringing it back to you cosmic style. You ever need a magic glowy finger on you, you just rig up a Speak and Spell and holla.
Be Good,
E.T.
P.S.
If you see Henry Thomas ask him why he's nowhere to be found while that little punk from "Empire of the Sun" is suddenly mother-beating Batman.
all noel's friends are fookin' wankers. probably met this one in bloody gay surrey.
Dear E.T. Big Superstar,
How are you? Are you still in 1982? If you are could you do us all a big favor and ask your friend Mr. Spielberg to not make the following projects?
"Hook"
"Jurassic Park 2 and 3"
The last ten minutes of "Saving Private Ryan"
"Indiana Jones and the Kingdome of the Crystal Hoohah"
The 2008 Beijing Olympics
The sex scene in "Munich"
Thanks!
Dear Howard Reabe,
Actually, hind sight being what it is, Ronald Reagan was all we needed to �prevent us from totally destroying it and each other�. I can never forgive him for that either.
Dear Doug Short,
ET should have been drawn in front of me. He�s the bitch�not me (reference him wearing MY shirt in the cover photo if you don�t believe me).
Dear Alan Scherstuhl,
You realize I want some of that phat Pitch advertising loot as a royalty now? Fighting Boy Scouts isn�t cheap!
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