Mom reads Peter Pan to Gertie--the part about the importance of believing in fairies--as E.T. listens from the closet.

When Elliott cuts his finger on a saw blade, E.T.'s finger lights up and heals Elliott with his touch.

On Halloween, Michael and Elliott dress E.T. as a ghost so they can sneak him out of the house. That night, Elliott and E.T. fly through the forest and make a successful call home.

Suddenly facing a police roadblock, E.T. uses telekinesis to lift all the kids and their bikes into the air and toward the forest, like he had done for Elliott before.

Gertie says a tearful goodbye to E.T., kisses him, and gives him her party geraniums, which he had revived earlier with his powers. E.T. tells Gertie to "Be good."

When asked if E.T. was male or female in an interview, Spielberg said neither. He envisioned the character as being a plant-like organism without any gender.

Harrison Ford had a brief cameo when Elliott was sent to the principal's office, but the scene was cut in post-production.

Most films go through several drafts before a final shooting script is locked into place, but Melissa Mathison's first draft was used during the film shoot. Spielberg would later say, "It was the best first draft I've ever read."

The primary inspiration for E.T. was Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's own painting, Women of Delta, which depicted a shriveled character with stumpy legs, a long neck, an oblong head, and large eyes. But in order to make the alien empathetic, Spielberg had Rambaldi collate the alien's facial design with photographic portraits of Carl Sandburg, Albert Einstein, and Ernest Hemingway.

Released on June 11, 1982, E.T. was an immediate blockbuster, surpassing Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film of all time--a record it held for eleven years until Jurassic Park, another Spielberg-directed film, surpassed it in 1993.