Reception and Home Video Release
The film did not do well at the box office, although it did better in video rentals and DVD sales and garnered positive reception from critics. Over time, it has gained a cult following among fans of Dante's work, as well as science fiction fans and those who feel it is an overall family friendly movie. It currently holds a 78% positive rank (out of 18 reviews) and a 6.1 rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
VHS and DVD releases would be recut to remove two scenes, where Wolfgang has an encounter with Steve Jackson's gang of bullies and a brief bit where the boys chase the Tilt-a-Whirl ride after they push it up a hill. However, it does restore a brief sequence at the end where Ben daydreams about the Thunder Road ship restored and in the classroom. Originally before the end credits, in the theatrical cut, the alien Wak "broke the fourth wall" and remarked how he knows people are still out there due to the popcorn smell. In the reedited home video version, he just tells another joke before it cuts to the closing credits.
Read more about this topic: Explorers (film)
Famous quotes containing the words reception, home, video and/or release:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“These people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. “He’s in the de-tails,” Sublett had said once. “You gotta watch for Him close.””
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)