Hello!

It’s being reported that Joe Dante’s terrific 1985 fantasy / sci-fi classic Explorers will be coming to Blu-ray in May. A trio of barely-teenagers build and fly their own interplanetary spaceship, to a rendezvous with aliens in outer space. Cleverly worked out from a script by Eric Luke, the computer-age First Men in the Moon addresses Junior-High problems and adolescent romantic fantasies. It stars a very young Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson, with Brooke Bundy, Amanda Peterson, Robert Picardo and Dick Miller, and music by Jerry Goldsmith. I’ll be looking forward to finding out how the special effects were accomplished… ’85 is fairly early in the development of computer graphic effects.

After about a year I’m happily back in contact with Swedish correspondent Stefan Andersson — we were able to exchange local Coronavirus reports. Stefan loves to report film-related online links …. in this note he pointed to a bunch of great links, starting with a way to see 3 Early Max Ophuls Films with English subtitles.

Stefan also sent a link to the 3-minute musical promo for an unreleased silent restoration, the Munich Filmmuseum’s reconstruction of Der Golem, with a new recording of the original music score by Hans Landberger. It’s said to be more complete than the Murnau Stiftung’s (really impressive) 76-minute Golem restoration that I reviewed last May. The Munich Filmmuseum’s cut is said to run 91 minutes — could some of the difference be because of a slower film speed?

And finally, correspondent Phil Lantis asked me to plug his organization’s New Hallywood Silent Film Festival, which is run out of Santa Clarita. This year the festival, which runs for three days starting on February 12, will be virtual. The flyer says they’ll be holding ‘sessions’ on Fatty Arbuckle, William S. Hart and Georges Méliès.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson