You Can Now See Every Disastrous Detail Of The Infamous E.T. Rip-Off in 4K
Yes, this is the movie in Paul Rudd’s Conan bit.
To the eyes of American businessmen, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. needed only one improvement: He didn’t endorse enough American products. Enter Mac, the curious, magical, whistling alien who’s separated from his strangely proportioned family on Earth and nursed back to strength with a combination of Skittles, Coca-Cola, and a trip to the liveliest McDonalds in America.
A garish, capitalist rip-off of one of the biggest hits of the ‘80s, Mac and Me has remained an internet curio for over 35 years. Now, thanks to Vinegar Syndrome’s first-of-its-kind 4K upgrade, every disastrous detail of this premium and fascinating so-bad-it’s-good adventure is available in the highest quality yet.
How Was Mac and Me Received Upon Release?
Since E.T., many films have tried to recapture Spielberg’s scrappy kids adventure and starry-eyed wonder, but the most enduring examples — The Iron Giant, Super 8 — were made by directors with nostalgia for the Spielberg films of their younger years. This creative sincerity is a far cry from the business opportunity that producer R.J. Louis saw in the ‘80s, when he realized that Ronald Macdonald and E.T. were so famous to children that it would be remiss not to synergize their appeal. “"It was time for another generation [to have its E.T.]," Louis told Thrillist in 2017 — a patently weird thing to say a mere five years after E.T.’s release.
To the credit of reviewers in 1988, Mac and Me was slaughtered critically. It did not escape critics (including the renowned Gene Siskel) that Mac and Me was a cynical, commercial scheme, where a stolen story disguised the true goal of advertising to children all the products they hold in the highest esteem. The film was a box office bomb, making back only half of its $13 million budget. Throughout the internet age, Mac and Me’s legacy as an ugly cult object has only grown, brought up by artists like Lost and Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof and, unforgettably, by Paul Rudd in a long-running prank on Conan O’Brien. The film’s creaky, retro vibe is off-putting and hilarious to today’s audiences, and its meme status has all-but claimed the film as a modern, online phenomenon — but a fuss was absolutely made over how transparently embarrassing it was on release.
Why Is Mac and Me Important to See Now?
Mac and Me is something you need to see to believe.
A 4K upgrade for one of the most embarrassing sci-fi movies of the 1980s feels somehow as momentous as any restoration of a serious, lost art masterpiece. Most people aware of Mac and Me have never sat through the whole thing, but it’s an immensely rewarding and baffling experience. Faithfully modeled on the story of E.T., Mac and Me follows the Cruise family — young wheelchair user Eric (Jade Calegory), his older brother Michael (Jonathan Ward), and their put-upon single mother Janet (Christine Ebersole) — who have just moved near Los Angeles when Eric meets MAC (a Mysterious Alien Creature). The extra-terrestrial has been isolated from his family of four after being sucked into a NASA probe transported to a secret, severe governmental facility.
Everything in Mac and Me feels off. The film is clumsily, carelessly shot, evoking the quick functional style of a commercial more than a cinematic drama, and the effects work — with puppetry, visual effects, and pyrotechnics — feel especially shoddy in a film that cringingly insists its own capacity for charm and wonder. The frequent, chaotic stunts and wide-eyed reaction shots are so exaggerated that it pushes the film into parodic territory, resembling an internet-era spoof of wholesome family entertainment with a creeping undercurrent of eeriness. At a certain point, watching Mac’s eyes grow large and bulbous, seeing his spindly alien arm stretch across the screen will either induce baffled laughter or a wave of shivers, like when you feel the phantom sensation of a bug roaming your skin.
The experience of slipping into an off-key, consumerist fever dream is why watching Mac and Me in 4K is the obvious next step. It’s a film of such baffling, ineffectual decisions that the viewer is full of panicked, helpless questions from beginning to end; watching the film remastered with crisp, detailed images helps shed clarity on what’s happening on-screen, and by extension, what decisions they were making when they made this oddity.
What New Features Does the Mac and Me Blu-ray Have?
The front cover for the new Mac and Me 4K release.
No-one is honoring niche and dubious genre cinema like Vinegar Syndrom, and Mac and Me’s 4K upgrade comes with a heap of goodies and appropriately weirdly textured cover art. Vinegar Syndrome have treated this new release as an investigation into a film that didn’t have to be this strange, with a new commentary track by director Stewart Raffill (plus, another commentary track by film historians Wayne Byrne and Paul Farren) and over 50 minutes of new interviews with the the film’s crew and craftspeople.
Aside from the new 4K (scanned from the original 35mm negative), the limited edition Blu-ray contains a book of essays and a video-sourced alternative ending — which is a notorious downer.
