10 Movie Scenes You Didn’t Know Used CGI Trickery

3. Walkie-Talkies - E.T.

Depending on which version of E.T. you've seen, this one might not have been in the movie at all.

In the original 1982 release of the film, the famous bike-chase sequence features several police officers - who are there to subdue Elliott and his extra-terrestrial friend - carrying guns.

But in the 20th Anniversary edition - released in 2002 - these guns have been digitally replaced with walkie-talkies.

E.T. CGI walkie talkies
Universal Pictures

The LA Times revealed the reasoning behind this seemingly needless change in an article back in 2001, where they quote Mr Spielberg himself:

"I regret that a gun was used as a threat to stop children on bicycles. And I regret that last cut, before E.T. opens his eyes and the bikes take off, of the gun coming up.... And if I ever reissue the picture, I'll use the digital miracle of, you know, CGI [computer-generated imagery] to take the guns out of the cops' hands. And I'll just simply delete the shot of the cop holding the gun up, which, in the current film, causes E.T. to fly. I think those were, you know, distasteful moments to me."

Apparently, this was due to the outcry of several parent groups, who were not pleased that guns were being used to stop children on bikes.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!