"YOU! How could you?! You don't know anything about E.T.! You don't love E.T.! You didn't even see the movie, did you?!"
E.T. is the second episode of the first season of Code Monkeys. It is preceded by The Woz and is followed by Stonervision.
Plot[]
The episode starts with Dave waking up in his and Jerry's office naked as Jerry finishes his new game Big Ass Dolphin. He and Jerry talk about what he did the night before, as Dave was too high to remember anything. To wit, Dave finished his latest game Floating Space Rocks and smoked some experimental weed before passing out. Later that night, he painted his penis green to resemble a serpent in the middle of his high. Before they prepare to go home, Clare enters the office to announce that Larrity was calling a meeting in the Break Room. Dave decides to go to the meeting, still high and naked.
At the meeting, Larrity announces that he has brought a "special guest" to help GameAVision one-up Belicovision. Dave expects it to be a motivational speaker who will tear up phone books, but it is revealed to be producer Steven Spielberg, whom Jerry idolizes (wetting himself in response). Larrity has secured the rights to make a game about Spielberg's upcoming movie, E.T: The Extra Terrestrial, and settles the proper payment via wrestling. The catch is that game is to be done in the next 24 hours. He assigns Dave to go see the movie, after securing an advance screening ticket, then come back and tell everyone about the plot before he and Jerry create it. Before he enters the theater downtown, he spots a boy who wants to buy the ticket off him. After messing with the boy, he loses interest and sells the ticket as promised before heading to a strip club.
Later that night, he finds that Jerry (whom he had Benny give candy to earlier for the all-nighter) is so hyper that his fists were bleeding from punching the wall. As he shirked his duties, Dave improvises the plot, making up things that would sound ridiculous to anyone who had seen the movie, such as E.T. looking for the Ark of the Covenant and crossdressing to become an actor. As production reaches its end, Larrity hands them a song he bought from musician Neil Diamond (Larrity was forced to pay more after losing a quick wrestling match). With everything set, Dave believes they have just made the greatest game of all time.
To everyone's horror, however, the final product is far worse than they could have imagined, at the cusp of becoming the worst game of all time. Dave suggests making some tweaks to the game, but Clare arrives to announce that the truck had left with the cartridges, and will be in stores within an hour. Dean follows and is irate that the game shown is nothing like the movie he had just seen. Dave shamelessly confesses what he did and, seeing his co-workers' angry faces, decides to head out and stop the game shipment.
Todd sees a distraught Dean and takes him to the outskirts to meet real aliens but, not only are they "probed" during the encounter, it would later be revealed that the "aliens" are army soldiers in disguise who take advantage of Todd's naivety on a weekly basis.
Dave and Jerry take Larrity's car since Dave sold his own for a giant blowup doll, and try and take the rig, outrunning police in the process. Though they could not outfight the truck driver, when he goes inside the gas station, they unhitch the trailer and take it back to GameAVision. Unfortunately, Mary reminds them that they only stopped just one of a series of trucks shipping a total of over four million copies of the highly anticipated game; the biggest shipment in history at the time, in fact. Knowing they could not possibly steal them all, Jerry simply hoped that the kids would not notice that it sucks. On the contrary, the game was so horrible, that it is openingly mocked or panned at best, and triggered horrible consequences at worst. A child diagnosed with cancer dies with even more cancer from playing E.T, while an angry child blames the game for his parents' divorce and "killing" his baby sister .
An angry mob is later seen arriving at GameAVision. Dave and Jerry attempt to evacuate Larrity from the building but, upon looking out the window, notice that the mob is headed not for GameAVision, but Bellicovision. Larrity explains that he anticipated how horrible the game was going to be, and covered the company labels so that Bellicovision would get all the heat for its creation. After scolding them for stealing his car, he calms down and sends them out.
He later shows them a warehouse where 3,999,000 of the four million E.T. games are being secretly stored, before revealing that he and Star Wars producer George Lucas conspired from the start to damage Spielberg's credibility and rob him of his millions (Dave just happened to have helped thanks to his incompetence). In Lucas' own words, it was a "friendly little prank".
As Dave and Jerry leave, they find Neil Diamond dragged into making an E.T. music video with Lucas as a the director.
Video Game References[]
- The scene where Dave and Jerry attempt to intercept the truck containing the games copies the look and gameplay of Spyhunter.
- Big-Ass Dolphin, the game Jerry completes at the very beginning of the episode, is likely a reference to Ecco the Dolphin for the Sega Mega Drive.
References[]
- E.T. actually was a video game released at the time this show takes place. Like in this show, the real game was rushed through production (though it had five weeks, instead of one night). It was so horrible that it played a large part in the (now historic) Video Game Crash of 1983.
- Larrity's deal on the E.T. licensing was $
30(I said 20, you son of a bitch!) million, the same amount as the cost in real life. - There were three instances of Larrity settling his differences with someone else with a wrestling match called Wrassle Mania. This is a reference to Wrestle Mania, the biggest show in professional wrestling, and wrasslin', which is the word "wrestling" pronounced in a deep southern accent.
- Todd pitches a game based on the novel The Color Purple before Larrity shuts him down. Steven Spielberg, meanwhile, listens in and writes on his notepad. This is referenced to the fact that Spielberg actually directed a movie adaptation in 1985.
- The boy who wants to buy Dave's ticket to E.T. is named Manoj, but Dave says it's too long and he will call him M. Then Dave pitches him a movie idea about a guy who's dead but doesn't know until the end. The boy is M. Night Shymalan and the pitch is the plot for The Sixth Sense.
- There are several references to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in this episode. Part of Dave's game pitch steals from the plot and infamous face-melting scene from the movie (e.g. "He's searching for the Lost Ark of the Covenant and he has to melt a Nazi's face off."). In the montage of displeased gamers across Sunnyvale, one of the scenes shows a bunch of Nazis getting incinerated by a pixelated Ark of the Covenant, another reference to the face-melting scene. In the final scene, the 3.99 million copies of the games are stored in a warehouse in the back of the office building that closely resembles the warehouse that the Ark of the Covenant was stored in in the final scene of the movie. George Lucas also makes an appearance here, who directed Indiana Jones.
- The real fate of the E.T. games was rumored, then later confirmed, to have had them taken to a landfill in New Mexico. Unlike the fate of the games in the episode, the cartridges in real life were all crushed and buried under concrete.
Notes[]
- Larrity swapped the names on the cartridges because he knew how horrible the game was. One episode prior, he admitted that he knew nothing about video games, but after revealing the truth, proclaims "I don't have to be a pig farmer to know a cow turd when I see it!". Either he was lying, or he learns quickly. Judging by the other players' reactions to the game, it's more likely that he knew what he had to do simply because it was that bad.
- Howard Scott Warshaw is the designer and programmer of E.T. The Game. In the world of Code Monkeys, Jerry fills this role, who coincidentally idolizes Warshaw.
- Interestingly, its first airing was on the same night, immediately after The Woz.
- Mary's line about Dave and Jerry's E.T. game being the "Ishtar of gaming" is actually an anachronism. E.T. was released in 1982 while Ishtar would not be released until 1987.