Explorers

 is a tween sci-fi film released in 1985.

Sci-fi nut Ben Crandall (Ethan Hawke) keeps having a dream about flying over a circuit board. He draws it and shows it to his brainy friend Wolfgang (River Phoenix), who builds the board and finds it can create a force field bubble, controlled via his home computer. The two boys, along with their new tough friend Darren (Jason Presson), build a spaceship out of an old amusement park ride and use the bubble to make it fly. They name their ship the "Thunder Road" and take it out for a test flight.

After flying around the neighbourhood, their computer is taken over by a remote entity and the ship is guided to meet an alien spacecraft. There they meet two friendly aliens, Wak and Neek, who have been sending the dreams in the hope of meeting some inhabitants of Earth. Hilarity ensues as the kids find their hosts' entire grasp of Earth culture and language came from watching Earth TV - and Wak seems to be especially fond of US game shows.

""WOLFGANG?! WOLFGANG?! IBBA WARBA GUNNA WOLFGANG!!!""
 * Acting for Three: The film is basically one huge showcase for Robert Picardo's comedic talents. He's Wak, Wak's Father, and "Starkiller" in the movie playing at the drive-in... at least.
 * Angrish: Some of the stuff the alien dad says is clearly this. Especially when Neek looks a bit lovey-dovey at Wolfgang.

"Ben: So, what'd you tell them about the basement? Wolfgang: I told them it was a rocketry experiment. I just mentioned Wernher von Braun, and everything was OK."
 * Ascended Fanboy: All three boys count.
 * Well, Wolfgang and Ben are. Darren seems to be along mostly because he finds their activities preferable to staying home with his drunken, abusive father.
 * Author Filibuster: The movie jarringly shifts from goofy alien TV-talk antics to berating humanity for making so many movies about waging war on aliens. Making it worse is that it's not even clear whether the writer was bitching that Humans Are the Real Monsters or just complaining that there wasn't more idealistic alien encounter fiction.
 * Billing Displacement: The cover blurb on the 2004 DVD name-drops Hawke and Phoenix but seems to forget there was a third co-star with the same amount of screen time.
 * Bizarre Alien Biology: And how.
 * Child Prodigy: Wolfgang.
 * Cool Spaceship: The Thunder Road, sorta.
 * Crazy Cultural Comparison: The aliens can only talk human using televison quotes.
 * Dream Land: The technological landscape over which first Ben, then the other boys,  fly to see the device designs the aliens are sending.
 * The Eighties
 * Girl Next Door: Lori Swenson.
 * Green-Skinned Space Babe: Neek, kinda sorta.
 * Hands-Off Parenting: Wolfgang's parents.


 * Humanoid Aliens: Two arms (unless you count the tiny ones where ears should be), two legs, one head...
 * Interspecies Friendship: The goal of the aliens, basically.
 * Interspecies Romance: What Neek seems to want with Wolfgang...
 * Jerkass: The.
 * The Mothership
 * No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Wolfgang apparently didn't keep any of the paper drawings of the circuit or make any backups of the computer programs... once the program is cleared from the computer on the Thunder Road and it crashes, no one thinks to just build another one. (Of course theoretically it might be that Wolfgang couldn't afford a new computer for awhile, they weren't exactly cheap at the time.)
 * Popcultural Osmosis: Pretty much how the aliens pick up stuff about Earth.
 * Puppy Love: Ben is just a hair too old for his crush on Lori to be precocious.
 * "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Ben's response to.
 * Shout-Out: Many many.  The movie is littered with them, mostly as a result of the aliens' absorption of Earth culture, starting with Wolfgang's mouse Heinlein, and the Thunder Road.
 * Space Pirates: The explanation given by Wak for  ship engulfing theirs.
 * Talking in Your Dreams: The alien communications.
 * The Unintelligible:
 * Younger Than They Look: The aliens.