A delightful and enchanting children’s film, Explorers – director Joe Dante’s first film after he gained considerable attention with the wonderful Gremlins – sees three boys building a spacecraft and meeting aliens. It’s part of that great raft of kids’ adventure films of the 1980s – while obviously not as well-known as E.T. or The Goonies etc, it’s warmly remembered by many people of a certain age (which happens to be my age). Dante’s best films contain a certain subversiveness but he’s always been very competent when playing it straight and it’s such a shame that his career seemed to fizzle out a little.
The most prolonged and successful relationship with a director in the legendary Jerry Goldsmith’s later career was that with Dante and this was their third film together (counting Twilight Zone: The Movie). Goldsmith’s score is pretty much like the film – warm-hearted, a dash of humour, with plenty of adventure and excitement but balancing this with an element of melancholy.
It features one of the composer’s very best themes – one which deserves to be injected into the public consciousness as much as any of the great adventure movie themes of the 1980s, but isn’t – presumably because the film is not quite so well-known. “The Construction” is extraordinarily good – one of Goldsmith’s most memorable pieces. Bouncing pianos introduce the piece, soon joined by swirling strings and then the full orchestra for a rousing, stirring anthem which deserves a place on any list of the great pieces of film music.
It served as the perfect overture to the original soundtrack album, despite being from the middle section of the film, which made perfect sense – not just because it’s so brilliant, but also because it’s built from ideas the composer used to make several elements of the rest of the score. He was a master at doing that (well, he was a master at a great many things) – taking fragments from here and there, turning them into something else, linking everything together in a way which was far more complex than most of the audience would be consciously aware of – going the extra mile, to use corporate speak. He uses parts of it to build a particularly lovely, wistful theme (heard to delightful effect in “I Want to Live”), other parts as dynamic action music, still others to underscore the innocent warmth of the central characters’ relationship.
It’s Jerry Goldsmith and it’s the 1980s so of course, there are synths, the only question is how many. Quite a lot! These are largely used to add an ethereal sound to various passages, particularly dream sequences – their most up-front appearances were not present on the original album, but do appear on the expansions. There’s also very unusual synth rock-and-roll music for the (very amusing) aliens themselves, and even that is done with such enthusiasm and warmth that it is hard not to break into a smile whenever it appears. I know I’ve mentioned warmth 77 times already, but I can’t help it – that’s the score’s defining feature – and so much of it is just truly lovely, nothing more than the fantastic “Sticks and Stones”.
There’s occasional action music – nothing that heavy – and that’s handled with the composer’s usual aplomb, frequently based on the soaring adventure theme which highlights “The Construction”. The original album focused on the most rousing sections of the score at the expense of the melancholy aspects.
This is one of those cases where I’ve never quite got used to losing the flow of the original album – which is not to say it isn’t wonderful to listen to the complete score. Yes, some of the cues missing from the old release are so short they can add a very slight piecemeal flavour – and yes, some of the more heavily-electronic selections aren’t nearly as appealing as the more orchestral content – but it does offer a different side to the score and makes for a more well-rounded overall experience.
Intrada’s expanded edition came out in 2011 and has long been out of print itself, so the 2026 release – which also adds various bonus cues and a remastered version of the original album programme (songs and all) – gives a welcome opportunity for those who missed the previous one to get their hands on what is really a delightful piece of work. It really captures the feeling of that whole generation of films in this genre so well and features, I have to say it again, what in my opinion is one of the finest pieces of music this great composer ever wrote, blessed with a real sense of magic.
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