Years after seeing Explorers for the first time, I realized the movie had stuck with me. Impressionable as I was when I was 10, when I was 13 or 14, the idea that one could still have "adventures" of the variety illustrated in this picture should have seemed, well, childish. The catch is, while it may not be as true as it was when I was a kid, if you're 13 or 14 years-old, you've still got the right to be a kid. The right to dream big, to reach for the stars. The right to be naive about the world. The right to think you could build a spaceship out of garbage cans using some interstellar technology beamed to you in your dreams. 

It doesn't matter that Explorers ultimately pulled the rug out from under the viewer and the main characters' feet - the promise and dream of adventure rang loud and clear. Boys could fly. Crushes could be reciprocated. Rock 'n roll was truly here to stay.

Explorers proved to be one of my favorite flicks from the 80's, the marriage of a hearlt-felt storyline with nifty special effects setting the model for many of my future favorites. What it also had was an excellent music score by the now-departed, but much loved and very prolific Jerry Goldsmith. While Goldsmith would re-use the central theme of Explorers in many other movies (most notably Poltergeist II: The Other Side,) his gift for melody blends seamlessly with Joe Dante's magical universe. When I obtained the soundtrack, I spent many nights listening to it in my room with all of the lights off, dreaming that I could take apart my Nintendo and soar to the stars. 

Vaguely mirroring the central theme of childhood discovery in Explorers is Michael Becker and Red 7's song  "Less Than Perfect" from the soundtrack. A straight up rock/pop tune with 80's style production value (check that chorale!) and soaring falsetto vocals, it's easily digestible to those who like their music served cheeze-flavored. Hyper keyboards? Check. Showy guitar solo layered in just the right amount of reverb? Check. Nonsensical lyrics. Double check. While the first two lines "First we learn to walk on water, then we try something harder" could be related to the movie, I'm lost as to the meaning of "lessons touching down, cities speak as one."

Regardless, while I bought the Explorers soundtrack to motivate my real-life adventures by scoring them with Jerry Goldsmith's music, "Less Than Perfect" was a nice bonus, itself scoring a few of my imaginary montage sequences in which I built impossible machines and chased improbable dreams.