The expertise and imagination with which it was made, however, gave it lasting properties well beyond the 1980s and has made it a favorite film of audiences throughout the world. Indeed, it might be seen as serving the same purpose and exerting the same degree of magic as the perennially beloved
Wizard of Oz (1939), although it is a product of the technological age in both its vision and its realization.
Considered at the time to be Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, and undoubtedly his most personal film, this story set in middle-class suburbia grew out of the director's own lonely childhood in Scottsdale, Arizona, the son of a father who left the family home. He has said, "I use my childhood in all my pictures, and all the time. I go back there to find ideas and stories. My childhood was the most fruitful part of my entire life. All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I do for a living today, or what I draw from creatively today." E.T. was the culmination of several ideas that had germinated, been explored, and even filmed, over a number of years.
