YMMV / Mac and Me

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Mac's stretching hands. Ugh. E.T. never tried anything like that.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Both Phelous and Spanish YouTuber Buck Fernandez (from VideoBuck) seemed to think that the aliens were in fact dangerous. Both even reedited the footage, turning Mac and Me into a horror film.
  • This Den of Geek! article puts forth a number of tongue-in-cheek re-interpretations of the film (like it being an unofficial kid-friendly remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth) that are actually quite plausible. Basically, this article puts way more thought into Mac and Me than the filmmakers ever did.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: To a modern audience, giving your kid a birthday party at McDonald's seems like a passive-aggressive way to tell them that you hate their guts. But in The '80s many of the restaurants had dedicated party rooms and regularly hosted birthday parties, and the McDonald's birthday party had a reputation as one of the best and fanciest parties a kid could get. And Ronald McDonald showing up at the parties like he does in the film was a frequent occurrence — professional clowns/party entertainers across the country played him, each one handling a certain region, making public appearances at big events for schools, baseball games, and the like. That one The Simpsons episode where Krusty the Clown has a clown college for people playing him in different regions isn't too far off from the truth in that regard.
• Awesome Music:
  • Alan Silvestri's score is way better than the movie deserves, something even stated in the liner notes for the score album (which finally came out in 2014). It becomes a Running Gag in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, with Crow getting a big laugh from Jonah and Tom with "I wanna see the movie this composer thought he was scoring!" during Mac's highway misadventure early on.
  • The pop songs featured in the film deserve a mention as well. Sadly, only two of them (the Award Bait Songs "You're Not a Stranger Anymore" and "Take Me I'll Follow You") were featured on the aforementioned score album, since they were both written by Silvestri. Luckily, all of the pop songs can be found easily on YouTube. There was a soundtrack album on Curb Records (7 songs, and one score cut) both this and Quartet's score album are now out of print so if you want either, they can be pricey.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The film jumps from the family leaving for a birthday party to— a bunch of teenagers breakdancing in a McDonald's parking lot. The dance sequence goes on and on, yet is completely unrelated to the story, beyond the fact the next scene is set inside the restaurant.
• Common Knowledge: The supermarket Mac and his family intrude and scare all the shoppers out of getting absolutely obliterated by a shootout. Except it didn’t, because if one looks closely, the supermarket is behind the other characters and the officer who caused the explosion.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The creators actually wanted to give back to McDonald House, so they arranged for all of the profits to go to the charity. Too bad the film was a legendary Box Office Bomb.
• Heartwarming Moments: Eric telling Mac he won't let anyone hurt him and holding his hands to comfort him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The orphaned Sequel Hook.
  • Sometime around the film's original release, Jade Callegory (Eric) appeared on the talk show Geraldo. Guess what clip they used when they were introducing him?
  • Silvestri scoring this film becomes a lot more amusing when coupled with Paul Rudd periodically recycling the "Eric" clip multiple times as Schmuck Bait for Conan O'Brien whenever he is promoting a movie. Decades later, Rudd would become part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Ant-Man, a franchise whose climactic Avengers crossover films would net Silvestri widespread acclaim to this day. Furthermore, when Rudd promoted Ant-Man, it was not safe from the gag.
    • In addition, Silvestri briefly quoted the Ant-Man theme in Avengers: Endgame, bringing everything full circle.
  • The film's "why you shouldn't Ghostbust an alien" scene (where Mac somehow controls the vacuum he's sucked into and drags Debbie around) managed to predict the release of 1998's Stardust, a movie of... similar quality about a boy befriending an Animate Inanimate Object vacuum cleaner.
  • The mere fact that Christine Ebersole plays Eric's mother. As she had just voiced White Diamond on Steven Universe a year before this film was used for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Season 12 premiere. Together with Joel Hodgson as Mayor Dewey, this means the show has had one MST3K actor from each side of the theater screen on the same show.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The wheelchair scene, frequently played on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and continued on Conan whenever Paul Rudd stops by.
  • In Spanish-speaking countries, Eric's "Eureka!" Moment with the windmills ("It's the straws, that's it!") is the only thing anyone ever remembers about this movie. The literal translation of straws (pajas or pajillas) is also slang for masturbation.
• Narm:
  • The movie is full of this, with scenes like the wheelchair scene and dance-off at McDonald's probably standing out as the most obvious examples. Then there's the aliens themselves, whose big buglike eyes, awkward movements and mouths that are in a permanent state of surprise make them impossible to take seriously.
  • Even Eric getting shot from the back and the kids' reactions are not as effective because of the actors' overacted sobbing.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The father alien twisting a tire iron into a knot, and later getting hold of a gun. It's easy to see why Phelous thought this would work better as a horror movie.
  • The alternate ending (Yes there is one), where Eric tries reaching to the Aliens and the cop tries to stop him, trips and his gun goes off and shoots Eric through the chest, killing him instantly.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jennifer Aniston has confirmed that she was an extra in this film, but there's debate over whether you can actually see her in it. In the McDonald's scene there are a couple quick shots of a girl who vaguely looks like her, but in an interview, she says she appeared in a picnic scene, and there's no picnic scene in the film, so it may well have ended up as a Deleted Scene.
  • According to IMDB, Nikki Cox is in this film as well.
  • Eric's mom is played by Christine Ebersole, who in addition to later playing the mom in Richie Rich and going onto a successful Broadway career, would eventually voice White Diamond on Steven Universe.
• Rooting for the Empire: It's pretty easy to sympathize with the feds in this movie. Similarly to the Alternative Character Interpretation above, our heroes keep telling them that the aliens aren't going to hurt anyone, even though they've done almost nothing but cause mischief at the best and act like wild animals at the worst. Oh, and one of them gets hold of a gun. Any attempt at bringing them under control is justified.
• Signature Scene:
  • The wheelchair scene, thanks to Paul Rudd.
  • The dance scene at the McDonald's.
• So Bad, It's Good: A popular "bad movie night" feature.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The opening scene on the planet has Chroma Key bleeding (black fringes) in most of the shots.
  • Mac frequently makes the sound of wheels moving whenever he moves, and then there's Eric falling into the river (where he turns into a completely immobile and obvious dummy), a scene Paul Rudd frequently showed on Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
  • As the supermarket explodes into an inferno, Eric is a cutout added in post!
  • The aliens themselves in all their rubbery, stiff glory. Doesn't help that their faces are always in a perpetual state of surprise and the animatronics for them barely work.
  • When Eric's neighbor friend is being dragged along the walls and ceiling via the vacuum cleaner trap, she's pretty clearly a dummy.
  • Early in the film when the truck jumps over two cars on the highway, a very watchful eye can spot the ramp used to make the jump.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Eric's death is either this or a failed attempt at such, as he arguably was not close enough to have been seriously affected by the explosion. Debbie's reaction is also a legitimately good acting moment.
  • The alternate cut of the scene with Eric getting shot in the back by accident might have done a better job. Maybe.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of this trope; the film so very blatantly rips off the premise of E.T. that you'd be surprised to know this was made 6 years after it first came out.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Alan Silvestri by miles, as Crow T. Robot can attest.
  • Jade Calegory and Lauren Stanley both give very sincere performances, with the former stating that he still considers the movie to be one of his highlights rather than an embarrassment.
• Toy Ship: Eric and Debbie spend a lot of time together, and though the movie never explicitly shows them to be anything other than friends, some fans saw a budding Puppy Love romance between them.
• Values Resonance: For all its other flaws, Mac and Me is one of the rare movies to feature a kid in a wheelchair as its protagonist, who isn't in some way Inspirationally Disadvantaged, and whose plot doesn't revolve around their disability in any way.

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