'Explorers' trivia and fun facts

During the children's flight over the circuit board at the end of the film, some of the camera angles and moves are meant to mimic the flight to Neverland from Disney's Peter Pan.

One of the movies that Ben watches is 'This Island Earth. In that movie and this one, the character builds a device with help from an alien.

One of the comic books seen on Ben's desk is an issue of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

River Phoenix originally auditioned for the role of Darren Woods.

The film was never finished and was released as a work in progress when the studio decided to change the release date and release the film as it was.

At one scene, the boys are watching at the Drive-In a movie featuring a spacefaring hero named Starkiller. George Lucas originally intended the lead character of his movie 'Star Wars' to be called Luke Starkiller until he changed it to Skywalker at the last minute.

In the helicopter scene, the pilot reads a newspaper, one of the headlines says "Kingston Falls 'Riot' Still Unexplained". Kingston Falls was the town where the events in 'Gremlins' (also directed by Joe Dante), took place.

The sound effects from the movie at the drive-in were taken directly from the original 1982 Atari 2600 video game Yars' Revenge (1981).

Inside Wolfgang's basement, the toy monkey from the movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', can be seen.

Wolfgang's "talking" rat is named Heinlein, after science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote many stories about young boys experimenting with spaceflight.

Both Wolfgang and Ben have extensive sci-fi literature in their houses. The titles of the books that can be recognized are: 'The Stars My Destination' from Alfred Bester, 'Childhood's End' from Arthur C Clark, 'The End of Eternity' from Isaac Asimov, 'Starmother' from Sydney J. Van Scyoc, 'Midsummer Century' from James Blish, 'The Twilight of Briarers' from Richard Cowper, 'Stargate' from Andre Norton, 'Mindbridge' from Joe Haldeman, 'The Overlords of War' from Gerard Klein and 'Doc Savage' from Kenneth Robeson.