Rate Your Music score: 2.8 out of 5!
Get out the Reese's Pieces and Speak & Spell!
Every radio DJ in 1982 noted that this now-lost hit was inspired by the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The record made Bob Leonard's countdown, and Bob mentioned the E.T. connection every chance he got. Now that I think about it, I actually don't know why that countdown was on so much in our home. It was on WMOH, of all places, which wasn't even one of the big signals in our part of town. Thankfully, I got in the habit of listening to WCLU because of this countdown, as I kept accidentally knocking the tuning knob from WMOH onto WCLU.
A reviewer on Rate Your Music said "Heartlight" is "the culmination of a long descent into sugary hamminess."
I have a weird memory of this song, but it might not even be real. I might just be imagining this. According to this recollection, there was a tutor who came to my school in 4th grade who really liked this song. I think she might have been a local college student. One day, there was a radio on, or maybe someone had brung in a record. The opening notes of "Heartlight" were heard. The tutor's face lit up, and she said something about how much she loved the song because it was about E.T.
That was also around the time Atari released an E.T. video game - which was such a commercial and critical flop that many folks blamed it for touching off the video game industry crash of 1983. Atari buried 10 to 20 truckloads of copies of the unsold game in a New Mexico landfill. The landfill was finally excavated in 2014 just to prove the games were buried there. The Smithsonian Museum then placed a ruined copy of the game from the landfill on display.
E.T. is also associated with a misheard lyric in a major hit song that was popular around the same time as "Heartlight" - namely "Gloria" by Laura Branigan. The real words were, "I think they got the alias." But everyone thought the song went, "I think they got Elliott," as in the kid in E.T.
Phone home!
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