ET will soon have a new home to call: Cinema's most cult alien puppet will go up for auction on Saturday, 40 years after Steven Spielberg's masterpiece was released.
Collectors who have kept their child's soul should snap up the "number one" robot designed for the film, put up for sale by the specialized house Julien's Auctions.
Estimated between two and three million dollars, the price of this mechanical figurine of one meter high could fly well beyond.
1300 mythical objects on sale
With its aluminum frame and exposed cables, the puppet is a little engineering gem, made up of 85 mechanical joints capable of moving the nose, eyes, eyelids, neck, arms... Enough to give full life to this creature abandoned on Earth, whose story of friendship with little Elliott moved the whole world.
Animated by a dozen people on set, the alien seemed so real that actress Drew Barrymore, who played
'(Elliott's) little sister in the film, really believed that ET belonged to a real living species'
, reminds AFP Martin Nolan, the executive director of Julien's Auctions.
At the time, in a cinema without digital, Steven Spielberg
The Italian, father of the
King Kong
of 1976 and
the Alien
of Ridley Scott in 1979, had won thanks to ET a third Oscar.
The alien's big blue eyes, which have melted generations with the
"ET home phone"
line , are modeled after those of his Himalayan cat.
Beyond this puppet, enthusiasts will also be able to acquire unpublished sketches used for the design of the character, or even one of the bicycles (estimated between 30,000 and 50,000 dollars) which follows Elliott and ET in the cult scene where they fly to the moon.
Scheduled Saturday and Sunday in Beverly Hills and online, the auction brings together around 1,300 legendary objects, drawn from decades of Hollywood life.
Read alsoThe puppet of ET and the broom from Harry Potter at auction
Enthusiasts and collectors will be able to snatch several dresses of the icon Marilyn Monroe (between 40,000 and 80,000 dollars), the raised stick with which Charlton Heston split the Red Sea in "The Ten Commandments" (between 40,000 and 60,000 dollars), or even a model of “Shooting Star”, one of the broomsticks straddled by certain characters from the
Harry Potter
saga (between 30,000 and 50,000 dollars).
Beyond these exceptional pieces, a number of more modest objects, belonging to the Marvel universe, Star Wars, or Terminator, are also put under the hammer.
The less fortunate fans can, for example, compete for the resin cast capable of driving Jim Carrey crazy in
The Mask
, priced around 1000 dollars.
