Rudd, imp that he is, would earnestly introduce his clip to O’Brien, but then show a 28-second portion of Stewart Raffill’s 1988 film “Mac and Me.”
The clip depicted the film’s wheelchair-using protagonist Eric (Jade Calegory) uncontrollably rolling down a wooded hill. His friend (Lauren Stanley) yells after him, but Eric’s descent cannot be controlled. At the bottom of the hill, Eric plummets off the edge of a cliff, and falls 30 feet into a body of water. Right when he splashes down, the film’s titular alien, Mac, pops up in the middle of the frame. Mac is played by a very odd-looking puppet, resembling a hairless, elderly mogwai. The clip is violent, weird, and hilarious. Rudd has shown it to Conan dozens of times in the last few decades. They would always get a good laugh out of it.
“Mac and Me,” for those unfamiliar, was a brazen knockoff of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” It was about a young boy with a single mom who befriends a weird-looking space visitor, just like “E.T.,” and featured a lot of parallel scenes. In “E.T.,” the young Elliott coaxes the space creature out of hiding with Reese’s Pieces. In “Mac and Me,” it’s a Coca-Cola. Both creatures also went by abbreviated names. E.T. was short for extra-terrestrial, of course, while Mac was an abbreviation of Mysterious Alien Creature.
Fun trivia: Jennifer Aniston was in “Mac and Me.” She was only a featured extra in a later scene, but one can clearly see her in the background, watching some break-dancers in a McDonald’s
