PRIME-TIME FLICKS

Explorers (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), a 1985 kids-in-space adventure with the euphonious team of Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, has some of the antic wit and frenzied visual imagination director Joe Dante pumped into the Gremlins movies but, at the end, it turns into a crazy sundae with the nuts on top: a space cartoon climax full of nyark-nyark goofiness.