A recent Hypnobobs podcast features two guests from The Black Dog podcast talking with host Jim Moon about the origins of ALIEN. It’s a lengthy discussion, running 2.5 hours, touching on the many filmic inspirations for the 1979 film written by Dan O’Bannon.
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Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hypnobobs
This is the perfect excuse for me to point out something that Moon and guests didn’t – namely the original literary source, perhaps, for all the films they mention and, perhaps, for ALIEN itself. It is a 1939 short story by A.E. van Vogt entitled Black Destroyer (later assembled into a part of a fix-up novel entitled The Voyage Of The Space Beagle).
Check out the original art:
In 1974, Marvel Comics’s Worlds Unknown did an adaptation, with a cover illustrated by Gil Kane:
And then, a couple years after ALIEN was released, somebody at EERIE magazine made the connection:
Posted by Jesse Willis
I demand RIpley’s sex scene be restored.
Also, the origin of D&D’s “displacer beast”, at least in appearance.
One of the other stories incorporated into “The Voyage of the Space Beagle” is “Discord in Scarlet,” which also has some commonalities with Alien. The ship is again invaded by an alien being, in this case one that implants eggs into various crewmembers to use as hosts for its offspring.