July 2016

Leading from 
updates 2016

Sunday 31st July 2015
Rewriting parts of Alien: Inventing the Facehugger because parts of it seem rather garbled and I'm not really sure if anyone has been able to read any of it anyway.

Friday 29th July 2016
1) Added: Alien: Echoes of ideas from Star Trek The Animated Series after watching all the episodes of this cartoon series from the 1970s. I had documented Beyond The Farthest Star a couple of months before as an influence, but then I thought there might be more in perhaps a clever way, ideas that might get into the viewer's head and mix with other ideas in a very abstract way. I was thinking about where the spore and facehugger idea came from because I'm not convinced it's simply made up from creepy crawly ideas, but that was the way to tie it all together.
2) So indeed, I'm probably looking for a few more ideas from various different sources aside from parasitology that ought to have inspired the life cycle and indeed the idea behind birth temple. Not entirely sure where the next place to look would be. Exploring beyond the narrative presented in the interviews seems to be ideal for me because I suppose they talk a fair amount of hogwash in these things and they're saying things often to sell the product or sound almost entertaining rather than give everything to the interviewer and suggest that there's nothing more than that, and indeed a lot of things don't always come to the surface in interviews when they're trying to follow a train of thought. That's why we've learnt so little about Giger's work over the years.

Tuesday 26th July 2016
1) There is the idea that there are many ideas from many stories in films, radio, comic, magazines and novels that Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett could have been looking at, with so many small ideas come over again and again and again from different directions and people waiting for Dan to spill the beans were only likely to get a small amount of the revelations coming through interviews etcetera about where his alien story elements came from. It does seem almost sad that we only managed to get a partial picture over the years, so I am trying to have a go thinking about where it came from using the method of realisations I've had about the various things that Giger was referencing in his. There isn't much to go on or fix things together with.
2) Added Creature Effects' alien mutant which people saw in a magazine back at the time of Alien Resurrection and assumed it was for that film. I was trying to find some information on line about it, I wanted to post it for quite a while and then suddenly today I found a picture of the thing on the Creature-Effect's website and they seemed to have named it Boris. However later on in the day, I came to assume that it was loosely based on Giger's Mordor VII painting.

Monday 25th July 2016
1) I had been looking at the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers novel the idea day seeing how it might have been a part of the conception of the Alien life cycle. I was wondering again where the spore idea came from and started thinking obviously about the spore pod from of course Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the word spore came up in the novel, which always seemed to be connected in the minds of many with the pods in Alien. The idea is to look at what influenced the alien life cycle because while it was partially inspired by creepy crawlies, there were plenty of other things with their roots in science fiction that in a sense were unified by the idea of creepy crawlies. The suggestion is that creepy crawly life cycle concept was a way to ground it and and bring forwards to the audience the sense of something based on realism. So it brings to the surface the idea. But the spore pod was not supposed to be an egg other than something egg shaped. The facehugger was also considered a larval form of the alien rather than something embryonic in an egg, even if Ridley made it into something symbolically embryonic and Jim Cameron decided to have an egg laying alien monster in Aliens. Rather than the spore floating through the depths of the space as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers floating for perhaps millions of years, it sits there around a plinth in a birth temple waiting the countless years it has in the Alien script waiting for a host for it to take it to another stage in its life cycle. The spore pods from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers appeared to be plant like things and then they created reproductions of humans, perhaps they were near enough space capsules to O'Bannon's spore pods being time capsules.

2) The other idea I was familiar with that came to the surface after having it having watched Quatermass 2 about a decade ago, about the spore pod's origins coming to the surface in my mind is the fact that Dan O'Bannon was a fan of Nigel Kneale and his Quatermass series. In the movie Quatermass 2 there are aliens coming down to Earth in small rocket like capsules made from stone that when humans come up to them, they suddenly crack open and the seemingly gaseous entities inside come out, and take over the human victims.
3) I watched the film First Men In The Moon some weeks ago and noticed that the insectoid aliens becomed cocooned while they go into stasis for an unknown period of time

Sunday 24th July 2016
Thoughts about the alien cocoon stage of the alien, and what it leads to, is it an alien egg or just a cocoon pod. It's simply a cocoon pod but with the larva having developed to a stage where it doesn't develop any more until one day if finds a host

Saturday 23rd July 2016
1) Oddly I started to think about Jack Kirby's Dragon Man as another point of reference for Giger's Alien Monster IV and so added : Alien monster iv as Jack Kirby's Dragon Man
2) Added "Ear" to Giger's Alien Monster IV references also Gene Szafran's relief for Tomita's album cover for "Pictures at an Exhibtion" since I had recently been comparing the ear structure to the alien monster IV head in passing thoughts
3) Added Virus (2016) film poster references Giger's ELP XII ?


Thursday 21st July 2016
1) Added: Cocoon (1985) as a film containing the idea of aliens disguised as humans wearing a synthetic skin and also the rough commonality between the hibernation pods in Cocoon and the spores in Alien


Tuesday 19th July 2016
1) Added: Alien Monster IV shows a Picasso-ised J G Ballard face?

Monday 18th July 2016

1) While attempting to draw a J G Ballard fade with his features transformed into biomechanoid Alien body parts, I suddenly realised that Alien Monster IV seemed to offer solutions to the problems I was facing and then I realised that the monster in that painting might be the face of J G Ballard, which is the way I seem to work these days
2) Added: Ben Wheatley's memories of Alien
3) Added: Ben Wheatley index page

Sunday 17th July 2016
1) Updated: Development of Necronom IV with another paragraph at the beginning with my own general initial thoughts
2) Updated: Prometheus: Michael Fassbender plays David the android

Saturday 16th July 2016
1) Rewrote summary for: "Treasures of Satan's" transformation into "Alien Monster IV"
Added 
2) Added: HR Giger: Alien Monster IV; Atrophied remnant of the battle between Gandalf and the Balrog in Moria
3) Added: Jack Kirby's Lemurian Train Bomb references Giger's Necronom IV?

Friday 15th July 2016
1) Added Alien vs. Predator: Alien warrior rear appendage which is basically the information from the Propmaster's page about the back appendage on sale at the time

Thursday 14th July 2016
1) Re-edited the  Prometheus: The "space jockey as a suit" question links
2) Updated  Blomkamp's Alien movie with information that everyone has seen already from Entertainment Weekly.
3) Re-edited Alien 5: Sharlto Copley or not 
4) Changed "Let her hose with it" to "Let her loose with it" on Aliens: Signing up weaver.
Sorry, was a mistake floating around there.
5) Re-edited Dan O'Bannon's view on Aliens as a sequel 

Tuesday 12th July 2016
1) Re-edited the  Prometheus: The "space jockey as a suit" question section and the pages about other films linked to it. Still have to write pages about The Thing and Cocoon.

Sunday 10th July 2016
1) Updated the Jack Kirby index page adding numerous additions relating to Jack Kirby, Giger and Alien, including the story he drew about an alien Saucer Jockey recovered from a flying saucer, which is interesting in terms of the use of the term Jockey and we have a giant alien body. I've also included a drawing from The Demon series, the Master Eye, elements of which have crept into Giger's The Spell IV, which is possible because another drawing later in the series appeared to have inspired elements of Passage Temple and The Spell II, and so I've been focusing on the Giger/Kirby interactions and trying to establish a timeline on the page.
2) Updated Space Jockey's origins in Swiss Family Robinson with information about the Saucerman referred to briefly as the Saucer Jockey. Oddly it was done the same year as Attack Of The Fifty Foot Woman came out and that featured a giant alien humanoid pilot who travels to earth in a giant sphere, but Kirby's giant alien pilot is encased in a space suit that might make one think of a metal giant in the manner of the robot Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Saturday 9th July 2016. 
1) Added the picture of the mysterious relief in the ampule room, scanned from the recent Weyland-Yutani Report book and added to Prometheus: Giger-esque relief in the ampule room
2) Added Jack Kirby's drawing of a sky demon for Devil Dinosaur (1978) references details from Giger's Passage Temple Entrance (1975) 
3) Added Giger's painting Ugly (1979) references the giant spaceship from The Eternals #2 (August 1976)
4) Added Another important component from the Alien Monster IV painting from a Kirby drawing from The Eternals.

Friday 8th July 2016
1) Added what I believe is: the other end of the mysterious flying serpent with holes that I think was referenced in later design aspects of the derelict ship . I believe that Kirby referenced Giger's work 147 which I noticed crept into the structure of the Lemurian Bomb Train from The Eternals. 
2) Added  Jack Kirby's giant space pilot statue from The Eternals references Giger's Necronom III amongst other things?

Thursday 7th July 2016
1) So following on from the last post, added an attempt to compare details betwen Necronom IX and Kirby's "Lemurian train bomb" and Dali's "Daddy Longlegs of the evening -Hope" picture 
2) And then this leads to the Alien Monster IV references the Lemurian Train Bomb. 

Wednesday 6th July 2016
1) I managed to finally get hold of a copy of the Weyland-Yutani Report book. I do not really know what to make of all the various bits of writing in it, I suppose one must consider that it's basically a book putting onto paper Dark Horse's bible for their Alien comic book series. Hut the idea about the mystery behind the Bishop 2's character connects with what I have been saying about him in forum and newsgroups over the years also it's just a creative perspective, it's okay for me to think about him as a cyborg. A lot of hard work and enthusiasm went into the artwork and there's a decent face-on photograph of the Deacon relief in the ampule/head room which has been interesting to me. It's not a book for me to criticise in terms of what it generally meant to be.
2) I managed to get hold of the new Jim Cameron interview in Famous Monsters of Filmland. It appears as if I have a bee in my bonnet or even a flea in my ear about people being so certain that the way Jim Cameron turned the Alien species into an insect like race that lays big eggs as being the most appropriate thing for the creature from alien. People might be attracted to the simplicity of it all, and I am more interested in the alien being incredibly alien and perhaps back in the 1970s, the idea of something being like an insect was very interestingly alien, but making the huge alien into something laying eggs like a giant termite queen was just too specific, and Jim Cameron decided that the big alien spores had to be eggs and not something slightly less explainable, although Ridley Scott did talk about it all being related to insect life, and wondered about the alien being like a member of an ant colony what was going on in final egg nest in Alien, seemed much less explained although it was generally insect enough. Looking at all the information about the original Alien and its life cycle, there were many interesting ways to go. Although there were other directions that Cameron could have gone, he went for something as simple as possible that conformed with another idea he had been working on. It worked for his movie, it's great that any movie could have been made at all, it didn't really satisfy my interests as a fan of the original Alien movie at the time and Cameron's movie was made thirty years ago. However I liked his biomechanical environments and the way an alien could pounce out of the biomechanic wall to grab a passer by. and how the alien  queen seemed to unfold from an almost compact form . Continuing to update Aliens: Replacing the human to spore stage with the alien queen
3) Added:  Dali's "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening" referenced Jean Delville's "Treasures of Satan", and James Gleeson's "Galaxy" references both. 
4) Today I suddenly realised that Jack Kirby had incorporated elements from Giger's Necronom IX painting so it seemed to prove that while Giger was referencing Jack Kirby's work, Kirby referenced Giger and Giger referenced the result in another painting, so it's almost as if seeds of Treasures of Satan were being batted back and forth between the two of them to get to the point where Giger painted Alien Monster IV which works as a prominent descendent of Delville's "Treasures of Satan", and I recognised that something of this happening between Giger and Gleeson. It looks almost as if I'm trying to invent a secret society with Giger, Gleeson and Kirby as members, but they might just be parts of a global network of penpals in the artists circles all obsessed with things such as mythology and surrealism. Some might wonder what Kirby might have done if he had done a Alien comic book of some sort or played around with the Prometheus film mythology, fusing it with his The Eternals mythos.
5) I took notice of the new photo of hand being sculpted for Alien: Covenant and probably am not sure what to think of it really. I have no idea whether it will be used either. The hands of the original alien by Giger remain much more interesting to me.

Tuesday 5th July 2016
1) Merged Aliens: Merged "Aliens: Adding the queen to the life cycle" with "James Cameron removes the human to spore stage" to become Aliens: Replacing the human to spore stage with the alien queen
2) Another Kirby inspired Giger. Actually this Kirby image will have worked its way into perhaps a couple of Giger images and what this Kirby images references itself is also part of another chain of things to consider. Giger's Biomechanic Mia (Egyptian Style) references the Lemurian train bomb from Jack Kirby's The Eternals #16 , July 1977


Sunday 3rd July 2016

1) Added: Alien: Giger referenced Jack Kirby for the later stages of the derelict design? 
2) Updated: Alien's Ron Cobb's drop ship artwork with images from an old issue of "Scifi And Fantasy Modeller". I wanted to show the slightly rougher version of the scans from the magazine.

Saturday 2nd July 2016
1) Added Jack Kirby references Giger's Landscape XXIX (1974) (work 249) in The Eternals #7, January 1977 ?
So it might well be that Jack Kirby was somehow aware of Giger's work, not really sure how. In issue 7 of the Eternals, there's a panel showing the rows of Celestials, and it looks to me as if he had take Giger's landscape showing the babies in wheelchairs and abstractly used them as reference for the faces of some of his Eternals. So certain faces correspond to the babies in their positions in the images. So perhaps they had friends in the artworld, although Jack Kirby was known for drawing precognitive comic book stories, and then it seems to be just me making the association in my usual way. I'll try not to wear myself out any more thinking about it.
2) I bought Roger Christian's book Cinema Alchemist as an ebook from Amazon and have started adding bits and pieces of information from the various things he's talked about to the blog. There are no photos in it. The hard copy comes out later this month.

Friday 1st July 2016
Added: Giger's Biomechanical Landscape I (1984-1986) (work 583) references the Giedi Prime landscape from David Lynch's Dune and fire engine scene from fire engine scene from Jack Kirby's The Eternals #16, October, 1977. I knew for a couple of weeks about the fire engine scene connection but today while working on the page, I made the Dune connection because of the year it was painted and I have been a fan of David Lynch's Dune even if the director was not happy with it. There are many interesting scenes in it and curious designs in it that would inspire watchers of the movie but in ways perhaps unrelated to the original book by Frank Herbert.