Celebrate Alien Day With These Facts

Happy Alien Day! For those not in the know, today is that day we celebrate the release of the first Alien film, and this year it’s special, not just because it’s the 4th annual Alien Day but it’s also the 40th Anniversary of the film’s release back in 1979!

What better way to celebrate than with sharing some interesting trivia relating to the films. Warning, there may some spoilers ahead.

• The film series was originally going to be called Star Beast

• When production staff first met H.R. Giger to see if he would be perfect for the project, he offered them drugs. The members declined but asked Giger why he has them and he said it helped “Keep the nightmares away.”, the crew members knew right there he was perfect for the job. This leads to the following bit of info…

• H.R. Giger suffered from severe night terrors; he then took what he saw in his dreams and made them to his art.

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• The “Company” is the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s a combination of two large fictional tech giants, Weyland Industries and Yutani Corporation. Yutani was bought out by Weyland forcing it to merge, later it’s revealed in Alien: Resurrection that Weyland-Yutani was eventually bought out by Wall-Mart.

• While shooting the “knife trick” scene in Aliens, Lance Henriksen accidentally caught Bill Paxton’s pinky finger.

and the look of terror was real too

• The novelizations of the films have referred to people who were victims of face-huggers as being rapped.

• Ripley’s harpoon gun can be seen still attached to the door as it’s being cut open at the beginning of ‘Aliens’

• Officially, Corporal Hicks is still alive. In the game Aliens: Colonial Marines, Hicks was taken out of hypersleep by the “company” who was secretly observing the events of Aliens from the Sulaco

• Alien: Resurrection was originally going to be about a clone of Newt.

• Bladerunner is set in the same universe as the “Alien” franchise.

• Ridley Scott wrote detailed biographies explaining the characters to the actors in Alien. The character Lambert is a Transsexual, and Kane is a drug addict.

• The basketball shot in Alien: Resurrection was real and done in one take.

• A special feature in Alien: Covenant hints at how the “Company” learned about the Xenomorphs. David sent a video diary as a transmission to the company showing him working on the creature’s creation. This explains how the company learned about the aliens as well as explaining why they discontinued the “human-like” David line of androids and replaced them with more obedient Walters.

• Alien 3 was the first alien film to show what happens when an alien is born from a non-human host and birthed (no pun indented) the concept that the creature’s appearance is based on what host the facehugger attaches itself to.

• Bill Paxton played characters that were killed by Xenomorphs (Aliens) and Predators (Predator 2).

• In the script for Alien, all the characters were listed by the last name because the character’s genders were not specified.

• The alien in Alien 3 was going to be played by a Whippet (dog) in a costume.

• Originally, there’s no queen alien, people taken by the Xenomorph are turned into eggs as the alien’s lifespan was very short. At the end of Alien, the creature seemed sluggish because it was at the end of its lifecycle. After the idea was dropped, that’s why the “sleepy” alien finale showed us a not so energetic creature.

• Alien: Resurrection director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and actors Ron Pearlman, and Dominique Pinon all worked together previously on The City of Lost Children.

• Technically, Jones, the cat is the only true Nostromo survivor. Speaking of Jones…

• To get Jones’ reactions, they brought a German Sheppard to the set.

• According to the novelization of Alien 3, the facehugger, in the beginning, bled acid on Newts sleep chamber because it got cut after breaking the glass on Ripley’s tube.

• The acid for blood concept was done in Alien to prevent the whole “Why can’t they just shoot it?” argument

• In theory, Weyland Industries and Yutani Corporation success grew after they reversed engineered Yautja (Predator) technology. This was touched on in Alien VS Predator: Requiem

• Alan Dean Foster who wrote the novelization of three of the “Alien” films, stopped writing the novelizations of the series as he did not like how Hicks, Newt, and Bishop had died at the beginning of Alien 3.

• The appearance of the Xenomorph skull at the end of Predator 2 was done as a nod to the film series but sparked fans wanting to see the two alien species encounter one another thus giving us the “Alien VS Predator” universe.

• Alien is considered to be the only “horror” film out of the series as the others were either more action or thriller.

• Al Matthews who played Sergeant Apone in Aliens was a real-life US Marine. He was the first black Marine to earn field rank promotion to Sergeant during his tour of duty in Vietnam. He held 13 combat awards that included two purple hearts.

• Originally the studio wanted Ridley Scott to direct Alien 3, Scott was going to make it about the origin of the creature but the studio did not want to, so Scott bowed out. This version Scott wanted to make is now known as Prometheus.

• Nothing officially says “Aliens VS Predators” takes place in the “Alien” or “Predator” film universes.

• Originally the “Alien Encounter” attraction at Walt Disney World’s Tomorrow Land was going to be set in the “Alien” universe.

• In the comics, the “Space Jockey” that we now know as the large humanoid Engineers, were shown to be alien elephant people.

Know anything interesting that’s related to the “Alien” franchise? Let’s hear it!