Hypnobobs: The Origins Of ALIEN

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Hypnobobs #80 - The Origins Of ALIENA 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.

|MP3|

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:

Astounding, July 1939 - Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt
Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt - illustrated by Kramer
Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt - illustrated by Kramer
Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt - illustrated by Kramer
Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt - illustrated by Kramer
Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt - illustrated by Kramer

In 1974, Marvel Comics’s Worlds Unknown did an adaptation, with a cover illustrated by Gil Kane:
Worlds Unknown #5 - Black Destroyer (COMICS adaptation)

Black Destroyer adaptation - adapted by Roy Thomas with interior art by Dan Adkins and Jim Mooney

And then, a couple years after ALIEN was released, somebody at EERIE magazine made the connection:
EERIE, February 1983 - adaptation of The Voyage Of The Space Beagle - cover art by Kelly Freas

Posted by Jesse Willis

3 thoughts to “Hypnobobs: The Origins Of ALIEN”

  1. 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.

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