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
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