Do Go On - 511 - The Alien Franchise

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

This week our friend Marcel Blanch-de Wilt drops by to tell us about the history of the Alien Franchise all the way from humble beginnings to a multi-decade, multi-million dollar cinematic machine. On this podcast, no one can hear you scream!This is a comedy/history podcast, the report begins at approximately 06:28 (though as always, we go off on tangents throughout the report).For all our important links: https://linktr.ee/dogoonpod Check out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Who Knew It with Matt Stewart: https://play.acast.com/s/who-knew-it-with-matt-stewart/Our awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader ThomasDo Go On acknowledges the traditional owners of the land we record on, the Wurundjeri people, in the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenji Amana, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there. Canada, we are visiting you in September this year.

If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. Hello and welcome to another episode of Do Go On. My name is Dave Warnocky and as always I'm here with Jess Perkins. David, hello. Hello, Jess.

And this week we are saying hello to Marcel Blanche de Welterlo. A thrilled to be back. A thrill to return to Australia's favourite podcast. You don't sound that thrilled. Thank you. Oh, I'm sort of playing it. I'm actually M. Chaff to be here. I love to pod.

I love to hang out with my friends. It's like, is this my best? Is this a make-a-wish situation? No, it's just... Yeah, I just want to double-check. It's not your birthday, right? It's the... My birthday is the 24th of November.

Okay, great. Okay, great. Haven't missed your birthday. Fantastic. Is this from all of us? Yeah, we're not getting you anything for your birthday. That's okay. Because this is the gift.

We're all grown-ups. Exactly. I don't do birthday presents. It would be weird if I'm like... Yeah, I've noticed. When you have your own income, it's weird to, like, expect people to buy things for you. Because the things that, if there's something that's, let's say, $50 to $100 that I want or need, at some point I've just bought it because I want to need it.

Yeah, exactly. So then anything else that would be a fun gift is in the $300 range. Who's spending that? Yeah, and then you feel awkward about that. If you're parted, for example, like really splashed out on something like, hey, we got you a car. Yeah. What the fuck? We're actually struggling for groceries at the moment.

Yeah. You should have run that by me. Sorry, thank you. I love an Audi. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Can we trade that in and buy several bags of groceries? Yeah, that would be nice.

You know, yeah. Our kid needs clothes. Yeah. By that, I mean, I mean my dog. Your dog can wear an outy. He'd look great in an outty. Anyway, we're delighted to have you here, Marcel. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us.

My pleasure. And, Dave, do you want to explain firstly how the show works? Well, first I'll say Matt Stewart is fine. He's fine. He is fine. I actually spent a long time with Matt Stewart on a recent road show. Oh, yes.

We did a tour together. So, you know, we're, you know, deeper friends than ever. Yeah. And do you now have more empathy for Dave and I and the trials of touring with Matt Stewart? Yeah, very much. So. Although he's a very cute man in that there was a moment where I have a practice while if I'm in a place where I'm judge you of the coffee, I'll get a mocker because, like,

a mocker will disguise a shit coffee. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's chocolately and lovely. And Matt was like, oh, I see you're buying a mocker there. What's the thing there? I explained it to him. I was like, oh, yeah, I might try that out myself. And I watched a man and he's as old as the wind.

I watched him have a mocker for the first time. And he said that, he's like, oh, you're under something here, myself. That's nice. And then second step, he was like, it is actually a bit too sweet. Because he's a man as old as the wind. And as you get old, you can't handle sweetness as much. One taste bud was like, okay, where's the rest of this? It was like in one of those movies where like someone takes a potion and like, oh, it's working.

I'm cured. I'm going to be fine. And then the second sip, like they start mutating into something. Oh, no, we got the thing wrong. We were too far. Yeah. Matt is, he is a real cutie. He makes up for so many floors with moments of cuteness.

Like we were in, I can't remember where. Bristol maybe. And we went to a little cafe that was called just between friends. And it was a tiny little cafe. so Dave and I was standing outside, Matt comes out, and he'd bought me a tote bag because I like tote bags. It had a cute print on it and it says just between friends. I use it all the time. That's nice.

That's sweet. He's still got that gene that like puppy dogs and babies do of like, there has to be cute enough so you don't murder them. That's right. That's right. And it works. Until today. Also at that cafe man asked us to watch his bike. Do you remember that? That's true.

And then we're like, like while he did a trick or something. Hey, watch my bike. Watch this. It was more like, I'm going to get a coffee, can you watch the bike? And I was like, oh yeah, sure. And then it was like, actually, how long is this going to take? Exactly, because it was a busy cafe. It's a long line.

That's one of those cons, man. That's one of those cons. I know. We were nervous. And we'd already ordered, so we're like, our coffees are coming soon. Sooner than his. What's going to have? It all worked out fine.

Yeah, we just gave him a couple of thumbs up. But we did spiral for a little bit. And that's just, that's how Dave and I work. And that's what Matt has to put up with him to us. Us going, oh my God, here's 18 hypotheticals. What if this happens. What other bucks goes on fire? Is that our fault?

And Matt goes, I don't think that will happen. That's the thing. That's the con is that the bike gets lit on fire. And then he comes out and goes, hey, I gave you one simple instruction. You're going to have to pay for this because I needed that bike to get to the orphanage where I work. And then you guys both feel bad.

Yeah, I'd be reaching into my wallet strass. And then doing the rude finger surprise. Boom. I know you're con. I don't give a shit about orphans. Okay. I will do it now. Explain the show.

We take it in turns here to report on a topic, which is often, but not always suggested to us by one of the listeners. We go away, do a bit of research and then bring it back to the group in the form of a report, which it is Marcel's turn. Thank you for volunteering to do this. A thrill. So exciting. You've gone away written a report. I believe Jess might have an inkling about what you're going to talk about because you discuss this, but I either have forgotten or do not know. So I'm really excited.

So we usually get on the topic with a question. So maybe, I guess it's just open to me. It's just for you, I think. Yeah. Okay. Unless it's like a really vague question not related to the topic, which is, but you can just do a trivia question. Well, okay. Well, sort of.

Finish this famous tagline in space. No one can hear you. Come. No, no, it's incorrect. Cream. People can hear you come in space? Cream is really close. Wait, we can hear people in space coming?

Yeah. It's a weird international space station microphone. There's a webcam going 24-7. Oh, that's... The astronauts hate it. That's... That's, honestly, that's disgusting. I think I'm thinking...

Scream! You would be correct in space. No one can hear you scream. This is the famous tagline to Alien. Today, we're talking about the alien franchise. I love Alien. Tell me about it. Have you seen all the films?

Okay, I think I've seen most of them. Alien. We're talking Alien. Aliens. Alien 3. Alien Resurrection. Oh, he knows his aliens. Wow. Then Prometheus.

Is that right? Well, yeah, you're in the Ridley Scott Canada now. Does that not count? No, no, he does count. He didn't know he directed the first one anyway. Then there's another one after that I haven't seen. And then there was a recent one. Alien.

Oh, you fell off. You fell off. Yeah, missed one, but then it popped up on Netflix or something. I went, oh, what's the new one? And I mean, they're all essentially the same film, but they're fantastic. Or are they? Oh, really? I mean, there's different genre types.

If they were all the same film, I would be talking about the first movie, and then I would just keep repeating talking about the first movie. But the new one, it's just the same thing, but Gen Zed are now fighting the alien. What was that one called? Gen Zed. I mean, they're said in the future, but yeah, they are younger. Yeah, it's just like young. Now, what a young people?

Like they're saying skibbitty toilet or something is that? What do they do? What are they doing? What are they bloody fucking? Put me out of my mystery. What's that one? The latest one, Romulus. They're doing TikTok dances with the aliens or something, what are they? Get off your phones! It's alien, but it's woke now. Oh, okay.

Oh, I couldn't possibly hurt this alien. She's trying to do a selfie with the alien. Oh, I can't believe what's going to happen. Which happens a lot in the new Superman movie, which I enjoyed, but it's like, all right, we get it. There's phones in this world. Superman's got burnout. Yeah. Well, sort of, yeah.

It's a good film. Anyway, I'm not here to talk about a superman. But I do love, and the one I missed after Prometheus? Alien. Covenant. That's right. Oh, you said it, as I was saying, the hard cut. And I've also seen the alien predator movies because I also love Predator.

Wow. I'm having a look in Jack the Hat to see if anybody has suggested. But it is obviously hard to search for. I've searched for Alien. That's brought up hundreds of results. But so far, I don't think anybody. has suggested the movie franchise. So you're here to say, no one wants this.

That's what I'm getting at. I want this. Nobody wants this. I love, I really enjoy it. Classically, I'm not a horror guy in any way. Yeah. And I know that this. Your life is too scary.

Exactly. I want an escape from the horrors of Dave Woonke's life. I made the mistake last night at dinner of telling Aiden what the topic was today. And then he talked for about 15 minutes. And I said, hey, I'm going to hear all this tomorrow. He was giving you the spiel. Would it be okay if I didn't hear this right now? Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's sort of one of a bonus little report of just like, what, you remember from dinner? It would be... Oh, I zoned out real quick. It was just sort of like... So you haven't seen any of these films? None, no. What's kept you away? Are they a bit scary?

Yeah. I don't like that. Yeah, but I, for some reason, I'm drawn to these ones because they're sort of actiony scary, depending on the movie, of course. Yeah. I really don't like films like Saw or something where people are locked in cutting off limbs and awful stuff like that I find that torture porn stuff a bit full on

I also find anything where there's just like people just really really suffering yeah yeah yeah there's something fun about alien and it's also there's a bit of escapism oh yeah we're on a spaceship yeah yeah yeah that's like this isn't my life at all but I could be locked in a box of my leg tied to it

exactly have you seen Saw Talk to a swordfish. I don't like to feel tense. As explained before, I'm tense all the time at everything. So watching a movie, I like to just be able to go, Tra la la la la. Would it be so bad to escape for a bit? Have a bit of escapism?

Yeah, yeah, it would be that much. I'm not really a horror guy either. I'm very similar. I like the ones that are a bit of fun. Yeah. Or the ones that are films of like, oh, you got to go see Get Out, because it's a film that everyone's talking about. And it's the same thing that draws me to these big franchises

because I go, well, this is part of culture. Yeah, right. An alien has been around since the 70s. And I'm just intrigued about how I want to be in on the conversation. I want to know what's what. And growing up, it was always about like, you haven't seen this movie? And that's such a dude culture.

I think of like, you haven't seen this movie. You got to see this movie. And I was like, I guess I have to. I have to. Yeah. Yeah. I think I am by just going anything that's even very, I'm not seeing it.

I am cutting myself out of a lot of great films. And the scariest thing of all, the nightly news. You've ever seen that? Far out. Oh my gosh. Talk about it. It's feeling tense. Skyhooks has a song about it called horror movie.

And at the end of the song they reveal, they're talking about the news. Wow. Mm-hmm. Pretty good stuff from Skyhaw. Red Simons, you've done it again. Powerful stuff. One of your catchphrases coming out earlier than usual. Yeah.

So, but you're a big alien fan. Like now? I mean, hey, I've come on this podcast. We've talked Mission Impossible franchise. We've talked Indiana Jones. I did an episode where I just hung out and someone else did a report. And now I'm back. You're like, all right, what's another franchise that I guess I've seen?

You're like, oh, I hated just being there and having to listen to them. So I would like to write another one. So myself, it's time to shine. But I mean, okay, if I'm putting on my cards on the table, I was a Terminator boy growing up. I love Terminator 2. My favorite film of all time. That's not let it box for. Yeah, it's my, it's my favorite, it's one of my top four as well.

And, but it does have, the films get worse and worse. And similar to Alien as well, but Alien is just still in the cultural tapestry. There's a mini, there's a TV series that's about to come out. So I thought, what better time than now? Yeah. To talk about Alien. Fantastic. And when you've done Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, I've, at the end of those,

episodes I've gone, I'm going to watch them. And did you? No. But maybe at the end of this one, I'll go, I'm going to watch it. They're very good films. And both of those, since you came on, have come out with probably the last film that they'll ever make. It's true.

Are you going to kill the alien franchise as well? Yes. God willing. But some things can just die eventually. The first one I watched was Alien Resurrection as a child. I would have been about eight. And it was one of those times where my older brothers were watching it. And my mom would be like, oh, you can watch it.

But, you know, Stefan, Anton, you have to cover his eyes when there's scary bits. And as a kid, and I know what's watching an alien movie, that's most of the movie. Especially if you're watching it with brothers, they haven't seen the movie. So they're just sort of, you're just guessing. Oh, yeah, I guess you should probably cover your eyes now. Something bad might happen. But it doesn't take into account how much worse it is to just cover your eyes and imagine what might be happening.

And still hear the sound, a big part of the horror often is the soundtrack. And a lot of horror movies they cut away from the visual. So if you're covering your eyes and just hearing it, you're doing more work than the movie is as well. I remember that, did you remember that Tommy Lee Jones movie Volcano? Yes. There's a scene where a guy like melts like in a subway.

Like he tries to save a kid and he dives over some lava and he realizes he's going to land in it and just, he melts. slowly. And in the movie that I watched years later, I'm like, oh, it's actually silly. It's not. And because he's carrying a kid and then he like piffs the kid. Yeah. As he sort of melts into the thing. But to just imagine that is way worse than the film itself. But like, that was scarring me for years because of this idea. So what I'm saying to any parents listening, don't cover

your kid's eyes. If anything, clockwork orange it up and just hold their eyes open. looking away. You need to see this. I didn't raise a quitter. All right, so where am I? At the beginning. Today, we're going to talk about a franchise that much like its title character refuses to stay dead.

Spoilers? Yes, and there are going to be some spoilers. I'm not going to do full brazier recaps, but I am going to sort of give options as we go along to sort of see, all right, do you guys want to hear more? of the story or should we go behind the scenes? Because we're going to do a combination of here's what happens in the movie. Here's what happened behind the scenes. And a lot of this is about how great and magical creative collaboration is and one idea

leading to another and how an iconic thing can occur because right time, right place, one person meets another person. I love all that stuff. So much of my work is creative collaboration and how someone can go, hey, you should come and do this thing and how it leads to beautiful moments like this podcast celebrating 10 years. Wow. Can you believe it? An iconic podcast. Yeah. One of the first. One of the first pods. You and cereal. I don't know. One of. Come on.

Number one. Well, and, you know, Mark Maron's holding up, you know, hanging up his hat, you know, soon. What a quitter. And you will be, you'll be the ones. Yeah. How long did he run for? I don't know, 15 years or something All right, so we just have to beat Marin. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I reckon we could do that. Let's quit at 16.

Yep. That's why you got into it in the first place, wasn't it? Yeah. To beat Marin. Yeah. But we're going to look at the highs and the lows, as indicated. There are good ones. There are bad ones.

We're going to focus most of our time on the first two. Okay. Which are the most iconic ones. And then there'll be a bit of, and then the rest. Yeah, yeah. And then this one has this. And also, the listener will be able to check the runtime on the episode. They'll go, is he going to spend an equal amount of time on

each of these. No, I'm not going to spend on each an equal amount of time. That's like whenever I get a book cheat and I go, so that's the end of chapter one and the guests look at each other like, what? We've been speaking for 40 minutes. I'm like, I know, but like the first chapter often sets up the whole list. Don't worry. Exactly. So they're extrapolating going, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. That's 10% this book. Yeah. What did I agree to? It was, that just reminded me, I'm rewatching, um, last man on earth, Will Forte's show and it's So funny. And I was just seeing what the other night.

He's like retelling the rest of the group something. And he says he was counting down. And he goes, he goes like, 10, 9, 8, 7, yada, yada, yada. Five. Four. And it's so, like he skipped one number. Anyway, that really got me. Yeah.

Well, that you'll feel like that. Yeah. That's my promise. That's my promise. Promise to you. Movies, like, the ones you don't like as much, will feel like a yaddi-a-a-a. Yeah, you've mentioned resurrection. You don't have to talk about it again.

That's fine. Our story begins with writer Dan O'Bannon. Picture, a beard, bow tie, and suspenders. Okay. Mm-hmm. Well, that beamings really came together in my mind, yeah. Thank you so much. The year is 1970.

O'Bannon has just finished working with John Carpenter, ever heard of him, on their student movie, Darkstar. It was a 2001 Space Odyssey Spoof. The film featured an alien created by spraypour. painting a beach ball and adding rubber claws. So this was a, this was a gag of a movie, but it inspired O'Bannon to make a horror movie where the alien would look more convincing, more convincing than a beach ball.

A beach ball. Okay. Which is not a huge thing. Good luck. He wrote an early concept titled memory, which involved into a first draft entitled Star Beast. That's pretty good. Memory is better than Star Beast. Star Beast.

Yeah. Because Star Wars doesn't exist yet. It doesn't, no. So. Star Wars is available. Yeah, should have gone on Star Wars. Should have gone on Star Wars. Planets are so much more interesting than stars.

How do you? Imagine. Planet Wars? Yeah. Planet Beast. That's not bad. That's better. Imagine if Star Wars was Star Beast.

Star Beast. Oh, my God. Big Star Beast fan. Which one? Episode one? And I want you to track this every step of the way. Would it have become a thing? if, you know, would, like, I don't think, same thing, because maybe talking about Star Wars,

Luke Skywalker was originally named Star Killer, and it's like, is that an iconic name? Or would it be just as iconic if he was? It's a great question. Because, like, with Alien and, like, the tagline, you're still saying, like, one of the most famous of all time without those alien. So simple. So, you go, ooh. But do I do that because I've seen the movie and I've grown up?

It's been, existed my whole life. Who knows? If it was called Star Beast and Marcel was like, one of the other drafts was just called Alien, we'd be like, that sucks. You're dumb. Exactly. So it's just whatever we've gotten used to. I suppose. So he had the first 30 pages worked out.

So let's hear what happens in those first 30 pages. I can read 30 pages. I've handed you the scripts too, so you can do the characters. Oh, I want to be Starbeast. Kill me. Right. He has the first line of the movie. It opens with Starmeets, going, I am Starvation.

Everyone's getting scared of me. The commercial space tug, Nostromo, is returning to Earth with a seven-member crew in Stasis. A space tug. A space tug. Yep, I have no other questions. I've got a space, no one can hear you come. No one can hear you tug. With the seven-member crew in Stasis, Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, warrant officer Ripley, Navigator,

Lambert science officer Ash and engineers Parker and Brett along with the cat Jones the ship's computer mother detects a transmission from a nearby planetoid mother and awakens the crew following company policy

to investigate transmissions indicating intelligent life they land on the surface but the ship is damaged Dallas Kane and Lambert discover the transmission comes from a derelict alien vessel inside is a large fossilized alien corpse with a hole in its torso.

Later, mother partially decifers the transmission, which Ripley determines is a warning beacon, and not an SOS as originally thought. They're like, oh, crap. Oh, yikes. Uh-oh, they're doing the little, uh, little pull over the, the collar. Yeah.

Eeks. Would you even tell your, you, your crew members in that moment? Yeah, that SOS? Yeah, it was an SOS. You know, I wouldn't tell anybody. I'd be embarrassed. Oh, you mean? I'd be embarrassed.

It was a warning. And now we're stranded here and it's probably dangerous. We cut back to O'Bannon at his typewriters. I assume it was a typewriter. It's old days. Yeah. He had no vision for what the alien would look like. He paused writing Starbeast when he was recruited to help with the effects on Alejandro Jodorovsky's Dune, an infamous version that would never be completed.

Which we've talked about on the June episode. There you go. It's subject to its own documentary. I love the shared universe of do you go on. Everything's connected. Yeah. On June, he met Hans Rudy Geiger, or we'll call him H.R. Geiger for short. He was a Swiss artist with an eerie sort of vampiric vibe.

Geiger offered Dan opium from an aluminum, aluminum package. Geiger told O'Bannon that he took opium because he was afraid of his visions. Wow. And Dan responded, it's only your mind. and Daga said That's what I'm afraid of Oh wow So you get a vibe of

Yeah That guy's all about I'm spooky as hell I've never smoked opium From an aluminum or aluminium part But does it not give you more visions Yeah that's what I was thinking

It's a cyclical thing Yeah I got to take I just keep seeing these visions Yeah You're scared of my visions But the opium ones are nice Maybe they have

Oh no other beautiful visions Yeah Let's try it This podcast is wrong to your bone One of his other beautiful quotes in this behind the scenes documentary is The Light Harts me, I like to be in the shadow The light hurts, yeah, he's a vampire He's a vampire

Wow And is this a pretty accurate impression you're giving? I think I'm nailing it, yeah, yeah, Swiss man I mean, you've seen Marcel's work He's an incredible performer Thank you so much I've been working on these in front of the mirror for a long time I wouldn't doubt him at all

the incredible performance. It's no Matt Stewart doing a German accent, okay? Oh, yeah. But I'm not questioning the performance, but maybe are you just interpreting that from the page or have you heard this man speak, is what I'm asking? I have heard him speak. He has been recorded.

Oh, okay. That's interesting because I didn't think you could take photos of vampires. But maybe you can record their voices. Yeah, their voices do show on top, but they sound weird and they're always embarrassed about what it sounds like. Is that me? They're like, that's not me. They're like, actually, vampires' voices sound different on record.

I hate listening to my own voice, as if you're the only person in the world who doesn't like the sound of their own voice. I hate listening to my own voice. I sound crazy on this recording. Man! That's very good. That's very good. Geiger showed O'Bannon his book of paintings and sketches. Dan was disturbed by what he saw.

I imagine just opening a trench coat. Be like, huh? Look at that. When Dave opens his camera roll on his phone, I'm like, oh, my God. Okay, Jesus. We get it. You have a beautiful baby. Yeah, that's right.

It goes. There's thousands of others. His, he said, his paintings had a profound effect on me. I'd never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Geiger monster. So from early on, he was inspired by, okay, H.R. Geiger does some really, he does, there's a biomechanical style of art where like, you know,

you see these sort of organic creatures mixed with more of a mechanical sort of thing, and it's all gross and weird and spooky and a little sexual as well. Uh-huh. They've all got stiffies. Yeah, which probably the thing that scares you the most about alien. It's like, oh, sex stuff? No, thank you. Not for me.

June fell apart, and Dan found himself broke homeless and needing to sell a script. He returned to the draft and renamed it Alien, determining that Star Beast sounded two. much like a B movie. He was inspired by the fact that it was both a noun and a verb. Now, it's so funny because my life has been alien for these last couple of weeks, sort of developing this. And it's so funny to have some stories go, he loved alien as a name because it was a noun

and a verb. Then another one was like, he loved alien because it was a noun and an adjective. And I'm like, well, who's got the real story? I got to ask chat, GBT. What is it? But it's noun and a verb. It's noun and a verb. Every good movie is a noun and a bit.

How does one alien? You know, to alienate. Alienate, maybe. Oh, alienate, okay. Yeah. I was like, yeah. It's sort of your whole vibe, you know, is like making people feel othered and strange around you. Fuck you.

And you look like an alien. Thank you. And you look like one too. Big head little body. Such a tiny body. Where's the rest of it? Ronald Chousset was on board to help with the story offering up the idea of the iconic face huggers

He said, we needed a way to get the alien on the ship What if the alien screws somebody? It's a good, good little suggestion. What if it's small and it sneaks on? I think there's so many other ways. Well, obviously the only way it could get on is if it fuck someone. And then someone puts down and says, What if it fucks their face?

He's done it. It's like, oh, we could keep brains. storming if you are. You know, these ships are like the size of, you know, small cities. An alien could sneak on there. Yeah, very easily. They can just like somebody's left a door open and just wanders on. Yeah.

It can turn invisible. Maybe it can do an Alex Mac and go a bit liquidy and go through door cracks and stuff. That's fun. We love Alex Mac. And when it's solid, it's wearing a backwards cap. Or it just does these fun little cartoonish sneaking. Yeah. Why does it have to fuck someone's face?

Or it can be like microscopic. Yeah, that's true. And then it grows. That's terrifying. Turns to vapour like that vampire we mentioned before. Yes. You know, there's other options, as well as saying. The best options, of course, a sexual alien.

Yes, I'm sounding like a real prude. I'm a bit prude of you. So he said it screws them and then it bursts out of their stomach. The idea was exciting enough to inspire them to stay up all night writing the outline. We're going to go back to the story. How's it burst out of their stomach? We're going to find out. Okay.

Kane enters a chamber containing hundreds of large eggs when he touches. is one. A squid-like creature springs out, penetrates his helmet and attaches to his face. This is the face hugger. It's this tentacled creature that has this sort of mouth that looks sort of vulva-esque with a protruding probiscis. It wraps around your neck and inseminates your mouth. It's pretty intense stuff. Yeah. I'm just going to say right now, I won't be watching this. I'm enjoying this. I'm having a great time. Love hanging out with you. I won't be watching. Was it the word vulva or protruding probiscous? That's a two for one.

It was a probiscus. I'm not afraid of a vulva. Okay, just saying. Fucking... And you shouldn't be... Hey, I've got some more. I love them. You should get...

Can't get enough. Everyone, as you listen to the podcast, you should be familiar with your genitals. You know, don't be afraid of your genitals. What's wrong with them? Get a hand mirror out. Have a look. Nothing to boo about it.

Feel for bumps as well. Do a little health check. No, I think it's more just like, something being stuck on my face. Mm-hmm. I don't like that. And it's sort of like it shoves its thing or sort of down their throat,

down the oesophagus sort of thing, doesn't it? Yeah. Yes, it's pretty intense. Sort of an intubation type. How does that feel as somebody with quite a delicate esophagus? I mean, it's absolutely horrifying. Yes.

You've got a delicate oesophagus? Isn't that canon on the pod? Ah, yeah, I think I've talked about it before. Yeah. Sophagus with a few. Delicate esophagus is, isn't that a Lynn Manuel Miranda, Miranda song? Delicate esophagus.

It's a brain injury I have that I have to say that every time it fits the rhyme scheme. She just sort of count the syllables of every phrase. Yeah. Alexander Hamilton, Ellicator Sophages. Yes, I've got one. Yes. And over time, it's just there. It's ready to go as soon as I hear it.

I guess I talk about the Delicate Osoficus in my debut stand-up special that you can watch right now on YouTube. We're in a plug right now. That's cool. Yeah, that's right. Well, let's do a little bonus episode of the comedy writers group right here. So how was it working on the special? Are you happy with how it turned out? Very happy.

So I shot up with the good people at Humdinger. So the new name was stupid old studios. And we had a, yeah, they made it so, so easy. It was a really, really fun night. But it was been sick and had to delay the recording. Yeah. Yeah. We did it in December before Christmas.

So we had to wait till post Christmas. And it's been a six-month sort of process since then. Well, thanks for coming on the pod. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Comedy Riders Group bonus podcast. If you want to subscribe at Comedy Riders Group and sign up to the Patreon, you know, may as well. And if I can get my plug into YouTube.com, look up the Humdinger channel. Dave Warnockie, even hotter in real life and maybe about 25 minutes in, I'm talking about myself.

I want to lean into my plug a little bit more because I undersold it. And I'm trying to work on, like, plugging myself better. Okay. And also, I know this episode is going to be long. So some of people might not stick around for plugs. Sure. That was good. It's good. It's good to just kind of...

Well, the comedy writers group is both a podcast, but it's also a community of comedian. So if you're interested in, like, writing comedy, sketch, stand up, whatever, come along. Because we have online sessions every week as well as weekly podcasts and a bonus episode. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. You do writers retreats? I do writers retreats. I'm about to go on one.

It's very exciting. It's very... wholesome, dare I say, getting grownups together to just create stuff and make things and love making stuff. That sounds so nice. It's so deeply against the sort of tall poppiness that is Australia. I'm like, you can't want to try things. I saw an article on ABC recently that was about the new generation of people are so afraid

of cringe that they don't want to try stuff. That's a try. Yeah. Which is terrifying. I know. I totally get it. I totally get it. Oh, yeah.

That's a big part of why I do and don't do things. So my love is, what if I'm bad at it? Oh, 100%. And what if it, yeah, what if other people think that's embarrassing? And that's on them. What would Jess say? Oh, yeah, and I judge. Yeah, she doesn't hold back.

No. So let's go back to the face hugger. So Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious cane back to the Nostromo. Ripley refuses to allow them on board, citing quarantine regulations. But Ash overrides her. I want to pause the movie here to talk about Ash. He's an android played by Ian Holme. Holm, who you know as Bilbo Baggins himself.

Thank you, yes. Ash's presence was a result of several rewrites in the script by the producers, David Giler and Walter Hill, who bought the script. And O'Bannon, he was not pleased with the new drafts. He was quoted as saying, they wanted to rewrite it, and I thought they were rewriting it very badly. Oh, no. In the documentary I watched, it's called The Beast Within.

And he strikes me as a very precious man. Like, he's still, like, years later talking about the movie, getting quite worked up about them rewriting it and changing dialogue and changing characters. But he did sort of decide, oh, you know what? That adding in Ash the Android was a great addition. Oh, nice. Because across the sequel, the Androids have become a key part of the universe, representing shady corporate desires and putting profit above human lives,

i.e. capitalism, i.e. the real monster. Whoa. Hang on a second. Movies aren't supposed to make you think. I mean, this is like every zombie movie is like the real monster is the survivors. You've always got to do that. Every horror movie is like, you thought it was the person in the mask. The real horror movie is drug driving or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you deserve to be murdered brutally. Ever thought about that? Ever thought about that? Yeah, fuck. Do I? So despite the fact that the final shooting script was written by Hill and Geyla, the Riders Guild of America awarded O'Bannon sole credit for the screenplay.

They sold it to 20th century Fox. Star Wars made science fiction a hit at the box office, and Fox wanted their taste of the action. And at the time, the only spaceship movie they had on their desk was alien. Which I love that. This is a quote from Dan O'Bannon, just like the idea of them being like, oh, we want a spaceship movie and having to like search manually around the desk. What do we got? What do we got?

Period drama. No. And they had to see the word spaceship and go, this one. Don't even read it. It's called alien. That's got to be in space. All right, let's go. Greenlight. Damn it, it's a period. Feece.

So, let's introduce the director. Enter Ridley Scott, or should I say, Sir Ridley Scott. Oh, I've heard of Ridley Scott. And not to be confused with the title, the main character named Ripley. It's, you know, there's Ridley, the director and there's Ripley the character. Then I have not heard of Ridley Scott. I apologize. I have not heard of.

I've got to go out and let me and say this is the only Ridley I'm aware of. Is that short for it? anything? Oh, great point. Yeah, you don't meet many Ridley's these days. I like it. Ridley. Yeah, I like it too.

Yeah, I think we should come back. I don't think you could use it. Ridley Warnockis, no good. I got it. Ripley Warnocky, because I quite like Ripley. Yeah, they're good too. Yeah, I think that's good. It's a nerdy sort of name, like naming a kid like a Game of Thrones character,

like a lot of DeNiris or something going around. What's Fiskegig from again? Well, FizzGig was named by my wife. It's my dog's name. And it's from the dark crystal. Yeah. And I'm not saying that, but if you name a child, but you're saying, I'm naming you after a fandom rather than, you know, people should only be named after their nans and granddance. I fully agree. And that's why I, Dorothy Perkins, I'm here. I could be Dorothy or Lorna. Yeah, that's good.

Lorna was short for Loretto. Neither are good. Loretto. Loretto. Oh, interesting. Unfortunately, my grandfather was named after a Game of Thrones character. Tyrion, so it's the burden I was carrying. So Ridley Scott was born in 1937. The man is 87 years old. And he's still gladiating or along?

He's what? Gladiatoring. Is that a vermin? He's gladiatoring. He was born in South Shields in England, and he directed his first movie when he was 40 years old. So there's still hope for us here, you guys. Really? God, that's inspiring.

I know. I love hearing shit like that. love that when they're like, Merrill Street wasn't in a feature film until she was 30 or something. You're like, that's fantastic. I think like, isn't Morgan Freeman, another one of those examples too? Like, he didn't start acting until he was late. Samuel L Jackson as well. There's a bunch of them who are like, yeah, they came to it pretty late.

But like all of those stories, like, they were still grinding it out. Yeah. Like, there was very few of them were just like working in an office being like, I could still win an Oscar one day. And someone was like, do you want a director movie? Yeah, yeah. People were like, he was working as a carpenter. It's like, yeah, to pay his bills while he heavily pursued acting.

Or they're like, I didn't direct a movie until his 40s. He spent the previous 20 years directing video clips. Yeah, commercials. TV. He was ready when the opportunity came along. Assistant directing on a lot of films. Harrison Ford's a good one because, like, yeah, he was a carpenter. But I think he was a carpenter on movie sets and stuff.

So you've got to be adjacent to the thing. You're also going to say it out loud to people. That's another sort of key thing. It's like when people come to me and they want advice or guidance on their goals and like, have you said this to anyone? You're like, no, I just want them to figure it. that I want that opportunity. You got to tell people.

You got to say. It really helps. Yeah. It really helps. I'd love to be on that podcast. You could ask to be on that podcast. Oh, I don't know. No, no, no.

I don't think that's how it works. I think they have to just sort of vibe it that I would be interested. What I do is that I, you know, in the first year of the podcast, you want to sort of say something like, you guys really on the right track with that podcast. Have you thought about, you know, less interludes and interrupting? Yeah. You know, it's just neg them a little bit and then slowly come around to going, hey guys, actually, Yeah, the podcast is really good.

You're doing a good job, but that can maybe be on. And it's a bold move, but it works. Yeah. So that's the advice. It's a long game. It's a long game as well. There's a podcast you like, neg them. Tell them what they're doing.

Give them unsolicited feedback. They'll ask you on real quick. Make them almost quit. Make them reconsider everything. So in this behind the scenes documentary, Ridley is rocking a beard as old dude directors must. Yes. And he's got a cigar in one hand.

Rock, full cliche, full stereotype. Ridley was an obsessive guy drawing every frame, choosing every lens and lighting state, always behind the camera. He made some creative choice with the limited budget. He wanted to make sure the alien spaceship

had a strong sense of scale. So he dressed up his own children as astronauts and shut it from a wide angle, which is delightful. They were crawling. He wanted to be the first time. No, no, there's no gravity. Bounce, jump.

God damn it. He wanted it to be the first time, like, they were showing like real space, you know, in quotation marks on screen, greasy, grimy, and with real people in it. You know, this is the truckers in space sort of idea rather than the space opera that you see in Star Wars and the like. It was O'Bannon that fought for H.R. Giga to design the xenomorph,

which is the name of the alien when it's fully grown, and collaborate on ships and sets. Fox rejected the idea believing his work to be too grotesque and strange. i.e. yucky. We don't want to see that. Oh, yuck. We're already thinking of Jess Perkins in the future that might not want to look at that. Oh, I don't like that. When Ridley was shown Giga's art book, the necronomicon, he immediately agreed that this should be the look of the film. So even though O'Bannon felt kept out of the creative process, you know, the rewrites and all,

he was directly responsible for advocating for arguably the most iconic part of the movie. Right. So he'd be happy with how it visually the alien looked at least. Yeah, because like that was what was in his head the entire time. And I don't think you can describe it so beautifully in a screenplay. You know, just look at this book. Just look at this. Look how wet they are. They're so wet.

Oh. But you've got to advocate for those iconic things. You know, it's like adding Jess Perkins to this very podcast, you know. Matt was against it. Yeah. Yeah. I said, look at these drawings. Look how wet she is.

She's dripping. Yeah. I'd just gone out of the shower. Yeah. And he was quite disappointed when I dried off. Oh. That's your voice. Okay.

We've already got dry. Yeah. We need wet. Every team, you know, you're going to think about how to put the team together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got Matt for the dry, just for the wet, and Dave's just right. He's moist. Damp.

He's a damp boy. He's a damp boy. Veronica Cartwright, who plays Lent, Lambert in the movie described H.R. Giga as erotic. She says, it's big vaginas and penises. The whole thing is like you're going inside sort of womb or whatever. It's sort of visceral. And the whole vibe of every alien movie is sweaty and damp. The secret to that look, Cartwright explains, K.Y. Jelly was quite the fashion at the time. It was put on everything that moved in front of the camera. Right. There you go. Because all of the alien movies are

wet, as you say, and they are making a real effort to go, yep, wet it up. Wet it up. Get some lube in there. Aren't they just their little slippery? Yeah. Yeah, that'd be a lot of health and safety on that set. Yeah. Aren't they really slippery?

He's amazing. How does he do it? You do the next one. Strange rumours circulated the set like about HR Geiger. Like, he had the skeleton of his fiancé who had commensate. committed suicide in his house. Pretty creepy stuff. But it turned out that I think people were just talking shit behind his back because he was

this sort of vampiric weirdo. Right. So, so stories started going, yeah, I think he's got a skeleton of his dead fiancé. But HR debunked this rumor in 2009. I don't think you can just have a person's skeleton in your house. Yeah. I don't think you can do that. But then where does the phrase, skeleton's new closet come from?

Shit. It must have come from a long, you know, process of people keeping. skeletons in there. If I give you permission. No, Dave. Can you just, I mean, I'm not saying you have to, but you probably could, couldn't you? Like, you can have anatomy on display. Well, I prefer if you zip up your pants, but you keep saying that.

Are you wanting your skeleton on display in a corner somewhere, or do you want us to stuff you? Oh, I'd like that. Actually, you're stuffed. You could sit you on a chair. What about the people that, like, donate their skull to a Shakespeare company to be, to be Yorick or whatever his name is? It is Yorick, yeah. I don't want to do that. And I don't want to hold a real skull.

We don't want a chick's skull playing Yorick, okay? People can tell. Oh, that's a chick. Yuck! No women in Shakespeare. That's a chick. That applies to the skulls as well. Disgusting.

I'm supposed to fucking connect with this when that skull's clearly a chick. I'll ask Paul Yorick. I knew her well. I don't fucking think so. You don't rewrite the bar. Speaking of of casting blind to gender is Ripley and a lot of the cast didn't have genders in the text. So Sigourney Weaver was cast as Ripley, which was her first major role. I was getting confused before I was like, this is the Sigourney Weaver one, right?

Which is yet another iconic thing. Like there are so many, like I'm going to use that word a lot because these are the things that sort of line up. I don't think you have aliens without it being called alien. I don't think you have this movie without Sigourney or Ridley. Like all of these things I have to line up to get a movie that is still talked about millions of years later. How do we feel about Sigourney? Fantastic. She's the only Sigourney, I know.

It's not, it's not her real name. Her real name is. The name theme of the actress, but yes. Oh, the name. That's not a real name because just this week, I got my toddler a doll of a house. Alien of Sigourney Weaver. It's like a little, like a baby born size thing. Yeah.

But it talks. I didn't realize what it sounded like until we got at home. And it sounds like an alien. It goes, Oh, Star Beast. So I've promptly thrown away the little talky thing because it was so terrifying. But I said, You think there was a, why didn't you get a refund?

Clearly it was like a damaged or something. Was it supposed to sound like? Yeah. I think it was just really cheap. It wasn't supposed to sound like a face hugger. Yeah. And I said, this sounds like alien. Should we call this doll Ripley?

and then we decided no, we're going to call her Siggy. That's nice. That's nice. So her full name is Susan Alexandra Sigourney, in quotes, Weaver. She took the name of Sigourney from a minor character in the Great Gatsby at age 14. Did you know you can just go, hey, I've read a book and I'm just going to, everyone call me this now. Yeah. Oh, wow.

We know a thing or two about people trying to force nicknames, okay? Yeah. I did try to. I tried in high school as well. After to kill a mockingbird, I tried to get me called Scout. Oh, that's fun. It did not work. But I tried.

I tried Bo Radley. I would have called you ham after the... Ham! When she dresses up as ham in the book, I would think that would have. Oh, you want to be scouted here? How about ham? No. I don't remember Sigourney in the Great Gatsby.

I think she was a... Very minor character. Blink in your miss her. You know, you blink when you read your book and you miss a word. All the time. I never go back. Yeah, I'm like, ma, my brain will fill it in the context. So, known for her height, she was a proddedly.

180 centimetres 5 foot 11 by the age of 11, which had a negative impact on her self-esteem, which she recalled feeling like a giant spider and never having the confidence to ever think she could act. So there's hope for all of us. This actors are tiny. Yeah. Yeah, to be a tall woman is particularly challenging with all these short kings going around sets. I was at a premiere of a musical last night.

And so it's filled with industry people. and I saw an actor who was like a villain on neighbours for a long time much shorter than me teeny tiny Everyone on TV is tiny Yeah, they got to fit in that box It's so, it's crazy You've seen Willie Wonka, Mike TV True, you've got to shrink him down

You got to shrink him down Okay Some of them haven't had the reverse You think, if they're still got a career, you don't get the reverse Oh, that makes more sense, thank you for explaining that Then you get Zat Because I'm like a, I'm an average, high, height woman and I'm too tall for TV.

And they have squeaky voices like my TV as well. You notice that? But once you play that back, it's like, hello. Welcome to the program. It's amazing. Like AJ listening to this, he'll go, oh, I'm going to press the compression button and make Marcel's voice extra deep. Let's get back to the story from Alien where we left off to talk about an iconic moment. There's that word again in film history.

After the crew returns to space. My man in film history. Yes. It's fun. Kane awakens and seems well. During a final crew meal before returning to stasis, he suddenly chokes and convulses. He's placed upon the table.

He rides and moans in agony. A small alien creature suddenly bursts from his chest, killing him and escapes into the ship. So the behind the scenes of this moment has become an urban legend. One of the bits of trivia that... One of the bits of trivia is... that gets blown out of proportion. Like, did, like, people were talking about these iconic moments in film and go,

did you know, like, the actors didn't even know, like, the, the chest burster scene was going to happen? And, like, that's their real reaction. And you go, well, how true could that possibly be? Yeah. You have to rig it up, surely. Yeah. They're not going to be, like, oh, you're just going to, your characters are all just

going to have a nice meal in this scene. And, oh, what? What's happening now? Like, then are you going to get a good performance out of them as well? Yeah. As well. We get them going around and going Ridley, Ridley, is this supposed to happen? Yeah, exactly.

I think you see that a lot. John Heard, are you okay? You see that? I see that on social media a lot of like, this is their real reaction to this. And I'm like, I don't think it is. I think they're an actor. Most of the time I've looked into like those, because people love going, oh, I hear you guys improvised on set.

Oh, you guys love to improvise. And so much of it, you hear the actor then talk about it and they go, oh, yeah, I might have like asked what if I did this in the next scene? And they're like, oh, yeah, let's. Yeah. Like, it's not magical, oh, wow, you thought of a thing in a moment and this is incredible. And so much of the time it's a director calling out lines to an actor go, say this now, try that. Yeah.

But people are obsessed with, oh, did you improvise? Yeah. And there's screenwriters, they're going, well, fuck me, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did write some stuff. But yeah, let's talk more about what the actor made up on the day. Yeah, it's very interesting. Love improv and I love to screenwriter.

I'm fighting for both teams right now. But you're saying have you looked, have you looked into this, whether this is. I have, I have. And there is, there is some truth to it. Ridley Scott wanted the reaction to be as authentic and as visceral as possible. The script, the script apparently just said that the actors had, it just said, this thing emerges, which is very vague. I'd be like, oh, it's going to come out of his butt. Oh, no, he's going to shut out this alien.

It's going to come out his butt. It's going to come out his dick. Oh, no, I don't want to see that. I'd almost be relieved it came out of the stomach. So then when it does, like, my reaction, my character would be like, Oh, thank God. And also old Hollywood. You notice when someone going, oh, it says in the script, this thing emerges.

So it's like, yeah, but zip it up, you know. Okay. That's no excuse. We're at work. Real animal inids, livers and intestines were used for gore to make it look organic and disgusting. They reportedly came from a butcher that day and smelled horrible under the hot lights. We want that. That's what we want.

Most of the cast had never seen the chest burst a puppet before. They had no idea how much blood was about to spray. A compressed air cannon filled a... So fired the creature upward. A high pressure blood pump blasted fake blood and guts directly at the cast. And the cast was truly disturbed by the moment. Yafet Kota, who played Parker, was reportedly so shaken. He went back to his room and locked the door afterwards.

Just go, that's enough. Went to jerk it. I've never been this horny. It really unlocked a kink for him. It's annoying because it's really hard to explode someone's chest. Yeah. I didn't know that's what I was into, but I need to act on this immediately. Imagination will not be sufficient to think back to this one.

And then an executive producer on the set's like, I feel the same thing. I'm going to green light seven sequels. Let's all take five, everybody. Much of it has been made of the film's themes in their thesis, Alien Woman, the making of Lieutenant Ellen Ripley. Jamina Galado and Jason Smith compare the facehugger's attack on Kane to a male rape and the chestburster scene to a form of violent birth, noting that the alien's phallic head and method of killing the crew members add to the sexual imagery.

Dan O'Bannon, the writer, argued that the scene is a metaphor for the male fear of penetration and the oral invasion of Kane by the facehugger function as payback for the many horror films in which sexually vulnerable women are attacked by male monsters. Oh. So about time, you know? About time a male was getting assaulted by an alien. We're all in standing in the cinema yelling, yes.

Yes. Yes, alien queen. It is. But it's still just a parody, you know what I mean? We still need more aliens attacking men to really make up for that gap. Yeah, it's not enough, but it's a step. The first time I watched Alien was on a plane. During the explosion chest scene, I remember.

I remember looking to the person next to me, like, did you see? No, they weren't what, thank God. Because that is full on to look over someone's shoulder and see that. I think you have to really think about what movies you're watching on a plane. Because I know how often I'm looking at the screens of the people around me. Three down, three down. Yeah, watching that, but trying to work out what it is. Sometimes, you know, you see something in a different language.

You're like, how do I find that? That looks good, but how do we find that? Yeah, what's that? They have names as well for those movies. Yeah. But, you know, I've missed the title sequence. It looks like some sort of Korean drama perhaps. Parasite.

I'm not reading good, but it's a TV show that I've never heard of before. But obviously, it would have been weirded by approach and said, hey, I'm sitting three rows back. Hey. Is this good? What's it called? Can you tell the brightness? I can't see it very well back here. I've listed all the movies and TV shows A to Z and I can't identify.

I asked her if why attended what you're watching? She said, she said, she says, it's confidential. I'll watch what she's watching. After ejecting Kane's body into space, the crew uses tracking devices to try and locate and kill the creature. Encountering Jones, Brett follows him to the cat. Brett follows him into a landing leg compartment where the now fully grown alien kills Brett. So like the xenomorph has this ability to go from like this, you know, a little baby bursting out of the chest like in like a very short amount of time grow into the great big hulking alien. Like little baby horses just walking around.

Yeah, exactly. And you're like, you just fell out. And then before you know it, it's got like this inner jaw coming out and eating people around it. Yeah, just like that. Classic horse. Dallas enters one of the air ducts with a flame thrower to force the creature into the airlock, but it kills him. Lambert suggests fleeing in the small shuttle, but it will not support four people. Ripley, now in command, decides they will flush out the alien.

Now, I'm going to, I'm going to save. I'm going to tell you more about this movie and then like, because I want, this is important plot points and stuff like that. So I'm going to, I'm going to spoil it, especially because now that I've determined, Dave's seen it,

Jess is never going to see it. The listener, if you haven't seen it, either pause this episode or I know a lot of kids these days are like, hey, just give me the recap and then I never need to watch these movies. That's me. I love to read the Wikipedia plot summaries of movies I'll never watch.

And I go, okay, I get it. So while accessing. mother, Ripley discovers that the company secretly ordered Ash the Android to return with the alien for study and deem the crew expendable. She confronts Ash who attempts to kill her. Parker intervenes knocking Ash's head loose, revealing him to be an android. And the androids in the alien franchise have like, it's milk for blood. Like it's what it is as a prop. And so just all this white goes everywhere. It was a point of a lot of people freaking out in the cinema, which we'll talk about later.

Did they know Ash was an android? Was that the reveal? I believe if memory serves this was the reveal. Yeah, this is the moment where they're like, oh, hold on. Yeah, they didn't know. I think they don't know. They also don't know that the company, like, fully evil. Right.

They just thought they were going to murder a man. And they're like, oh, hold on, it was a. That's fine then. I feel, I felt nothing, but now I'm like, well, probably. Yeah, I feel like, I'll double nothing. But that's a recurring plot point in the, in the movies, is just that the company that they were. What is the company called again? Wayland.

That's, yeah. They're like a... Wayland Dutani. Pretty evil and are pretty keen to get their hands on an alien to study it. I see. And the people are very expendable. Because they can get... I'm going to...

We can turn this into weapons and we can turn... And like with all the Jurassic Park, when you were saying, I think it's like, what if we can make medicines and weapons out of these things? Corporate greed. Yeah. The real enemy. Burn it all down.

Kill all the billionaires. I'm seeking in my political messages into this podcast. Whoa. Oh, you guys are probably billionaire. I love billionaires. Because one of them could outbid every of the other listeners. So starting with the money. To just do, that would be really strange to have, we have one listener, but he's a billionaire

and he pays for everything. And we're not sure he listens. It doesn't come out to anyone. But it's like, it's pocket change for him, but we all own mansions now. It's really not. We just call him our mysterious benefactor. And no one can listen to it for free. It's like that Wu-Tang album that just.

just went out to one person. Would you do think you'd still do it? Would we? Do you think you'd still put out the podcast to one billionaire? I wouldn't for a while and just see if he said anything. Oh no, he would have an assistant monitoring it to make sure it still gets uploaded. Yeah, I guess so. But what I'd ask his assistant and like, was it fun this week?

Did they have a guest on? You know, that sort of thing. I wouldn't be doing any research. I'd be reading Wikipedia pages and that's it. Verbatim. Yeah. Reading Wikipedia. Not almost.

Reading Wikipedia page. Oh, you're just page, yeah. I guess. Read your Wikipedia page. It's funny because the one that pops into my, like the rhythm that pops into my head isn't a cool one like Hamilton. Oh, yeah, cool. Master of the house. Keeper of the head a lot.

That's what pops into my head a lot. Yes, from Fiddler on the Roof. Another iconic musical. Actually, I was tossing up today between Am I going to do Fiddler on the roof or the alien franchise. Wow. Can I just say I'm so disappointed in shows I have him. It's about time. We talked about Fiddler.

Has it been an alien musical? There has been an alien theater show. Wow. I don't think it was a musical, but it was like iconic and there's a documentary about that as well. There was way too much stuff to like consume. Like if I, this podcast would be eight hours long and it might still be. Yeah, we might get there. You know, look at the runtime, dear listener and go, I think he's going to talk about the alien theater show.

Because like you said, we haven't finished the first movie. And it's been an hour. Oh, gosh. But don't worry, guys, there'll be some yada yada. Yeah. Also, as I listened back to the Indiana Jones episode, and I remember Matt kept reprimanding me for mentioning the time. He's like, the listeners, hate it when you mention, there's a time limit.

So, hey, let's just chill out. Yeah. Well, that's not chill too hard, though. I'm going to slow down. No. I can keep going to this pace. It's a great pace. Beautiful pace.

So Ash is incinerated. The crew decides to self-destruct the Stromo and escape in the shuttle. The alien kills Parker and Lambert as they gather supplies. Now alone, the final girl. Ripley initiates the ship's self-destruct sequence. But the alien blocks her path to the shuttle. She retreats and unsuccessfully attempts to abort the self-destruct. She reaches the shuttle with Jones, the cat.

You got to save the cat. Got to save the cat. Narrowing as the Nostromo explodes. Wow. As Ripley prepares for stasis, she's like, oh, it's all good, I've done it. You know, the Nostromo's exploded. I got the cat. We're okay.

We're in the escape shuttle. She discovers the alien has stowed itself in a narrow compartment. Just tucked into a little corner there. She dons a space suit, loads a grappling hook gun, and uses steam vents to drive the alien out of its hiding place. Just as is it about to attack her, Ripley opens the shuttle door blasting the creature out. But it manages to hang on to the doorframe. Oh my gosh. She shoots the alien with the grappling.

gun knocking it into space, but the grappling gun is caught in the door when it closes, pulling the alien back into the shuttle. It's like one of those things we're like, it's never going to end. Oh my God. I like this podcast. The alien attempts to reenter the ship through the engine housing, prompting Ripley to activate the engines, blasting the alien into deep space. After recording her final log entry, she places Jones and herself into stasis for their return

to Earth. Roll credits. Oh, my God. Everyone else is dead. Everyone's dead. Wow. But the cat's alive. Thank God.

Yeah, people would be very upset if the cat died. It is a good move to have a pet. Like the new Superman movie has crypto in it. And there's a bunch of other people like getting their pets into cars when Metropolis is falling apart. And it is such a smart move to go, oh, give the character a little turtle to be carrying out of a house. Because people are, I think, more going, oh, yeah, say the turtle from the from the baddies. We care about the turtle. We don't human life.

Yeah. He cares. Who cares? Oh, a bunch of chaos school bus. Oh, wait, one dog! I do want to just like highlight how, you know, the other iconic element of Sigourney is, you know, she's at the time, a rare example of the woman taking charge, being the hero. Not just like, I survive to the end, but like she is, she kills the alien. Yeah.

She's not just the final girl survive, like a lot of horror movies. So, like, she's Lieutenant Ripley. she's taken charge. She's a proper badass. Am I imagining, like, she's in like a white tank, like a singlet top? Am I imagining that? That's perfectly timed because it's even though like she's badass and she's a hero, they still manage to get her into a singlet top and underparence in the movie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you look at the, pretty much all of the Marvel, but they've gotten a little bit better in the more recent movies of not sexualizing the women as much. But you look at like Black Widow who's this incredible spy and, and fighter and everything, but she's in a tiny little suit and mega hot. And you go, yeah, okay. And also, like, we have to have a scene where she was getting changed in the back of a car.

And Happy Hogan is like, oh, I'm just glancing. I'm only human. Exactly. You know, okay. Okay. Okay. Come on. So I do want to make sure, like, for the newcomers that we have the alien biology clear.

Okay. So you got the egg, the egg has the face hugger that jumps out of it. That then puts implanted embryo into the hose. that explodes out of the body and then that turns into the xenomorph which is this black, ugly, shiny thing that has sort of a phallic sort of head

and a jaw that shoot, in a jaw that shoots out and can, essentially it comes out with such a driving force that in some of the movies it will put holes in people's heads and stuff like that. And they also have the wippy tail. Whippy tail, acid blood. Acid blood. That's another bad thing because if you shoot this thing, sometimes blood will come out and start burning holes in the ground or burning holes in people.

Oh, my God. And that's so embarrassing too because like, oh, I've shot it. Like, oh, I killed it. And then you're like, blood comes out, you know, oh, damn it. Oh, crap. I did that. You know, that's embarrassing too. You're like, oh.

That's a whoopsie. And in space you don't want acid melting the floor or the walls. Why is that? It's just hard to clean up. Yeah, true. You're a long way from the shops. Probably don't have a tap to fill up the mop bucket. Yeah.

And like, you know, sometimes you might spill something when you're eating on the couch. you go, I'll just throw a, I'll just throw a tea towel over that. Yeah, of course. Of course, you just throw a teetail on it. You think I've got like a patchwork couch? I don't. I saw it some curry the other day and I sprayed just like the same spray you spray on like a dog wing. You just have that in the cupboard.

And Eleanor was like, oh, that's, oh, did the, did Physica have an accident? I'm like, no, it should be the same stuff. You're like, I had an accident with curry. With curry. Yeah. I woke up the other day and could smell. that specific dog cleaning products. I was like, oh, the dog has shat somewhere in the house.

And I was correct. So, you know. Oh, and that was like a fun little game. Yeah, I've trained myself. Is it in here? Yeah. Was it in here? Because it's already been cleaned up.

So then I'm like, ooh, the doormats moved. So you've trained the dog to, well, goose knows how to do it now. Well, he's nearly five. That's true. It's about time. I'm nervous that Fiskeg hasn't learned how to read yet. How old is Fiskeg? Three.

He's a bit behind development. journeys. There's no judgment. But you also want to get onto these things early. Yeah. I want him to be able to get a job, you know, join the workforce. That's right. Contribute to the home. Exactly. What's it going to live at home forever? I hope not.

Yeah. Come on, mate. Come on to get your own place. I'm over him. So I want to give you. You're wearing a t-shirt with your dog's face all over it. I'm over him. I want to give you full props for not just saying when Eleanor said, did Fiskekekeke have an accent? You could have either just said, yeah.

And it was really, it was nasty. It was like a yellow curry. It's awful. I don't know. You must have been eating something else. Like curry. So I want to talk a little bit about the inspiration behind the movie too because we go, oh, wow, it's so impressive, like how many great ideas the writers had.

And as a writer myself, I get intimidated seeing movies like this and, oh, I could never, how do they do it? How do they do it? And it was encouraging to learn that O'Bannon drew inspiration from many works of science fiction and horror. He later said, I didn't steal alien from anybody. I stole it from everywhere. everybody.

That's good stuff, man. So I'm going to run through these, like, because there's a bunch of them. Um, he stole from The Thing from Another World, which is a 1951 movie, inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a delety alien creature through a claustrophobic environment.

Hang on. Forbidden planet, 1956 gave a ban on the idea of a ship being warned not to land and the crew being killed one by one by a mysterious creature when they defy the warning. Planet of the Vampires, one of my favorite titles, 1965. contained a scene in which the heroes discover a giant alien skeleton. This influenced the Nostromo's crew's discovery of the alien creature in the derelict spacecraft.

Despite these similarities, O'Bannon and Ridley Scott both claimed in a 1979 interview that they had never seen Planet of the Vampies. What a weird coincidence. So I saw from everything except that. Except that. I don't like that. O'Bannon had noted that the influence of Junkyard, 1953, a short story by Clifford D. Simak, in which a crew lands on an asteroid and discovers a chamber of eggs.

So, like, everything. And he's also cited influences strange relations by Philip Jose Farmer, which covers alien reproduction and various EC comics, horror titles, carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people. It's all stolen. Yeah, but who's, like, when was the last original idea, you know? The Bible. A lot of original ideas coming together.

Yeah. No influence from other religions. No. Don't look that up. I mean, you've got to wait until Christmas time to have, like, your snarky cousin be like, you know, actually, this was actually stolen from other religion? Yeah, we get it. Okay, which is an excuse to get together.

Sorry, sorry, Stephen. I think mum needs help with the desserts. Excuse me. No, I've got to explain to you. Yeah, no, I cannot wait to hear it. Mom's yelling for me. You know how she gets at Christmas? I had to just go through my brain for a bit to find a name that I didn't have a cousin.

I have something like 40 cousins. Stephen, you nailed it. I don't have a Stephen. You don't have a Stephen. I don't have a Stephen. I've got two Phillips, two Thomases. On the same side, crazy. Do you have a Sigourney?

I do have a Sigourney, yes. You go to do a little guess who board right now. Does your cousin have glasses? Definitely got a cousin with glasses, yeah. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Probably multiple. You know, they're all getting old. Yeah.

Me? 2020 Vision. Mm-hmm. Optometrists said my eyesight's gotten better. 2020 Vision 20 years old. That's me. 20 out of 10. Yep.

in hotness. Yep. A lot of 20s. 20s across the board. So let's talk about the reaction to the movie. An early screening did not go well. Really? And this was due to a poor sound mix.

And you watch these movies and go, oh, like everything's music. Everything's atmosphere and sound effects. Oh, certainly like everyone, it starts with the computer waking up, but it's like, so awesome. Oh, yeah, let's go through them all. There's a toilet flushing.

I don't forget this one. Ah, ah. But there are scenes where you are just waiting for something to happen. And without the right sound mix, then you are just sort of going, yeah, what's this? Yeah, because they just have like establishing shot outside the ship, like in between scenes. Even just having like the clink of chains in the right moment, he's like, oh, what's who?

Well, made that clinky sound. You know, those sorts of things are huge. So once this was rectified, the next screening was a massive success. The Fox executive's wife was so traumatized after watching an. early preview that she didn't leave the house for a day and a half. The half is a good detail. You're like, well, okay, I'm done. He was like, by the afternoon, she was really hungry for sandwich.

She's like, I guess I got to get out there before it gets dark again. We don't have DoorDash yet. What was the, what was the, what was the, I watched a scary movie once at the cinemas too, huge mistake. I had to sleep with the light on for several days. Several days. And it was one of those ones that, fuck. It was all like CCTV footage.

type thing. Like paranormal activity? That was it, yes. Yeah. And I had to, I just put the light on. Because at one stage three, like... So the camera can see you and watch for any paranormal activity. That's right.

Because some sort of demon can't appear in the light. There was a scene... Am I thinking of paranormal activity? Were they like, they put down powder and there's like hoof prints in it or something? Oh, yeah. Not hoof prints. Like, you know, like a devil type thing. Interesting.

And so then I, every time I close my eyes, I'd just see like powder with prints in it. I'd be like, ah, there's footprice or something in my room. There's a very small horse in here. A pony? It was a scary thing that's on the plant. So these, all of these things. I'll kill you. All of these things of reactions in the cinema sound ridiculous.

There's that old story of that, that really ancient film called like a train arrives at the station, ever heard of it. One of the first horror movies. Yeah. And the idea was that the train just arrived at the station and the people watching this movie were so terrified that a train was coming at. they ran out of the cinema, which is a myth that that happened. Pretty funny, though. There might have been a few people going, oh, but it wasn't like, we gotta get out of here. That's apparently a myth.

Like the first time you see 3D and you're like, it's coming at me. Yeah. I'm tired of, oh, my God, it's a bee. I'm trying to be. Oh, that fish is almost on my face. Oh, that is a bee. Excuse me, I show there's a bee. There's a bee.

Sorry, I'm allergic, so. There's a bee in row bee. There's a bee in row bee. That doesn't work. I will admit, and this is just for the listener who's been hearing other Alexander Hamilton's, I've heard them too and decided not to do all of them. Because I also have to go, has myself just deliberately written in Alexander Hamilton's into this? Is myself having a breakdown?

Not to do all of them. Yeah, it's not impressive if it's like, we think you just set these up ahead of time. And then now we're going, look at me go, guys. But if you've heard a master of the house, you're wrong. Because I haven't heard him I've never seen Fiddler on the roof I don't know why

I haven't either I know it because it's in George Costanz's head in a sign foot episode Like it's his It's his earworm Master room So these all sound ridiculous

But apparently these are true At another preview In Usher fainted People were reportedly Running and screaming Out of the theatre Wow Management were complaining

About people vomiting In the theatre Oh wow Veronica Cartwright lined up for a regular screening and remarked how people were leaving and going out and baffing in the lobby. Wow. Yeah.

One theatre who hated the movie was doing what was doing to their bathrooms cut the chestbursts scene from their reel. So they were like, you know what? We're going to just trim that scene out because too many people are messing up the toilets throwing up. Wow. Which is also so rude to the filmmakers to go, oh, we'll fix this. Yeah, I'll just make an edit.

And then those people were like, but how did the alien get out? Yeah. What happened to that guy? Why everyone's so upset? Yeah, we never saw him again. He came back. They had a lovely dinner together and then he disappeared and then the alien was big. Mers would just keep trim it, just trim the whole thing.

It just cuts to Pucci just flying after another planet. So that's how it happened. Sigourney herself watched the movie through her cable knit sweater. So, like, she's hiding behind her own jumper. So effective was the combination of the edit, music and sound effects. And she's about in the documentary goes, and I was Ripley who doesn't get scared. Like I'm watching, she's watching Ripley on the screen and go, oh, this is scary. How's you going to get out of this one?

It's like, you were there. So Gorney, you're an actor, okay? Ripley doesn't get scared. You do. Oh, I'm frightened. So Dan O'Bannon, who was initially resistant to watch the movie. He felt as if he had been kept out of the development process in the documentary. He spoke about driving angrily around the city questioning whether he was.

he would attend an early screening. And then he saw, you know, the line busting the block around, you know, which is where we got the term blockbuster. You know, hey, this line's busted the block. Wow. I did not know that. He pulled over and he bought a ticket and he reportedly he wept in his seat because his vision had become a reality, realizing that even though like it had been

sort of taken away and other people had thrown their own bits and pieces into it, that he had contributed to something truly special. That's great. So there's like a room full of people, there's vomiting him around him. And he's just like, I'm so happy. And it would be too, because like James Cameron talks about this, about the next one is, you know, same.

He says, he compares it to comedy of like, if you're doing a comedy show and people aren't laughing, then you have failed. And if you've made like a horror thriller movie and people aren't going, oh, God, if people aren't yelling out, if people aren't tense in their seats, then you have failed. So it is.

They would have been, like, they would have been, the executives would have been sniffing that vomit, being like, mm, that smells like money to mean. And that's got to be the best advertising. Like, the best word of mouth is I went to this horror movie and I was so scared that I had to run out and vomit. Yeah. People go, oh, I want to see that.

Yeah. Yeah. I go, fantastic. Thank you for letting me know. I will never watch that. It's the same as people go, oh, you're going to cry in this movie as well. Oh, don't tell me that.

Yeah. Now I'm going to be thinking about that the entire time. Now I'm out of space. But I'm not going to cry when maybe I would have. You're sitting there going, is this the bit that they cried? Yeah. Because if so, they're weak. Oh, it's sort of sad.

Should I be forcing the tears? And then later on, I really have me. Oh, no, I wasted those tears on that little moment. Damn it. Another dog time. It's got nothing, boy. It takes empty. I'm dehydrated over here.

So, I initially received mixed reviews, but it won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Ah. Three Saturn Awards and a Hugo Award for Best Visual Effects. dramatic presentation. Alien grossed $78.9 million in the United States and $7.8 million pounds in the United Kingdom during its first theatrical run. It's worldwide gross to date has been estimated between $104 million and $203 million. That's going to be way more than the budget, right? That's going to be bringing in. Yeah, they made it for $10. Can you believe it? Oh, that's very good. Well, I suppose it was just a lot of lube. Yeah.

cuts from the butcher. And a lot of people were just volunteering their time. Yeah, that was student actors. Get your mates together. Yeah. You guys don't mind, do you? Yeah.

Putting in some time. Dave does the sound really well. Do that again. Oh. So, you know. That's your Ripley impression? Yeah. I've got that.

So let's cut to four years later and talk about the sequel. It's 1983. Despite the success of Alien, its sequel took years to develop things to management changes and a lack of enthusiasm from 20th century Fox. The producer of aliens, Gail Ann Hurd, remarked that sequels didn't have the reputation in the 80s that they do today.

Enter James Cameron. He's 30 years old. The studio execs read The Terminator invited him to write the alien sequel. If his time directing Terminator was a success, then he'd be invited to direct as well. So Gail Ann Hurd was the producer. It was married to James Cameron

during the production of aliens. their relationship however was short-lived and they divorced in 1989 a famous year. Why? I don't know. When were you guys born?

I was born in 88. We were born in 90. I thought one of you guys would be an 89 baby. No. That means nothing to us. We hate the 80s. 90s kids through and through. The 80s?

Yuck. We are true 90s children. Let's play a little game called guess the tagline. Okay, you finish the word for the aliens tagline. This time it's Come.

That's my answer. Personal. This time it's war. It's what we were looking for. Really? That's not as good. I like this time it's personal. What's that from?

There was an alternate tagline, which was this time there's more. Which if you remember, is that the first movie had one alien. So they're promising there's going to be more than one. See, I prefer when a franchise sticks to one naming convention. So when I found out last night at dinner That aliens is the sequel And then the third I think is Aliens 3 or something You would have liked it be Aliens'es?

I said it should have two S's yes And that that should just continue Yeah But whatever You love the SS I know sorry You love the SS No

Can I ask about the aliens the title Is the famous story about that true Yeah let's talk about it So okay No okay you tell you what have you heard Okay, this is the story that I've heard. So James Cameron, I've heard that he pitched the idea for an alien scene. Because it's been years, like you're saying.

Four years, but then that doesn't get made for a little bit longer, right? It's like a long gap. He pitches in. And the story that I've heard is he's in a boardroom. He writes alien on a white board or on a piece of paper. And he turns it around. He writes S, aliens, and then he turns it around. And then writes something else and he turns it back to them.

and all he's written is he's turned the S into a dollar sign. Like, you're going to fucking make money on this. Is that true? Tell me it's true. It is a famous Hollywood story and it is true. Yes. Jim. Because it is such a great story.

I've just like, I've added an S and here's a dollar sign. And here's a dollar sign. We're going to make a lot of it. So I look this up to confirm it. And in an interview with the independent, he says, I was in a meeting with the studio head and the executive producers and I turned my script over. And on the blank side of the last page, I wrote Alien. Then I drew an S on the end

And then I drew two vertical lines through the S And held it up to show them Which like feels as well like it's really spoon feeding To be like, like the story that you've heard And that I've heard sounds like like I'm pitching this From the ground up But like presumably they've already talked about it It's at the end, it's in the meeting and to go

I don't know if you guys are getting it Yeah, okay, okay, okay Who cares about story? Aliens Dallas sign There's more than it and it's going to be More aliens, more. More money.

Yeah, the tagline is this time it's profit. He's doing the thing with his fingers to imply money. Daddy wants a yacht. I have brainstormed these other filmmakers as well. I looked at other filmmakers that tried the James Cameron technique. There was no country for old men's. Apocalypse Now's. Okay, yes.

Goodwill huntings. Okay. And don't forget, 12 angry men's. I'm in. Yeah. They all, they didn't come to fruition. I'm greenlighting all of them. Didn't work for everybody, you know.

But maybe, maybe a listener, you know, who's sort of an angel investor will want to get interested. If any of our listeners are billionaires. Apart from the one, the mysterious benefactor. Yeah, yeah. I'm wondering why they're on like the $10 level and they could just be giving us a million dollars a year. Do you have a tier that's like, hey, this is crazy, but if you want to? No, because we're scared someone will. And then you'll feel like indebted to.

Because there'd have to be some sort of reward for that and it'd be like you own us or something. What if you just sort of, you had just said then, like you'd just whisper their name on every episode or something? That'd be fun of that. Let me just say, Clarence. Michael. My opinion is.

On this week's episode, Michael, I am going to be talking about. We've read the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Michael. Do go on. My name is Pai. Michael Dave Waterkey. I will rename myself legally if you get on the million dollar tier. So for a lonely millionaire, they might love that.

You know, for it's just like, oh, cool. You know, I sleep with the podcast and I just love to hear it whisper to me. Some people that listen to this enough probably already feel like you are whispering their name. But I don't care what their name is. We're saying Michael, right? Yeah, sorry. That's the new tier of the Patreon. The tears just called.

Like, God. What are we charging? $500 a month? It's got to be more than that for a Michael. $10,000. $10,000 a month. We will save Michael on every episode. Yeah.

And you get to be the official Michael. We'll limit it to one at a time. So if you want to be the first Michael, let us know. $10,000. $10,000. We're going to run this by Matt. No, I think he's on board. I'm going to, I'm going to, oh, yeah, I'll tell you,

because we jumped, we jumped to the, um, sorry, I just was so excited to know whether that was a true story. I'm so glad that it is. It's great. I want to, and I want, and it could have been totally organic

until I went, oh, duh, oh, let me fly for it as long as you a day that's really, my glasses are slipping down my nose. So, this one,

as I say, as we go, as we go through the subsequent films, the stories will get shorter, but like, this is the other big boy. This is the other one that people go, this is my favorite movie

of all time. Yeah. This is huge. This is another, the first two movies the ones responsible for these still being talked about today. All the other movies are trying to emulate what came before.

Are you saying two was the big one for you? Or the first one? Or both? I love both of the first. I think of Terminator 2, you're saying. I love Terminator 2. Also, James Cameron. And I saw Terminator 2 first.

I thought alien first. It's interesting, the relationship as well, like which one did you go? Well, no, so I saw Alien Resurrection first. Like, this is the weird thing of seeing them out of order. Yeah, so because the, which I know you're going to go into, because I did say in start, they're all the same film, and they've actually not. They're very different types of movie, but the plot is often the same. It's the same. Poor people stranded with an alien. They've got to get rid of it kind of thing. But then there's, there are a few different settings, but one and two are very different on there because the first one is sort of like this slow burn. Horror movie.

Psychological sort of stuff going on. The second one is very much an action movie. Yeah, it's sort of, it's a neat sort of combination of action and thriller and, and, and, and, still, you know, it still has a decent amount of horror in it. So we cut to it's 57 years later and Ellen's been Ellen Ripley. It's weird to say Ellen. You know, it's like, and the name's Ripley. I'm like, who? Ripley.

She's been in stasis for 57 years. What? She'd be wrinkly. No, it freezes you. It's what you got to. She'd be cold. She would be calm. She would be calm.

Ripley is rescued and debriefed by the Wayland Utani Corporation. These are the baddies. But, you know, they're corporations. Everyone's working for them. Yeah, corporations are bad. Employers who doubt her claim about alien eggs in a derelict ship on the Exo moon LV426. You know, and this isn't, you got to believe women. You know, they go, hey, there was some alien eggs.

They killed all the back crew, and they were like, lady, you're crazy. They're like, are you sure you weren't just on your period? You know how you guys get on your period. It's always hallucinating. She's like, yeah, where are the rest of the crew then? What do you think I did with them? Did you kill them because you were angry because you were on your period? Sorry, your last corn chip.

Oh, no. No, somebody at the chalky and you got man at them. After contact is lost with the colony, Wayland-Utani representative Carter Burke and Colonel Marine, Colonial Marine Lieutenant Gorman asked Ripley to accompany them to investigate. So it's like, hey, you know how you said maybe there was an alien. Hey, we actually believe women. Yeah, there might be an alien.

Can you come along and help us is essentially what happens? And Ripley is traumatized, but she's like, you know what? There's nothing I hate more than aliens. Because to her it happened yesterday. It's true. She had on that. It was real, real recent. Yeah, the night must have just done an end for this poor lady.

You know what I mean? Because it's been 57 years. Yeah. But she just went to sleep. Yeah. And then woke up. So she joins a crew of these colonial marines who are like, you know, badasses. They got their guns.

They're ready to shoot stuff. And there's another android. This guy's named Bishop. And Ripley's not into it. She's like, I don't like these, these androids. They're always up to no good. But it's been like, 50 years.

They got milk for blood. So, like, I'm sure and droids are being more accepted now, so she just seems really racist. Yeah. And old school and ignorant. Yeah, they're like, we like him.

Yeah. He's actually our friend. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, yeah, when grandparents start to kick off about something, and you're like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, like, if you'd been frozen at the end of World War II,

and then you woke up 507 years later, they'd be freaking out. Yeah, exactly. Well, grandpa, you can't say that. Well, look at Captain America. He was okay. Yeah. So there are exceptions. Captain America is an exception.

Exceptionally beautiful man. I got to say, I didn't know about the comic, but I heard someone's introducing themselves as Captain America, I would presume they were very racist. I'm Captain America. Yeah, and his suit is like the flag, basically. Yeah, okay, cool.

Cool, that's great. Not a good rep these days, branding wise. Yes, yes. Also walking around with a shield. All right there, buddy. Yeah. The shield's, I mean, nicer than a gun. It's true.

It's probably one of those too, right? So they land on the planet. This is the planet from the first moon, but they've been colonizing it in that time. They're like, oh, hey, let's go and put some people to live on that planet. Oh, no. It seems hospitable. We're going to terraform it and stuff.

But they haven't found all the eggs. No. They get there and they go, oh, wait a minute. No one's here. This doesn't look so good. And they look around and they find this little girl, the one survivor. Her name is Newt. She's got a cute little nickname.

also a beautiful name for an upcoming baby. Newt. Yeah. For anyone listening. Because I know some people will listen to this just for name suggestions. Yeah, because we have some great names. Potential offspring. And yeah, Jess is always available.

So is Michael. Jess is always available. The Marines kill. Michael is available. $10,000. What better way to spend it? That's so good. If you had a spare $10,000, what a fantastic way to spend it.

$10,000 per month. Per month. What's that in a year? I can't figure it out. So the Marines go searching around as Ripley is sort of hanging back in the control room. They kill a newborn alien after it burst through a colonist chest rousing. Several adult aliens who ambush the Marines. So for the first time on screen, you got multiple xenomorphs running around, killing people.

Everyone's shooting their guns and fire enough. It's all very, very exciting. Hicks orders that, you know, so it's like time to escape. Ripley assumes command and rams their armor personnel, carrier into the nest to rescue to rescue Corporal Dwayne Hicks and Privates Hudson and Vasquez. So it's like Vasquez, she's there going, I got to take

a man. Oh man. It all comes back to Ripley again. Oh, God. What a week I'm having. Because again, it's just a day for that. Hicks orders the drop ship to recover the survivors, but a stowaway alien kills the pilots causing the drop ship to crash into the station. Low on ammunition and resources.

It seems like all hope is lost. And that, is that whenever we get the famous Game over, man. Game over! Yes, indeed. You have mailed it, you have read it from. You've practically read it off my page. Oh, my God.

I want different voices in the room. It's beautiful. I'm super excited for it. So that's the late great Bill Paxton. He delivers that line of game over, man. Game over. And I wish I could say, like, now that I brought up that his death is like, maybe that's on his tube snow or something.

Game over, man. Love Bill Paxton. There's another favorite line shortly after this. Newt warns Ripley that they should get inside as it will get dark soon, leading to, she says, they mostly come at night, mostly. And it's such a weird line reading of, why is she putting so much emphasis on mostly?

Mostly, except the one behind you right now. Kids are creepy. Like as if, as if rep. As if she didn't say mostly, like, you know, if she didn't say mostly, like, oh, no, we saw some out in the daytime. It's like, well, I said mostly, okay? Don't nitpick what I'm saying.

That kid's been fact checked before, and it's just getting ahead of it. Yeah, it's, pretty creepy performance from the kid actually, isn't it? It is, it's, apparently so much trouble casting this little girl. She never acted before. She does a good job and like everything in this movie's iconic, of course. So this is the thing is like, because everyone loves this movie, it's like, well, Newt's iconic and this is great.

But like she's also not. I'm going to look up Newt. She's not putting in like a powerhouse. She's no, she's no, Haley Joel Smith, shall I say. Yeah, there's something creepy about that kid. Tell me, do that actually grow up to be like an Academy Award winning adult? No, shit, this was her one movie. Perfect, one and done.

That's the way to do it. Yeah. Not to try and create. You do one brilliant movie. Exactly. Yeah, okay, that was cool. I'll become a regular, like, it's like Charlie in the chocolate factory. Yeah, he's a vet.

He's a vet, man. Yeah, I love that. You know, and people go, yes, I am Charlie from Charlie in chocolate factory. No, I don't own the chocolate factory. Now, speaking of, your dog has eaten a lot of chocolate. We need to pump his stomach We thought you'd love it When you guzzle down treats

A trip to the vet Yeah, just tell me what the bill is, okay? I haven't finished this up I haven't finished this on Please, I'm a professional Did you want a vet or did you want Charlie Bucket? So James Cameron directed aliens And it was not an easy process filming it

He traveled over to Pinewood Studios In the United Kingdom And the crew and him did not get along. They seemed to resent not having Ridley back for the sequel and having to work with James Cameron and producer Gail Ann Hurd. Was there any effort? Did they ask Ridley first? Do you think?

Yeah, I think the gap was just too long and he moved on to other things. I think I think Ridley is very much like, oh, what's exciting me right now? And as I said earlier, it wasn't really a thing to, oh, yeah, sequels and franchises. it was, and remember he's 40 years old. He's probably going, I want to do anything else now. I'm retired. He also wasn't into science fiction. I'm close to death.

He wasn't interested in science fiction and horror as well. Like, he wanted to make alien like an exception to that. I'm like, I'm going to make a really good movie. He's like, I've made the best one of the genre ever. Now let's try a rom-com. Try another genre. I'm going to make Gladiator in 30 years or some shit. Remember Gladiator?

Good film. Good film. The new one. You mean, you loved the new one. Gladiators. I haven't seen. That was on my list. Here's what James Cameron had to say about the crew.

I couldn't resist. He's got a list of things that he hated about this experience, and that's good fun. He said, the Pinewood crew were lazy, insolent, and arrogant. There was a few bright lights amongst the younger art department people, but for the most part, we despised them, and they despised us. Wow. So here's a list of things that. he hated. He hated, he thought the crew were lazy and resented union mandated breaks. He just

wanted to like, come on, let's get on with it. Like, they took a lot of tea breaks. The crew would stop work every Friday afternoon for a lottery drawer where the winner would take home a prize of 400 pounds. One of the crew running the lottery came up to Cameron with the tin and said, do you want to put anything in the drawer, Jim? Do you want to put anything in the drawer? Hey, I, Jim, we do a little lottery every week, a bit of fun. Yeah, 400 quince. You know, it's not for the sneeze at, is it? No, you've probably got your big fancy mansions, but a bunch of us just, you know, we're working class, mate.

Cameron allegedly shouted at him, fuck the drawer. Wow. Fuck the draw. And, you know, British people, they did not, like, swear. Oh. Oh, what's that? Oh, blimey, Jim, that's a bit full on, that is.

Fuck the drawer. That's incredibly rude. I don't get how much you put in. You can't fuck the draw. You just put in 10 quid and you might win 400. Jeez. You wouldn't believe what Jim said. Tea break.

Tea break. I need another cup of tea after that. I'm absolutely horrified. Apparently Jim Cameron pushed the tea trolley over one day. You got the tea lady coming in. Oh, time for tea. He's like pushing it over. All right, Jim, that's a bit much, mate.

Dave, imagine I'm in the red zone, right? Yeah. And somebody puts a coffee down in front of me. And then somebody comes along, flips that. What am I going to do? I've got to tell you, there'd be no avatar. He would be dead. There'd be no avatar.

And wouldn't the world be an awful place? Cameron eventually held her hours long, all hands meeting where grievances were aired and both sides agreed to an uneasy truce for the rest of the shoot. All right, what have I done wrong? Well, you kicked the tea lady in the face and we didn't like that. We didn't like that. She's a nice lady. All right, fine.

I agree to not kick the tea lady. Well, you should apologise to her. I'm not doing that. So this is what he was quoted as saying towards the end of the shoot. He says, This has been a long and difficult shoot fraught by many problems. But the one thing that kept me going through it all was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back. And that you sorry bastards would still be here.

What a piece of shit. What a grumpy piece of shit. Yeah. What a grumpy piece of shit. Wow, that's really good. It's amazing. And what is one of those things where it does, it sounds like maybe both people were challenging to work with.

Yeah. And I think it was just sort of, it's a culture clash of like, here's how I like to work. Here's how you like to work. Some people were probably more jerks than they could have been. Yeah. But I don't, I don't really side with any particular team. I think it's just that thing of going, clearly this wasn't a good match. And I think because as a director, usually you get to go, hey, we're going to shoot here and do this.

and like you have a bit more control because he found himself going, all right, you've got this movie, it's your second one you're over shooting, you're under, you know, there's still a little bit of a,

you know, we're looking over your shoulder. So he found himself being like, ah, fuck. Yeah. They hate it. But despite all the challenges, the film was a massive success.

Aliens opened to generally positive reviews. It appeared on the cover of July 28th edition of Time magazine, which called it the summer's scariest movie. That's how they talked back in that time. Ah, I'll skip. Wow.

Breaking news. Everyone's seeing aliens. Oh, spooky. Everyone's seeing alien dollar size. I forgot to change it in the end. The studio was like, okay, if you think that's going to work. It must have something to do with the plot, I guess. The aliens are bankrupts in this one?

No, it's all about profit, baby. Roger Ebert called the film, it was called the last hour of the film, painfully, unremittingly intense in horror and action, leaving him emotionally drained and unhappy. Oh, wait, that's the review of the Indiana Jones episode. Just kidding. It's a very good episode.

It's a very good episode. Go back and listen to that. Whoa. Maybe it's a review of the end of this episode. Emotionally drained and unhappy. People were skeptical, as I say, people were skeptical of a sequel, but it was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Actress for the Xenomorph, the Alien Queen. Isn't that huge?

Wow. What? Yes. No, So, Garni, we have a nominated for

Best actress. What is... The first time an alien had been nominated. About time. What's her famous line at the end when she's fighting?

Get away from her, you bitch! Yes, that's it. Whoa. Bad ass. And she's fighting this alien queen like in this mining thing. Basically,

she's fighting like a, like a Power Ranger-style robot. Yeah, she gets into this robotic suit, which is like, amazing, technology-wise at the time, you know, they have very limited seizure. There's, like, there's, like, blue screen in this movie and there's, like, rear projection. It's so inventive with how they do all the special effects in this movie.

A lot of miniatures still. But this exosuit that she's in is just many people puppeting it. Fuck, it's... Many people puppeting. It's... Now I'm... I have a nosebleet. Too many times.

And I'm just like, you're just going to be having dinner tonight. Channing. Oh, no. What have I done? What have I done? But, yeah, it's incredible. So she has this battle between her and the alien queen.

And then once again, the alien sucked out of the airlock. Ripley loves an air look. Thank goodness. Just like James Cameron, the Terminator loves melting. Being crushed in factories. Oh, yeah. You got a crush. You always end in a factory.

And that's where that song, Crush comes from It's just a little crush Every time we touch Yeah Great track It's a James Cameron Produced that song

Wow Yeah He's very talented And we'll talk about that For the next 40 minutes All right So we're on We're now going to like

These last movies They get less and less iconic So they're going to get Briefer and briefer This is the yada yada yada section We're in the yada, yada, yada. But I also want, I'm going to, just like my Nike run coach on my app tells me,

you've got to finish strong. Like, you don't get, you don't start lag in your run as you're, oh, yeah, we're coming up to the end, you know. I end with a crawl. I go, never again. That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, never again. You're talking about your runs. Runs.

Okay. And episodes. Yep. Yeah. Everyone knows that the Jess Perkins episodes, they fade out. Like, okay, you get it. Yeah, I just got a hand and there. I don't know

I guess that's it you feel it you get it I guess if you really want to hear the end of it fucking look it up yourself I don't know

anyway time for the Patreon part what are we even doing here really if you think about it chat GPT can just spit this out

yeah we're gonna be replaced by AI sooner than we think I should go retrain at something else should learn some new

skills or something every episode oh god what am I doing what is my legacy Matt and David both they go if you could just

finish it yeah You've written it, so you may as well read it. Do you want to tag me in? Yeah. No, I don't want to hear you do it. Do you want to send me the file or hand me your computer and I'll read it? No, it's all right.

This is good. All right, let's guess the tagline for Alien 3. Alien 3. Is you going to give a sum of it? Yeah. Well, yeah, there's a bunch of options, which is good. I'll fill in the blank for this one. Three times the suspense.

Three times the danger. Three times the... Come. A bunch of. Just to brag about the budget We spent heaps on this It was a disaster Please come

Please come We had so many lawsuits We're still battling some I can't talk about it Three times Three times the come Three times the What were the other

Three times the suspense Three times the danger Three times the terror Terror Yeah I'm still not going to say that This time it's hiding In the most terrifying Terrifying place of all is another one

Your house. Okay, that's worse. That's much more terrifying. Get it out of there. Because I can leave my house. Okay, fill in the blank for this one. Our worst fears have come true. It's...

Come. It's back. It's alive. Yeah, it's back. You nailed it. It's back is really good. So, this was the one that played on trailers. So, like, this movie was in development for ages.

And there was 10 different versions of the movie. Like, they loved aliens. They wanted a sequel for it really quickly. You know, James Cameron. and put another dollar sign next to where they're like, we're not really feeling that, but thanks so much. What else you got? If it's a pound sign.

A little bit coin. Alien b. So it, in, beautiful word. In 1979, this is on the trailer. I'll do the trailer voice. In 1979, we discovered in space. No one can hear you scream.

In 1992, we would discover on Earth. everyone can hear you scream. Wow. And here's the thing. They said that the Alien 3 is going to take place on Earth. They didn't have a script. They didn't have a director. They didn't have any idea what they were going to do with it.

That's the only thing they did. They released a trailer saying like, yeah, it's going to be on Earth this time. It turns out it's not on Earth. They went in a completely different direction. That's great because I was sitting there thinking, maybe I haven't seen 3. No, I have. It's just not on it. Okay.

There were 10 different versions of the sequel. So many people wrote different. versions one was set in a shopping mall on earth. Shopping mall! Oh no, it's at the Wendy's! It's pretty terrifying. But as somebody who worked in a shopping center for many years across a few different shops,

I reckon I could get my way around. And remember as well, Dawn of the Dead is set in the shopping mall. And then what they've done there, they've set up this idea that, you know, we're the real zombies because we're the ones shopping. Capitalism. Yeah. People shopping are zombies. And who's mostly doing the shopping?

Women. Yeah, women. The most of them. Am I saying this right? Women be shopping. Women be shopping. Women be shopping. Women be shopping.

Women be shopping. One was set in a wooden planet, like a gigantic, like wooden space station, which like full of like monks who were against technology. That's so fine. We just need wood. I just want this to be woody. They thought that would be way too high budget to like build a whole thing. Oh my God.

Wood. That's stuff. heaps but a planet A planet of wood A planet of wood We emptied out Four bunnings

That's still not enough I was like one street We need a planet You go to the guy Yeah We need a better planets Worth of wood Yeah

What do you reckon No you should have Called ahead For this to be honest This should have to be a special order Sorry Stephen Spielberg Just dropped by He got it all

He's working on A Jurassic Park And Shindler's list At the same time, there was a version that just focused on Hicks and Bishop the Robot, where Ripley is unconscious most of the movie. That's nice, isn't it? That's a dream acting gig. But I still get a decent pay?

Yeah, Sigourney's signed on as long as I can sleep. That's good. Yeah. So this one, I didn't rewatch all of the movies, but I did rewatch this one and I rewatch resurrection. There's a few of them that. I can't remember. And I rewatched aliens as well. until my Disney Plus subscription started telling me,

hey, this is actually a friend's account, and we need to prove that you, and I'm like, oh, I get Disney Plus. How about, yeah, piss off. I'm trying to, I'm trying to research for a podcast, Disney Plus. Do they accept that as an excuse? Yeah, yeah, they did actually. They said, oh, great, have a year for free.

So here's the really disappointing thing about this. So the movie starts, and all of this happens in just, like, the first two minutes opening credits is, So Bishop and Ripley and Newt escape in the first movie They Kill the Alien Queen And then this movie opens with them crash landing There's a fire in their escape pod And all everyone dies but Ripley

And she lands on a prison planet That's essentially an empty prison But with prisoners who have decided Yeah we're going to stay here Because we're all they've sort of borrowed that monk idea Of like yeah what's sort of monk like And we're going to We live here and

we've all sort of given up the idea of being horrible people anymore sort of it's so already from the moment you go oh all those great characters that we came to love and aliens they're all dead they're all dead and what was the point of that yeah she did all that stuff to save this little girl and now that kid has just died and and so therefore is where you don't have like because she spends that whole movie protecting new and you go oh wow and just like the cat in the first movie you go oh you got to give her something to care about and in this movie she is sort of like yeah all right I guess I'm here now in this movie.

And they sort of just go, oh, yeah, there was a face hugger that stuck on board. And like, how that happened? No, don't worry about it. It's just sort of, who cares? This time, like, one of the one or two interesting things, the face hugger attacks a dog in this movie. So, like, the alien is a little bit more like a canine-like. Yeah, we sort of discover, is this for the first time that the aliens don't always look the

same? It crossbreeds with its hosts. So it finds whatever. it's like face hugs the dog so when it comes out of the explodes out of the dog something like you're saying now it's on four legs so like in theory like the xenomorph that we all know

that's only if it crosses with humans right that's possibly not it gets all messed up around and all the prequels they make it way too complicated imagine if it like bred with a dinosaur oh my god would sound like this this would be the same vibe as the studio

executives of like sitting around because they all same thing with the Jurassic Park movies the alien the alien franchise Jax gets obsessed with hybrids pretty much after, you know, from alien resurrection on, would they go, oh, well, people, we can't just have the xenomorph anymore. Yeah. What if it started messing around with other things? People aren't scared of T-Rex anymore.

Yeah, and it's so stupid. I want a Jurassic Park movie. They're going to just have the dinosaurs. Yeah. They're still spooky and scary. I don't want to get eaten the one. But they want to tell us. They're like, oh, yeah.

And they're telling as well the people in the movie themselves as well, like, oh, yeah. You know, Jurassic World opens with kids yawning at Jurassic World at the theme park. Like, these kids would be over the moon. Because kids are excited to see a zebra at a zoo. What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah. Kids who don't see like a 116th model of the T-RX at a big W. So so much of this stuff, it's unfortunate.

Like, this is the thing. Alien and aliens have this beautiful thing of really creative people making really excellent movies. And yes, they are to make money for a studio. But then it feels as if from then on, much like Wayland Utani themselves, the evil corporation. It is start to get more driven by greed and more like, let's just, we just want to make some money. So who cares? Let's just get something out there. And that's why.

So Aliens 3, we have the trailer before there's a script and they have a deadline for when it's going to be out there before it's even being starting to make. Because 20th Century Fox are like, we've got to pay rent this week or whatever. And they go, all right. We've got to put a movie out. They're going to do their landlord. Don't worry. We've got a movie coming out at Christmas. It's going to be great.

I'll pay you back. Yeah, absolutely. I'm good for it. I'm good for it. So Ridley Scott was invited back to direct, but he was more interested in making a prequel, and they were like, that sounds too expensive. We want to make money. Yeah. We want to make money.

That sounds really expensive. We've already explored the wood world. You're probably going to make the world out of wood, don't you? We're not doing. I wonder why that would be more expensive than the prison planet. It's so funny. Well, they're still so limited in CGI. So, like, because it's still pre-CGI and like it's only sort of baby stuff that's being done

with CGI, they're going, well, that's just, that's going to be miniatures and have to be built and all sorts of things. They just, they know what's going to be crazy expensive. Right. And I've got to say the CGI and this is real bad. It's really bad. Yeah, it's really bad because like, so many of the alien movies have this like beautiful practical effects and miniatures and people in costumes and such. And this one's like, I think, you know, an early CGR they go, oh, we can do it with a computer and it's, you know, we go to Jurassic Park just because they can do it. Doesn't mean they should do And it looks, it looks bad. Yeah, it's like one with the dog aliens like crawling along the roof or something.

And it really looks so, so bad. It looks like it's made 10 years before the first movie was made. It really does. It's 20 years or whatever. And I think, too, it might be stop motion compositing rather than CGI. I might be wrong. And, hey, I know we love it on this podcast. Right in and tell us how wrong we are.

You guys love to embrace that. Hey, don't worry. I don't think Alien has a big fandom where people are obsessed with it. Yeah. It's fun. This isn't a peer-reviewed podcast. I'm so glad that you guys don't have episodes where you're like, all right, let's hear from people about how we messed up in that previous episode.

We don't have, we can't handle that. Our motto is never apologize. You guys are much more wholesome. I love that you guys just have fact quote, fact, quote or question rather than tell us how wrong we are. My fact is the fact that you guys were so wrong in the alien episode. God, don't tell them they can do that. At the moment, it's just emails and we go, okay, thanks. I got a question for you.

Why do you keep doing this book? The fact they're paid to do that. Hey, we'll take your money. Why did they come just to bill us? I went, Michael, what are you doing? I pay $10,000 an episode for this show. At least you can do is whisper my name a few more times per episode. David Fincher is a director on this one.

And this was his first feature. So it's like three iconic directors in a row. It's amazing. And yet he was, you know, And everyone, like, before they blew up, he was directing music videos, as you alluded to before, about having, you know, I'm ready for the occasion when it comes along. He directed Madonna's Express Yourself and Vogue. So, of course, you'd see that and go, you know what this guy would love? Aliens.

Yes. He'd be good at chess bursts. This guy knows black and white. Mm-hmm. That's Vogue, right? Yeah, it was. Yeah, strike a pose. Yeah.

So Alien 3 was greenlit by the studio because it was considered to be a sure hit, but the studio had already, as I said, already said a release day. And Fincher is there going, oh my goodness gracious, how is this going to work? And he hated it. Fincher later stated that the constant studio interference made the film stray so far from his vision that the only way to make a director's cut would be to burn the entire negative and start over. Wow. He also admitted that when the 1992 LA Riot started to get close to the lab

whether films' negatives had been developed and stored. He hoped that the entire building would burn to the ground and the film with it. He said, hey, guys over here. That building there. Please. So he was not a fan. The movie got 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. Out of.

That one review quote says, Alien 3 takes admirable risks with franchise mythology, but far too few pay off in a thin. scripted sequel whose stylish visuals aren't enough to enliven a lack of genuine thrills. Ouch. David Fincher disowned the film stating an interview with The Guardian. I had to work on it for two years, got fired off at three times, and I had to fight it for every single thing.

No one hated it more than me. Wow. Yeah. So there's a big thing as well when people are giving you reviews. It's like being in the comment section of like Apple podcast reviews. It's like, hey, I hate this too. Yeah. I get it.

I agree with you. There's nothing we can do about it. Yeah, worst podcasts you've ever heard. Well, worst podcasts I've ever done. Okay? And I had to hear it in real time. Yeah. I couldn't.

I lived through it. It was horrific. I heard the bits we edited out as well. Yeah. Okay. I would never have riffed so much of the top if I knew how long it was going to be. Alien Resurrection, tagline. It's been more than 200 years.

The beginning has just... Come. Yeah? For the first time. You have nailed it. The beginning has just started. I think this tagline is one of the worst ones. It's been more than 200 years.

The beginning has just started. That's too long. No, too long. It's not a tagline. That's a fucking paragraph. So we arrive at the first alien movie that I watched as a kid or when I rewatched this a few week or so ago. We're like, okay, I really did have my eyes closed for most of this movie.

I don't remember much of it. And I quite enjoyed this one. It's a bit different. They got a European director on it. So, Gornier's back. And we are just focusing on the Ripley movies. And this is the last Ripley movie. 200 years later, she's been cloned by, like, what, you know, the new corporation.

And they've cloned her because she died with her alien embryo in her in the previous movie. Oh, it's pretty cool. That's one of the coolest bits I remember from the end of Alien 3 is she knows she's got an alien in her. And it's going to come out and, like, you know, kill everyone. So the only way to get rid of it is. And she also knows the corporation is. coming for it. They're like, we want that, we want that embryo.

Give it an embryo. Yeah, they want to get it. So, what if she just jumps into like a molten lava thing? Yeah. And as she's slow-mo falling, like we're watching her fall, it bursts out of her stomach. She dies and then into the lava. And she holds onto it too to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no you're going into lava too. And she's just a woman who's had enough.

Oh, my God, yeah. She's like, thank God. A reason to just. A little break. Why not? So speaking of, Sigourney Weaver originally refused to do the fourth alien film. When she, when asked why she changed her mind, she replied, they basically drove a dump truck of full of money to my house. Wow.

She was paid $11 million, which is the entire budget of Alien. So there you go. There's the answer to the budget of the first movie. Wow. So it did make heaps of money, but they've, you know, it's made heaps of money for her too. Imagine having that sort of cash-o. Like, yeah, I'll do it. Like, and it's the same thing when people ask me, oh, someone's asked me about doing this gig or this.

corporate or whatever, what should I say? Is like, yeah, do it for as much money as like you would want to actually do it, like if it sounds like a drag. And obviously Sigoni was like, uh, nothing, nothing less than 11 million to get me to be Ripley again. The money where, like, she's naming it probably thinking, they'll never say yes to this. But if they do, I guess I'll do it. And then they're going, yeah, you know, we've got a deal.

And she's, oh, okay, got to do it now. At least, yeah. At least I got $11 million. I thought I named a really stupid. That's a line. That's a million. That's what I. My salesman father built a career on.

This is the thing when, you know, when someone buys the $10,000 Michael tier, you go to fuck, we shouldn't make it $20,000. 10,000, that's nothing, really. To whisper Michael every episode. That's not going to put a dent in our expenses. Oh, no, my gosh. They're only going up. We're living way beyond our means.

It's crazy, Marcel. I just thought another mansion, Marcel. I'm sorry, I advocated for it. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet spoke almost no English at the time of shooting. and the translators had had translators on set at all time. So like, oh, let's get a European director. Let's go in another direction. It's not going.

Also, by the way, do you speak American? Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yeah, let's get trained. Like, how annoying would that be to have to have a director who's being translated the entire time? Yeah, just for the flow of conversation and, yeah, interesting. By the time of the...

He's like, yelling, action. Action. Sorry, what? What's he saying? Oh, action. Oh, right. Oh, okay. In America, we say action. By the time the special edition DVD was released in 2003, he had learned enough English to record a director's commentary. What? Which is, you know, it's great that he was able to, oh, yeah, okay. Although Jean-Pierre Juner has stated to be proud of the film, he swore off Hollywood after this experience on it, his next movie was Amelie.

Yeah. Cool. The whimsical romantic comedy. So quite a different. That's a beautiful movie. Right. He apparently for the 25th anniversary, he wrote, he watched a 35mm print of the film. He was a bit concerned to watch the film.

He says, maybe I wouldn't like it. And he says, no, it was great. I have a lot of shots that I love. For the people who don't like it, I can say, fuck you. That's great. He's a beautiful grass one English. Yeah, so he learned enough to say, fuck everybody. You're wrong.

You're wrong. H.R. Giger described the designer of the original alien was pleased with resurrection, describing it as an excellent film. And is he still involved or is he sort of a bit like now, based on my stuff, I'm sure I get a cut of the royalty or whatever. He was disappointed with not being credited in this film. Really? For all the other movies, you will see like, you know, alien design. Yeah.

You know, xenomorph design, but H.R. Giga, like, he is, he is the alien, you know. That's the thing. This one also tanked critically. They said, while Sigourney Weaver's feral performance as a resurrected Ripley, like her clone version, like she's got like superpowers now. She's like half, you got like, she's got acid blood. She's also like vaguely not Ripley anymore because she's like, I'm waking up. The world's different. This sort of sucks.

Yeah, she's not, she's a different sort of character. She's not the same Ripley. But, you know, like, geez, she's what, 200 something years old now? I'm 35. I'm different to how I was at, you know, 20. Yeah, exactly. Just let her grow up. Of course I'm going to be different.

Yeah. Hopefully better. But they say the acid blood running through the fourth entries veins, corrods whatever emotional investment audiences had left. Wow. Yeah. So we're now going to just rattle off the rest of them now that Ripley's dead. Let's talk about, and like I wish I sort of was tempted to do,

you remember that Simpsons episode where they do the, we'll never stop the Simpsons song. I was tempted to just do the. rest of the movies as that, but I ran out of time. So I'll just grab them on. So then we get Alien versus Predator. The next time we would see a xenomorph on screen would be Alien versus Predator in 2004. Ridley Scott does not consider these movies canon and it would disrupt where he would go

on to set up in Prometheus, which came out in 2012, which is a prequel that explores the origins of the xenomorph and that great big skeleton known as the space jockey, the skeleton an idea O'Bannon was accused of stealing from Planet of the Vampires. What do you think of space chucky, Jess? What are you talking about? That's so silly. He wasn't in a space jockey and this is one of the most terrifying movies of my clums.

And it's one of the things that the audience sort of just named it the space jockey. They're just like, what's that gigantic skeleton doing? What's his deal? And that was a thing like, let's explore it. So Ridley Scott doesn't consider alien versus predate Yeah. Which has one of the best taglines, which is

whoever wins, we lose. which is... That's good. Which is great. But how do I fit come into that? Whoever wins, we come. Yes. Have you seen those?

Whoever comes, we lose. They're fun. They're fun. They're very light. The first alien versus predator is sent an antitica. Oh, that's right. This is like a deep alien base under the... Or predator base underneath.

Yeah, let's meet up that pyramid and we'll have a fight. Did Predator already exist? Yeah. Predator's 80s. Yeah. And can I ask, do you remember? and skip ahead if you don't want to spoilers. Who wins? I can't remember.

The humans win. There's a thing as well. You got to throw the human in there. She blows up the alien queen. And it's a woman, woke. Oh, my goodness. But then there's an alien versus predators too, isn't there? They fight again.

Yeah, Requiem is what it's called. That's right. Which I always have any of those sort of little things are like, rise of the thing. Like, just call it two or something. Or add an ass to it. Aliens versus predators. That's where fast in the few. furious loss movie because their naming convention is horrific.

Exactly. The tagline for Prometheus, the search for our beginning, could lead to our... Calm. It works every time. So, Prometheus just give a two-line summary, a team of scientists journey to a distant moon to uncover the origins of humanity following clues left by ancient civilizations. There, they encounter a deadly threat that challenges their understanding of creation and survival, which takes us to Alien Covenant.

So just quick pause. The whole tagline is this might end everything, but we know that it is a prequel and that there's a sequel set 200 years in the future after. So whatever they find cannot end humanity. It's always the issue with prequels when you're like, oh, I know that that character lives or I know that this is going to be fine. This is going to kill everyone. It can't.

Sorry. Exactly. Prometheus's sequel was titled Alien Covenant, which was like a total cop out. Oh, we're going to do Prometheus. movies now and it'll be in the alien universe but it's going to tell its own story and then clearly the studio starts to go Prometheus didn't make as many millions of dollars as we wanted it to can you call it let's call it alien again which just sort of just back yourself a little bit yeah

so the tagline to this one the path the paradise begins in calm it's kind of true what is the actual answer the part of the paradise begins in hell Oh. Yeah. So a colony ship investigates a mysterious planet only to uncover deadly creatures and a sinister plot by the Android dev. So this is like, this is starting to feel familiar but sort of same-y. Yeah. Like they promised they're going to do something different with Prometheus.

They did the same thing in just a slightly remix sort of way. But we also wanted more alien. We didn't see as much. We want, like it's just a bit of a mess of having someone go, we're going to do something in the alien world, but not quite. and they didn't really satisfy anyone as a result because every audience member seemed to want different things from it. And so that led to New Blood, and the most recent movie that came out is called Alien Romulus.

And guess what tagline they came back around to in space? No one can hear you scream. Full circle. They went back to the draw. And Romulus is set just a few years after the first movie, and it's essentially, it's essentially let's do the horror movie version again and it's it is excellent like it really got really good reviews really good director and it's it's spooky it's kooky it's fun there's a few

too much fan service there is like one of the an android says at one stage get away from her you bitch and it's and it sucks it's like why is the android saying that and they bring back um what's his name oh Ian home in home Ian Holm who is dead uh yeah they bring him back and do like a a deep fake on his face. And it got the blessing from his family. And it is sort of like, oh, wow. Like, you know, it feels, yeah, it's a little bit icky, I think. Yeah, okay.

To go, we're going to bring back someone from the dead and try and recreate it. It's weird. Yeah. But I guess they're trying to get around about being like, he's a robot. So either if you want to give your blessing, like, to keep the podcast going with, like, an AI version of yourself. If you would have an untimely passing. I guess, like, you.

You guys wouldn't have to put up with as much of my stench. That's true. Robots don't smell. And people will be able to hear our voices more clearly when we don't have our handkerchiefs placed to our nose to survive your stench as well. Yeah. Like we are old-timey detectives getting close to a corpse. Yeah. Oh, let me just get my handkerchief here and muffle my voice the entire chance.

And I guess like when you're not recording, you can just turn it off. You know, you don't have to put up with me. I still say no. Okay. Yeah. You don't give you a blessing? No. Dave, do you want to give you a blessing to AI, Dave?

I think it's a no for me as well. To dive. That's, I'm put it AI in your name. Okay, that's one of me around. Activate dive. Dive. I just got to boot up dive before we start recording. All right, the legacy and looking ahead,

Alien has been ranked among the greatest science fiction horror films and has been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In 2008, it was ranked. by the American Film Institute as the seventh best film in the science fiction genre and the 33rd

greatest film of all time by Empire. Wow. H.R. Giga, he died in 2014, but his work is on permanent display at the H.R. Geiger Museum in Switzerland. And he won an Academy Award for his work on the first Alien movie. That's cool.

The rider of Alien, Jan O'Bannon, he died from complications of Crohn's disease in Los Angeles in 2009. He credited his experience with Crohn's for inspiring the chest bursting scene from Alien. So lots of different stories of like how these scenes come to those. Oh, by the way, it was Crohn's.

Wow. It sounds like he's had a really hot time. That's inspired that way. And just as a little aside, decades later, O'Bannon would admit, I stole the giant skeleton idea from Planet of the Empire. Wow. He said, it's so funny he's crediting everything else being like, yeah, watch that as a kid. Love that, love that. Oh, never saw that. No. No.

I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I stole that too, which is fine. A guy that openly admits I stole everything. A television prequel written by Noah Hawley, who's an excellent writer and director, it's going to be produced by Ridley Scott. Alien Earth is going to premiere on FX on Disney Plus in 2025.

So that's coming up in August. And finally they're on Earth. Have they just dug out that old trailer? Yeah, it said we weren't lying. Apparently it's set before or like during the first alien movie around that time. So it's like, oh, interesting. how there's xenomorphs already on the planet when we sort of led to believe that that might be,

you know, so I think it's going to be good. And Noah's an excellent Noah, first name basis. Yeah. He's an excellent writer and always very invented with what he makes. I think he did Legion, which is an X-Men prequel that, you know, very few people saw, but absolutely loved. I, he might be the Fargo guy.

Oh, okay. But I might be wrong. Looked at it. Also, as you've been alluding to Jess, a fun bit of true. that saw that I saw in a review on letterbox. The four Ripley alien movies take place over 257 years, and Ripley is conscious for about 13 days of it.

So, like, she's got, like, and that's also clone Ripley as well. And what a waking nightmare for it. Every time she's like, got, finally, some peace. I saved the cat. I saved the kid. Every time she freezes herself, she's probably hoping, like, I hope I wake up on a beach. Yeah.

Like, with a coconut in her hand. And then she wakes up and it's like a thing going, Bebe, be, beep, beep, beep. And somebody like, shaking you. We need you. She's like, fuck, say. It's being a mom. It's being a parent, you know, let's have a break.

Yeah. Finally drifted off. Ask dad. Yeah. Get a ban in there. Hey, guys, you know when I said, I didn't make time to write a parody song that wrapped it all up? Yes.

I lied. So this is my, we'll never stop the Simpsons version, which is already a parody if we did. start the fire. Sure. Here we go. Nostromo. All crew killed.

A bunch of acid. Blood is spilled. Wake up. This time it's war. By which I mean, this time there's more. Day saved. Back to bed. Wake up.

Newt is dead. Ripley's melted. Then she's cloned. When will they leave her at nine? They'll never stop the aliens. Have no fears that go stories for years like another beheaded robot. Maybe fight the predator in the Arctic. Or how about another prequel and another high.

hybrid do do do do have no fears they got stories for years and that's my report who I mean you really raise the bar for the next guest report give her then yeah we start with the question we end with the song you know that right tied all together well I got to talk myself you know what I mean I love to be a guest on this podcast I love being invited back you know I'm like I got to make sure you know keep it fresh yeah yeah otherwise we're like we're over him because I've had I've been lucky enough as well to have listeners to this podcast come to my shows and say hi to me at comedy festival and stuff. Oh, I love to work. Oh, I heard you go on. And every now and then they're going, oh,

so on road show, someone who wanted to get a picture with Matt was like, oh, you know, like, you've, you've been on the podcast as well, like sort of vaguely. I'm like, oh, this, how do I, all right, now they have a strong on the go, I know you. Oh, you're the guy who sang the end. You're the guy who sang to you. And you go, yeah, that was made. They'll go, that was weird. We don't like that. I didn't like it. Yeah, I emailed them. I said, edit that out.

Is it too late to put the alpha notes for future edits? They put it out as a clip and I'm, I unfollowed them. Yeah, thank you for letting me know. Yeah, road show audiences can be brutal sometimes. No, he was, he was extremely nice, but I just, you know, it's that thing of, of. Well, one told me I was pretty funny for a girl. So, you know. And that Dave Callan was pretty funny for an Irish.

Wow. So the person kept it going, they realized, oh, I shouldn't have said that. And then they went, oh, no, I said that about everyone. You're funny for a girl. You're funny for a person with glasses. You're funny for a person standing in the corner. That's just a thing that I said. Well, I have to go.

And got in the car and just looked at themselves in the rivie, me. What the fuck is that? That drove out of town and never came back. For a girl. What did you do? She was a woman. Can I go back and say, I meant for a woman. That's what he was.

Yay! I meant for a woman! Fixed it. Now I can go home and go to sleep. I meant sort of funny for a woman. Sort of funny for a woman. Yeah. The bar's lower, obviously.

It was amusing. Yeah, they can't get home for them. It's so little. So weak. Marcel, thank you so much for that. I'm stoked because now I kind of, I get the universe without having to watch it because I don't want to watch it. I'm glad because also, man, as I said,

there's so much alien stuff. like books and comics and video games and there will be like alien fans listening. Oh, you should have mentioned this. And I'm like, to you, I'm like, man, this would be, you know, its own series of podcast episodes if you wanted to cover all of the things. Sure, for sure. Yeah. The amount of spinoffs and all that sort of stuff and the, the law and also the bits that

discount the other bits, which mean, hey, that's not, that's not canon anymore. This is exhausting. That's why I don't really care for the prequels that much. I'm excited to see this new. one. I think that'll be fun. I didn't know what's coming out. I'm so, I'll watch that for sure. The series?

But yeah, but I'm also, now that I've done this report, I'm like, don't fucking even say the word alien around me. Yeah, I've sort of consumed everything. Yeah. You need a break. I got there, I think, with like a lot of the Marvel stuff when it was like, you've, oh, I don't know, recognize that character because they're from a TV series I haven't watched yet and stuff like that.

Yeah. You got a bit of fatigue. It's a lot. It's a lot. I did like the Thunderbolts. I like, yeah. That made me go, okay, this feels like Avengers. again.

Yeah. That was fun. All right. I mean, obviously a little sizzle don't hold you to it, but you've done Mission Impossible. You've done Indiana Jones. You've done aliens. Is there any other franchises that you hold close to your heart? I've been pondering.

This is the thing I love Jurassic Park. Yes. And I think it would be sort of similar. We'd be like, all right, focus on like the iconic parts. And then talk about how shitty the rest of them are. Goodness gracious. But yeah, Jurassic Park is up there. I do a really good impression of Chris Pine and Chris Pryne.

Chris Pratt in Jurassic World. To Goose when you're training him. Yeah. You hold out your hands like he does to the Raptors. Yeah, yeah. It's good stuff. Can we hear it? Can we play for us?

Oh, it's not. It's a visual thing. It's a visual. All right, can we see it? Yeah, but I'm now realizing I've said it, and it's probably only really funny to Aiden. It makes Aidan laugh so hard because he just does this 15 times a film. Oh, very good.

It's a slow, a good action movie sort of, um. Slow turn. Yeah, what do they, they call that, they have a good word for it in the Jamunji Dwayne Rock movies. Oh. Smolder. Smolder. Yeah, yeah. It's like the eyebrows up.

He's like, what's going on? Does it? Most of movie acting is just that, I think. Smoldering. Being able to just have that up your sleeve. Looks like I could be in a movie. You should do it. I think you'd be great to be.

All right. Well, I'm going to go. You're not 40 yet. Not yet. But I am, you know, in my mid-30s, which means I should be going forward. roles as 60-year-old women. Yeah, exactly. I can play mums.

Then you're stealing rolls away from them. No, but they're playing 90-year-old women. Oh, yeah, true. Yeah, that's how it works. But then 80-year-old men are playing 40. That's how it works. George Clooney is still like a heartthrob, and you're like, how?

Anyway. Well... I got upset about George Clooney. How? It's not fair. Why can I be a heartthrob? Marcel, thank you so much for joining us and regaling us with The Tale. excited to watch a bit more alien.

I'm going to check out the one that I haven't seen and then watch the TV series. Thank you very much. Then my work here is done. And I'm, oh, I'm turning into glowing dust and I'm fading out. He's ascending. Into the atmosphere. No, come back. You need to tell us about your stuff, your comedy writers group.

Yes, yes. You've got to check this out. So I have a podcast called the Comedy Writers Group podcast. But it's also a community for comedians, comedy writers, beginners, intermediates, the rest. We've got people who are working on their first five minutes, people who are working on their next festival show, people who are working on sketches and things. And it's all, as I say, very wholesome and lovely and love the podcast. And like the podcast is all about getting into the behind the scenes.

How does this work? Asking the practical questions, the people who listen to it can go, oh, yeah, it's all being demystified and made a lot more approachable because stand up and the like can be a lonely business. Yeah. And it can be hard to know, like, how to get started and what to do and what the process is. I've been on there, Jess, have you been on the comedy, right? Yeah, I have.

You get some wisdom from two of the best. And Matt has been on and he hates his episode. And he's glad it's one of the paywalled episodes. Like, thank God. Why did he hate it? Just because he found it hard to be honest and not funny. It was one of the episodes we were working on jokes and he just didn't like what he came up with. So it's his fault.

No, it's a good episode. But he just, I think he just went like, oh, I don't, it's not my day. I'm not bringing it. So I'm going to give him a redemption. episode in the future. He doesn't deserve it. Until he does something cute. Do you think he'd be listening to this?

Oh, no. Okay. Do you think you call the episode Matt Stewart's with a dollar sign? Yeah, but I have to find a second Matt Stewart. This time, there's more. This time, there's more. So you're doing out the comedy writers group, anything else? Have you got any gigs coming up you'd like to people to come to?

Yeah, find me, Marcel, the comedian on Instagram. I have monthly shows called Marcel and Furze. friends at The Improv Conspiracy. There'll be an August show, which I think will probably be more time for this. So come and check that out. It's a delightful show where I get a bunch of talented improvisers and a few sort of celeb faces that you've seen on podcasts and internet things and maybe the telly and just an excuse to go, you guys want to come play with me.

You guys want to come have some fun. And the show is really fun. Like, I feel like I'm getting away with something when I do shows like that. I can't believe that I can, number one, ask people to just come and do a thing for fun, people who are extremely talented and great, and then people want to pay money for it, and people will watch an hour show of people goofing around and go, that was really funny, and go, really? Wow, okay.

You liked it? You like me? Because it is, like, really, like, inner child sort of stuff. Like, you are asking grown out of, go, you want to come play with me, and then asking people to come watch you, like, you know, kid in the lounge room. style of and and putting on a show yeah we're putting our little show so and it's delightful and fun and people should come see it and say I'm here because you've too go away excuse me every time I've been to one of your shows you've ended up doing that voice well well that comes out of me too

there's a shade of great so I'm like oh there's a guy from New York but he could also be this guy you know I'm walking he's new I haven't seen him before oh we like him yeah it's fine Yeah, I got range. She's like, this guy, I'm a Hollywood producer. And I like, hey, wait, whoa, I'm a sort of a goofy dude. Oh, what's going on over here? It's really beautiful to watch. And then sometimes I'm British.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's that sound like? Oh, I'm sorry. I must be going. Oh, I'm an orphan. Oh, you know, that sort of, where am I? Who's this guy? Oh, you're all right.

I'm finding a character in the moment. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, Marcel's used, I'm channeling Marcel right now. I'm not a character. I'm a ghost that haunts. What's this new studio? Humdinger Studios. I've got unfinished business.

I've got to do another four-hour podcast. Oh, no. The doors are locked. No. I'm going to talk about a franchise from my time. The train arrives at a station, a series of films. You've got a train arrives at the station. Yeah.

You've got the trains arrive at the stations. This time there's more train. You've got a train that leaves the station. That one's a sad one. But then you've got the return of the train arrived at the station. Oh, I'm beginning to vanish. I'm turning into bright lights. My business is complete.

Wow. That was beautiful. Guys, what happened? Oh, hey, Marcel. How long is it? Are you ready to start the podcast? You bet. You just kind of, you just sort of sat there staring at the wall and drooling for about two hours.

We thought it would be rude to disturb you. That's your policy here, not to intervene. We're very polite. This is sort of a Star Trek thing. pulse, you were fine. Like whether there's documentary crews that can't interfere with the animals, you're like, well, if that line's getting killed by that gazelle, we can't do anything about it. Are we rolling on this?

This is crazy. Nature's wise. Anyway, thank you, Marcel. Thank you, Marcel. A pleasure. And as we say goodbye to Marcel, we say hello to you, our wonderful listeners who have been here the whole time. But we're breaking the fourth wall now. We're breaking the fourth wall.

We haven't been talking to you this whole time. No, what we're going to do now is everyone's favourite section of the show where we bask. We spend a little bit of time talking about you, celebrating you, our fantastic listeners and supporters, particularly people who support us on Patreon. Dave, do you want to explain what this section is? Well, this is, like you said, there's a bit of time to thank some people and also get people to contribute to the show because if you sign up to support the show at Patreon, you're not only keeping us going. You're also keeping yourself going with stuff to do.

For example, listen to bonus episodes. We put out one nearly every single week to do four a month these days. And there's over 260 in the back catalog that you can unlock instantly. So you can go back and listen to the old ones as well, going back nearly nine years. Crazy. And you can also hear about life just before anyone else. Get discount codes. Get ad-free listening.

You can be part of the Facebook group, beautiful part of the internet. You get to vote for topics. Tell us what you want the show to be. about. It's crazy. And also submit facts, quotes or questions to a section that actually has a little jingle. And it might go, something like this. Fact quote or question!

Dung! Dung! I always remember the song. He always remembers the dung. That's right. It's called fact quote or question. People get to submit facts, quotes, questions, brags, suggestions, recipes, gentle feedback, games.

We've had a bit of everything. It can be anything you want. your time. This is your time to shine. You also get to give yourself a title. Our first fact quote or questioner comes from Jordan. Jordan's given themselves a title, just a little guy. Just a little guy. Which I like. Just a little guy. And I like it. You like it? It appeals to me. And Jordan has given us a question. Question is, what's the longest you've worked without a day off? Oh. Which is such a good question. And I keep taking

my computer off loud to show you funny video. Oh, yeah. And then I get a text. What we like is when people answer their own questions. Jordan has done so if you want some thinking time. For me personally, as myself, okay, I've hit 28 with no days off, then a Saturday off, and then another week. If you're wondering, this is not legal, but my work is quite niche.

So we get emergency jobs sometimes. Interesting. Wow, so intrigued as to what it is. Yeah, emergency. It's like quite niche. Yeah. Yeah. 28 days with no day off, then one day off than another week.

No, I'd fall apart. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever done more than the week because for a while there, I was working about six days a week. Yeah. And then having Saturdays off. I'm not sure I've ever had a stretch where I was doing day after day after day. I mean, I guess when we're on tour, we're technically at work all the time. Are we?

No, but it's really fun. Because we're often watching movies in our pajamas as well. we do a podcast about the movie. That's right. Our job is really hard. Our job is very difficult, and I tell my police officer best friend that all the time. It was really hard to run in Berlin and we were playing wee tennis for about four hours a day. It was really tough. I was a gentlank. I was gentlank that I had to work for an hour that night at a show and it was really hard. It was really hard.

What do you mean? You found another body. Yeah, I think in retail and probably actually in radio as well at times because I was working weekends if you then had to fill in through the week, often you would do the weekend and then the week. So I've probably done six, seven. I would say, I have a feeling I've maybe done 10 days in a row, but possibly definitely not 28. That's crazy. And 10's not legal either, but, um, you know, Christmas rush in retail, it's important. You know, we also have emergency stuff like, people need underwear. It's very important. Back when I was doing trivia, I mean, it's not days, It's like, this is only a few days in a row,

but I remember once it got really, really busy and a lot of the other hosts were away, so I did something like 12 trivia gigs in three days or something. Whoa! I don't know, it's just, that's just a lot of setting up, driving to a place, doing a thing, packing up, driving to another one. And see, like, I guess the difference as well is the amount of hours you're working.

It's still mentally draining to work, say, like, 10 days in a row, but you're only doing a couple hours each night if you're doing a tour or if you're doing trivia or something like that, If you're doing really long days and 28 in a row, that's crazy. You know, you're basically not living at that point. Yeah, I've got to say, you probably win this one. Yeah, I think you win. I think you win, and that might have been what Jordan was going for.

Well, I respect it. And good luck in your niche industry. Yeah, niche. I'm thinking some sort of like, like he's, I don't know, like. I'm thinking a trade. Yeah, I'm thinking like fixing something. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, like a cooling system in a hospital's broken down or something

and you've got to do 28 days in a row to get it back online. Imagine if you just nailed that of your first get. That's just my gut. Jordan, let us know. Let us know. Exciting. Next up, we have Piper Gallagher. Piper has given themselves the title.

It's been 30 years. It's time to stop jumping and accept that the Venga bus is never coming. Wow. And Piper's given a quote and suggestion. Cheeky. Their words, not mine. Okay. Here it is.

Oh, it's a little long. Here we go. What are you? I'm looking out because. He's immediately started. tippy tapy typing. That's because, so Tony Martin, he's, the band. We don't need Matt here for.

Well, Damien Cowell, his disco machine, he's, Demi Kowl was one of the guys from Tizm. And he often performs with Tony Martin, the great comedian. Yes. And they've got a song called Where the Fucks the Vengabas. Which I'm just looking up, you can listen to on Spotify. That's very good. And it absolutely goes off live. And it features Tony Martin yelling, where the fuck's the Vengabus?

Very good stuff. Look it up. I saw him live. with Matt a couple of years ago. Man, the shows are so fun. And I believe their other band, the arseless chaps, currently on an Australian tour.

Yes. Okay, Piper's quote and suggestion here. We all know John Green for his team romance novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, and his and his brother, Hank's massive contribution to online communities, online education and online philanthropy, as we know them today.

But you may not know about his non-fiction book based on his podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, essays on a human-centered planet. The idea behind the project is to review a random aspect of human life on a five-star scale. Anything from Diet Dr. Pepper to Super Mario Kart to Sycamore trees to the Jimmy film Harvey in unreasonably deep, eloquent and touching ways. The quote I've selected is from his review of whispering.

I'm really excited by this because I do like John Green and Hank Green. I like the Greens. Okay, here's the quote. These days when my kids whispered, to me, it's usually to share a worry they find embarrassing or frightening. It takes courage even to whisper those fears, and I'm so grateful when they trust me with them, even if I don't know quite how to answer. I want to say, you don't have any cause for concern, but they do have cause for concern. I want to say there's nothing to be scared about, but there's plenty to be scared about.

When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it, but I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff. I give whispering four stars. Sorry for the long-witted FQQ but I wanted to share a side of a man a lot of people know very little about. That's really nice. That is nice. I like that a lot. I like the idea of reviewing things. Yes, totally. That's very funny and very sweet. Thank you, Piper. Okay, finally for fact quote a question this week, we have Connor B. Conner B. Conner B is giving themselves the title, Chief Coordinator Officer for the deployment of Seagulls that hover around picnic tables looking to take your chips.

Wow. That's scary. And Connor has given us a joke. A joke for the nature lovers of the podcast. What did the horny, what did the horny frog say? Oh, anyway, something about, around ribbet, fuck it. Rub it, rub it. Rob it.

Okay, that's good. A joke for the classics lovers of the podcast. Why doesn't Oedipus use foul language? He kisses his mother with that mouth. Something in there for everybody, the nature lovers and the nerds. That's great. Dave got it. Thank you.

Thank you, Connor. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jordan. The next thing we like to do is give some shoutouts to people who support us over on Patreon. They get a little shout out here, and we usually play a bit of a game. Now, the topic was alien, and the alien franchise. And the alien franchise, that's right. and I actually, before we move on,

we have to issue a correction. Oh, my gosh. In this very episode. So we recorded this one actually last week when Marcel was here. And that night. And I was a great report, by the way. I absolutely loved it. I'm a big alien fan, like I said.

He messaged the group. Maybe they even that afternoon saying, oh no, I got it wrong. Master of the House. That's the song. That's not from Fidler on the roof. Yeah. That's from Les Mis.

And I'm sure that there's been a few musical fans. Yep. that that has annoyed. And I honestly thought, like, I haven't seen Fiddler on the roof. Why would I know a song from it? There you go. So he wanted us. And I said, relax, we haven't done the Patreon bit yet.

There's still time to correct this before the tweets, before the emails, before the messages. So if you've tweeted, if you've emailed, if you've put it in the Patreon, go delete it. Or if you really have to leave it in the Patreon Facebook group, comment below and say, okay I've just got up to the bit where they've corrected themselves and I apologize. And we accept. We accept your apology. Hopefully you accept our apology for being wrong. Never doubt us again.

It was just a joke. We were kidding. It's a bit. Obviously that's not fiddler on the roof. We know that. We know musicals. We love musicals. I couldn't see myself just then, but I really, I think if I could, I would have enjoyed the shape

my face just made. We love music. I think that was really fun. I think you got to enjoy that. I did. I'm the only one of the world who got to enjoy that. That's lucky.

Cameras are not rolling. Okay, so I am a little stuck for a game on this one because although I listened intently to the plot and summaries of the alien franchise, I'm still not very familiar with it. What about I bring up a list of alien franchise characters? Okay. We give him a character.

Yeah, I've got the wiki page for a list of alien characters. Fantastic. I'll read the names. You can give him a character. Okay. All right. Are you ready? Yeah.

I feel like I've lost you again into a video. No, I'm getting the list ready. Sorry. I'm just checking. Just checking. Okay, here we go. Ready. All right.

He's ready. So, first up from Denver, Colorado. It's Chris Her. Chris Her, aka from the aliens, 1986 film, Private Spunk Meyer. Oh, yeah, that's good. You've started strong. Yeah, that's the best one.

From, oh, address unknown. We can only assume deep within the four. Portress of the Moles. It's Alistair Webster. From the original movie, we've got Gilbert Kane. Gilbert Kane. That's a good one. Alistair Webster is a great name too.

There's a lot of Alistair Webster. I could have swapped those around and I would have been like, yeah, Alistair Webster was in the aliens movie. Yeah. Next up from Muncie, Indiana, the favorite place of Jerry from Parks and Rec. Jerry Gergich. It's his favorite place. He loves to holiday there.

It's Elizabeth Pike. Elizabeth Pike, okay, introduced in Alien 3, we're looking for Walter Golick. Possibly Walter Golick, but... Let's say Golick. It's like Golick. Thank you, Walter, aka Elizabeth. From New York, New York, it's MJ.

MJ? Okay, well, from New York, New York, MJ, aka Vincent de Stefano. Ooh, DeStefano. Yeah, I reckon that's what they're saying. That's nice. Vincent DeStefano. Vinnie DeStefano. For that's good stuff.

From Chicago, Illinois, it's Jennifer E. Burgess. Jennifer E. Burgess, aka from Prometheus, Meredith Vickers. Oh, yeah, that's a good one too. Guys, some great names. Maybe I'll watch this movie, then I'm sure will terrify me. Also from the unknown, deep within the fortress of the moles, we have Paige Elwood. Page Elwood, okay, from Alien Covenant. It is Corrine O'Ram.

Wow. That's pretty good Very good Biologist Yeah Important From Helsinki In Finland

We have Neti From alien Romulus We're looking at Bjorn Bjorn Oh we've gone from Helsinki To

Knoxfield in Melbourne And Shazah Shazer A.k.a Jones An important role Nicknamed Jonesy Of course.

And finally... Oh, that's the cat. Oh. That's right. That's the cat. That's cute. Finally, from Watson in the ACT in Australia. It's Kate Ritchie.

Kate Ritchie? Oh, my goodness. A.k.A. David 8. Oh, what did he eat? Jonesy. Bit of a... What? No, that's fucked up.

Played by Michael Fassbender. Oh, very good. Oh, it's the eighth in a line of David models. Oh, I see. Fun to name a robot David. David's pretty funny. I think David's a really good name for a dog. Yes.

Or a cat. Yeah. David. David. Thank you so much to Kate, Shazanetti, Paige, Jennifer, MJ, Elizabeth, Alistair and Chris. Chris. Finally. I love you, Chrissy.

Or Michael. Michael. The final thing to do. Was that on this episode? I think it was on this episode. Michael. The final thing that we need to do is welcome three people. into the Trip Ditch Club.

Now, the Trip Ditch Club is for people who have supported us on the shoutout level or above for three consecutive years. We welcome them in. Once you're in, you can't leave. But why would you want to? We have everything you could possibly need. We've got a bar. We've got Dave Books a Band.

There's games. There's like an arcade out the back. We've got a pretty good collection of air hockey tables. We've got toilets. We've just renovated the toilets because somebody destroyed them. Stop looking at me. It wasn't me. Stop looking.

So we've got nice, brand new toilets. It's like walking into a spa in there. It's so nice. Wow. No, not for long. There's a lot of essential oils burning in there at all times. Because Dave, unfortunately, will not stop destroying toilets. He will not stop.

There's nothing illegal about what I'm doing. It's natural. Everyone does it. Nobody said it's illegal, but ethically it is. It's not ethical. It's not ethical to the cleaner. It's not morally. and honestly, medically I'm concerned for you.

That's great. So we are going to be welcoming in three inductees. Dave, have you booked a band this week? Oh my gosh, you're never going to believe it. Because I didn't know what this topic was going to be, of course. Love alien, but I didn't know that's what myself was going to talk about. I've just checked the emails. You know who's just confirmed?

What? It's alien ant farm. No. Smooth criminal. What? Can you believe it? I can't. I'm just thinking of their top ten played songs on Alien app on Spotify.

That is Alien Ant Farm. Number one is their smooth criminal cover, then there's smooth criminal re-recorded. Yes. And also smooth criminal re-recorded. That's so good. They were really determined not to be a one-hit wonder. So they've done the one hit three times. That's right.

We're actually a three-hit wonder. Okay. Well, the second and third time it wasn't a hit. I bet you feel pretty silly. Okay. Are you ready for me to welcome some people in? Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Have you just looked at the first name? Yeah. Okay, great. First up, from Kenny Bunk in... What's M.E? Oh, my gosh. I mean, I could look this.

I don't know why I've made you do it, but you're started, so... All right, Emmy. Emmy. Emmy. It's Maine. Oh, Kenny Buck in Maine. Confusing. It's Sir Gertelot. Bow down!

Sir Gertrothal. Bail down. Oh, my lord. My lord. What do you need a hand with that thing, sir? From Milton Keynes in the Great Britain, it's Richie Bolton. I feel Richie Rich when Richie Bolton's into Oh, and also from Maine, this time from Winterport.

Really? It's Amy Clark. Amy Clark, brings that certain. Amy Spark. Welcome in. That was nice. Well done. Amy, Richie, Sir Gertellot. Please, take a seat, head to the bar.

Plenty of drinks available to you. Alien Ant Farm will be starting in about 25 minutes. We're going to be opening with Smooth Criminal and closing with Smooth Criminal re-recorded. As we have all requested. Well, that brings us to the end then, Dave. Is there anything else that we need to tell people? Have I forgotten anything?

Just if they want to drop us a line. We've got some email. We've got some email. Do you go on pod at Gmail. That's right. We've also got Instagram and Facebook. Yes. And an un-updated Twitter account, which is at Do Go On Pod.

But if you want to get onto our TikTok, yes, what's the address for that one? That's Do Go On Podcast. Nice. Look us up. But apart from that, that's pretty much it. Um, yep, that's it. So, um, tune in next week, I guess. Hey, I reckon you should.

It would be a great one. It'll be really fun. We've actually already recorded it. So I can guarantee you it's a fun time. Is it? Yeah, you did the report and it's awesome. Oh, yeah, that was sick. Yeah, had me on tenter hooks.

Ooh. I'm saying that correctly. Exciting. Never know. Stay tuned for that next week. Um, and I guess, well, I was going to wrap it up, but that's your job. We will be back next week. But until then, thank you so much.

for listening and goodbye. Bye. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are and we can come and tell you when we're coming there. Wherever we go, we always hear six months later, oh, you should come to Manchester. We were just in Manchester. But this way you'll never miss out.

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