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We love Eddie, and not just because he's stunning to look at and a tremendous player here in Hollywood. We love him because he can bring the pain, and bring the pain he does.
"Asimovian." He says that shit. Who says that shit? Eddie.
I consider this a good summary of the episode.
Very entertaining. Eddie had some great insights.
I always assumed Arcturus was a colony filled with easy chicks, not alien chicks.
except that apparently whatever "Arcturians" are, you can't tell the males from the females, and it doesn't matter.
Even assuming that the characters are teasing each other, it's always seemed to me there's more to that story than just relaxed Arcturian morals. It's as if they're talking about sheep or something.
In fact there's an old joke that goes sorta like that. (The punchline is "yeah, but you picked the UGLIEST one!" You can probably work out the rest of the joke yourself. :-)
Right. I guess I just never took that remark literally. It just seems like any other discussion of girls by military men; they always seem to claim that the other guy's date was a dude.
Iron Man comes to mind, and I think there was a similar thing in Top Gun.
The links here mostly work at night, mostly.
Aliens on Amazon.com
Aliens on IMDB
As an avid fan of this film I have included a few of my own comments; these are marked with an *.
Many of the points I bring up come from James Cameron's own commentary (also required viewing IMHO); these are preceded by "JCC."
Certain comments are marked with a timestamp; this refers to the commentary time, not the film time.
*Burke will state it soon, but it has actually been 57 years since the events of Alien.
*The year is generally accepted to be 2179.
JCC: It is never explicitly stated, but Ripley never in fact sets foot on Earth in this film.
JCC: Despite some initial difficulty nailing down what Cameron wanted, Ray Lovejoy did edit Aliens.
*There were two major cast / crew changes on Aliens. Adrian Biddle replaced DickBush as the cinematographer, and Michael Biehn replaced James Remar as Hicks.
JCC: Cameron got the job to write Aliens because the producers of Alien had read his script for The Terminator and wanted to work with him on something. He was allowed to also direct the film following the success of The Terminator.
JCC: Sigourney Weaver was not brought on board until very late in the writing process. Cameron was asked to pursue a storyline that excluded Ripley which he balked at. As a result Sigourney became the first actress to get $1 million for her role, a role for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
JCC: The robotic cutting arm and laser scanner were not in the initial budget for the film; Cameron paid for them himself.
JCC: The reasoning behind the suit design is to suggest that while this is the future, Burke and the other bureaucrats are "suits," and regardless of timeframe, a "suit" is a "suit."
Rear Projection, or RP
(0:13:43) JCC: Sigourney later said that she had based her entire character on this scene. Also the picture Burke shows her is actually Sigourney’s mother.
Look, Helen Mirren!
(0:15:40) *The crew dossiers that appear behind Ripley inthis scene were originally written by Ridley Scott for the cast of Alien, and appear as an “Easter Egg” on older editions of the Alien DVD.
(0:16:45) *Adjusting for inflation from 1986 brings the cost of the Nostromo up to ~ $83 million, still pretty cheap for a spacecraft.
*Michael Biehn states (on one of the Alien 3 special features) that he got paid almost as much for the use of his picture in that film, as he got for actually playing the role of Hicks in Aliens.
(0:20:10) JCC: This entire sequence on the colony comprises an entire reel that was cut from the theatrical release.
“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.” - Leonardo Da Vinci (unconfirmed)
Peter’s neighbor in Spiderman 2, Mageina Tovah.
Paul Reiser, as Burke
Some Alien stuff Bob Burns cares for.
*Fun fact: On the readout that displays the names of everyone in cryosleep, Hudson is missing.
Re: Eddie’s Mom: Newsweek, February 18, 1980“Women in the Military – Should They Be Drafted?”
Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
Ron Cobb designed the “BugStompers” logo on the nose of the dropship.
William Goldman, we mention him a lot.
*Sidebar, my fault, keep reading
*The Smart Gun, is actually a German MG-42 dressed in parts from a motorcycle, and mounted on a steadicam harness.
*A good breakdown of some of the weapons used.
*The incinerators are based on the M-16
*Vasquez carries a Colt 1911
*Gorman carries a Heckler & Koch VP70; also the gun handed to Bishop before his pipe crawl
*Subdued rank, or rank that matches the camouflage of the uniform, came as a result of Vietnam, and a lack of understanding of basic color science. If you’re in a green place, wearing all green, the bright yellow thing on your sleeve, or the shiny metal thing on your headgear, tends to stick out. It didn’t take the enemy too long to learn rank structure and act accordingly.
In case you haven’t seen Star Trek: Lens Flare
Eddie means aeronautics, not avionics
*The APC is a great cheat; watch closely, you never see more than 3 people get out, that’s all there was room for. The interior was a whole other set.
Eddie is either referring to the Daewoo K11, or the XK8
Carrie Henn was cast as Newt with no acting experience; Aliens remains her only acting role.
Lance Henriksen had special double-pupil scleral lenses made for the dissection scene, but Cameron deemed them to creepy.
(1:19:10) *The model shop guys did re-create the clear “dome” of the Alien skull, but Cameron had them remove it because these aliens would be jumping around a lot more, and be more prone to the dome being damaged and needing to be replaced.
M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle
(1:45:15) JJC: The little look that Bishop does after "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid," is because he realizes he just made a joke, but since he's not human he’s not sure if it worked.
The closest thing we have to the M41A Pulse Rifle, the G11
*There is an editing mistake as Ripley is arming herself to get newt; she grabs a pulse rifle and a flame thrower off the rack, but sets them down in the wrong order. Grabs rifle, puts down flame thrower, grabs flame thrower, puts down rifle.
(2:30:10): *The Powerloader could either be suspended from cables on the ceiling, or in this case, with a pole armout the back.
The Reebok Alien Stompers sneakers
Last edited by Matt Vayda (2010-03-16 03:39:12)
according to the first draft of the script, Wierzbowski actually had lines. His lines were the ones about cornbread and some other stuff. I think his lines ended up being given to the Frost character. That is, unless the skinny, black guy is the Wierzbowski character...
So. I am listening for Aliens right now and right in the beginning you guys talk about which movie is Bill Gates (Aliens) and which is Steve Jobbs (Alien).. And joking mentioning Jobb´s cancer and how this joke will turn out in the future..... Well.. 
Hee hee. That one took a while to pay off, but it was just a matter of time.
That's nothing compared to the number of verbal timebombs in DIF episodes that will all go off when _I_ die. 
Great commentary. Perfect movie.
Soooooo.....
Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-06-26 07:14:54)
What have I done?
I would have thought this was the obvious one, but then no one did it. So I had too.
Back in 1986, they released a board game based on the movie. This is a flash version of that game, and it's brilliant - really hard to do and quite addictive. Warning, it can be unfair, but then that's part of the fun!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408816
Soooooo.....
For Trey:
I'm really late to the party on this one, but it's not my fault. I only discovered this page like a few weeks ago through Zarban's page (which I in turn found through Rifftrax iRiff hunting). Anyway, I'll throw my two cents in for the hell of it:
1) The Arcturians line bothered me too for the same reason. I eventually decided that it was just probably a human colony. Humans can get pretty weird over a few generations if they are geographically isolated even on Earth, so I can only imagine what an isolated colony in space would be like.
2) I thought that almost every special edition scene was something that the movie was better without except for two:
2a) The scene with Ripley's daughter was short, poingant and added some emotional resonance to her character as well as helped explain why she was so crazy about saving Newt. Also, an interesting bit of triva: The upcomming Alien game that actually looks like it -won't- suck is a pure horror game in which you are trapped in a space station with an single Alien. It's not a shooter like the previous games, and you -cannot- fight the Alien because it will pretty much murder you outright. The protagonist of the new game is Amanda Ripley and takes place 15 years after Alien and focuses on her searching for her mother.
2b) The autoguns scene. For some bizarre reason, these scene was included in a cut that exists in the various broadcast TV cuts even though I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the theatrical version I saw. Yes, I agree with all the points you guys made about these scenes but I liked them because it was an earlier indication that the Aliens weren't just animals and could learn.
Everything else, though, I could have done without. The colony scenes undercut the tension of when the Marines landed on the colony because in the theatrical cut you were only seeing it for the first time so you never had a baseline for what is normal. In the SE, the second they leave the dropship it's immediately obvious that this is not normal because you know what it's supposed to be like. Hudson's painful "badass" speech was just awkward. Even the little extra lingering glances between Ripley and Hicks towards the end that imply a little brewing romance were good cuts.
One other thing: I had a slightly different interpretation of Ripley's behavior in the hive. Yes, emptying all her guns was a tactically unsound but made sense for the character, but what prompted her Alien baby murder spree was the hatching of the egg. The look she gives the Queen after she sees the egg hatch I read as Ripley interpreting that act as the Queen trying to pull a fast one (i.e. the big xenos back off but then Queenie tries to slip a facehugger into the mix without Ripley noticing). Ripley gives her a "oh you sneaky bitch" look just before she starts torching the nest. Sadly, she then kinda goes off the rails at that point and we all know what happens after that.
Thanks for your time and keep up the good work!
2b) The autoguns scene. For some bizarre reason, these scene was included in a cut that exists in the various broadcast TV cuts even though I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the theatrical version I saw. Yes, I agree with all the points you guys made about these scenes but I liked them because it was an earlier indication that the Aliens weren't just animals and could learn.
It's not uncommon for TV versions of films to have extra scenes included. You have to fit the movie into a certain time slot with commercials, so you either have to cut things out or add bits. Often the added scenes will balance out things you had to cut for content.
(long gone are the days when they would film "clean" versions of scenes for TV, as was done with both Animal House and Ghostbusters)
+1
long gone are the days when they would film "clean" versions of scenes for TV
I'm not talking about dubbing over swearing. I'm talking about doing an entire new take of a scene with the cast saying new dialog. In Ghostbusters, the TV version has Bill Murray saying "Well, wasn't that a load of fun" or some such when he comes out of the hotel ballroom, instead of his "We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass!" You can tell he probably only agreed to one take of that version 
He also has a different joke instead of the "dickless" line, with a different setup. In Animal House, they filmed it once with women topless, and once with them in bras. I saw the bra version on TV long before I ever saw the theatrical version. Some of this footage even slipped into the main movie: when the guys are fleeing the Black nightclub on their road trip, the girl who jumps out the car window still has her bra on while it was long gone a scene earlier. Obviously, the editor liked the bra take better than the topless one, and figured nobody would notice. Well, either that, or the girl refused to do the stunt without some protection.
Last edited by Invid (2014-09-16 22:49:59)
Prink.
It's not uncommon for TV versions of films to have extra scenes included. You have to fit the movie into a certain time slot with commercials, so you either have to cut things out or add bits. Often the added scenes will balance out things you had to cut for content.
(long gone are the days when they would film "clean" versions of scenes for TV, as was done with both Animal House and Ghostbusters)
That was half of the fun. It was neat having seen glimpses of the versions that weren't shown in theaters and trying to find them amidst tons of home tv copies.
Regarding the TV sanitized versions/edits, some of those were pretty amusing. I remember half the jokes missing from Blazing Saddles, for obvious reasons. One in particular that blew my mind was when Cleavon Little greets the old lady on the street and she says "Up yours, N-----!". I watched a tv edit, and the replacement line they dubbed in (and I'm not even kidding here) was "Screw you, N------!". Because obviously, "up yours" was the offensive part of that statement that television audiences would have a problem with.
On a related note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p … khv7xCKVP0
Curiously, it doesn't have extendable rocket pods.
I just heard something interesting. I remember you guys mentioning how weird and out of place Frost's line about Arcturian Poontang was since it seemed to be contrary to the fiction of the universe the rest of the dialog was building (i.e. that humans had never to their knowledge encountered alien life beyond probably "bugs" and microbes).
I was listening to the Cracked podcast in an episode in which they discussed best and worst fictional companies to work at and they referenced the Wolfpop podcast "I Was There, Too". In that podcast, they interview "everyone else" from famous movies and scenes (such as everyone on the bus from Speed who wasn't Sanda Bullock and Keanu Reeves).
Anyway, apparently they did an ep in which he interviewed Ricco Ross (the actor who played Frost). I haven't listened to the original ep yet, but the topic of the "Arcturan Poontang" line came up. I remember you guys puzzling over that line in the podcast and I had the same reaction because it seemed to be contrary to the canon of the universe they were building otherwise (that humans had probably never encountered alien life outside of maybe "bugs" and microbes). According the podcast that mentioned it, the "Arcturan Poontang" line was actually improvised by Ross and wasn't part of the original written screenplay. According to the actor, they thought it was funny so they wrote it in.
I'm trying to verify this, but it would make sense as it didn't really seem to fit.
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