Well, as far as I can remember, they changed the names of the two protagonists and a couple location names, but even then you could tell it was supposed to be a sequel to Aliens. I myself kept seeing past the names and seeing it as an alternate branching from Aliens.
Another tidbit that I recalled, whilst reading through the thread.
In an early shooting script for the original Alien, there was a scene that took place while Parker was off refilling Dallas’ abandoned flamethrower. He ran across the critter, which didn’t see him, because it was fascinated by a flashing green strobe light in one of the airlocks.
He manages to get ahold of Ripley on the intercom, and they try to seal the thing in the airlock, so they can “blast the fucker off into space.” Ash tumbles to what they’re doing, and sets off some kind of audio alarm, which makes the alien jump back out of the airlock, just as the interior door is closing.
The thing loses an arm, trapped by the door, and there’s a fair bit of air lost to the ensuing hull breach, before they manage to close all the right pressure doors.
(At least part of this scene was filmed; IIRC, stills from the scene appeared in a one shot Alien movie magazine. Anyone catch the recent re-release of the film see anything similar to this?)
So yeah, originally it was supposed to be able to see, at some point.
And as Jonathan Chance mentioned, there were a few bits in the novelization of the movie, that never made it into the final cut of the film. Alan Dean Foster wrote the book, and from my limited experience, this is like a trademark with this guy. He’s written quite a few “novelization of the feature film” books, and in damn near all of 'em, there’s stuff that gets cut between the draft he works from, and the finished film.
In fact, he wrote the book for Aliens as well, and included the robot sentry guns, which only got put back into the film for the directors’ cut.
Another little bit with the eyes…at least in the director’s cut, there’s a scene with Ash looking at a couple of pictures of the xenomorph fetus in the lab when Ripley comes up and starts talking to him about opening the doors and letting the search crew in despite her orders. You can clearly see a huge blue eye. The covering up the dome and the eyes didn’t necessarily get rid of the eyes. The actor didn’t need them to see, so if they didn’t want them at all, they could have filled in the sockets or made the front end of the dome dark enough to hide them like they did in the other three movies. I think they look more sinister without visible eyes, but I never saw it to mean they didn’t have any at all. Plus, for a creature that can apparently live in a vaccuum, being dependant on things like sound and scent doesn’t seem like the best idea.
As for where they came from, I’ve read/heard that Scott always believed them to be some sort of weapon. Their creators would seed a planet, wait for the xenomorph to essentially wipe out their opponent, than their masters would push a button and they’d all die. Of course, I can’t tell if he means for the Space Jokey to be one of the creators, or just some hapless schmuck who came across a xenomorph and bit the dust.
Thanks for that, I was wondering what happened to them.
That’s not a trademark. Movie novelisations (and comic adaptations, for that matter) are written to be released at the same time as the movie; back in the day when single-screen cinemas were the norm, they sometimes used to sell them in the lobby as theatres sell souvenir programmes.
What this means is that the book is almost always based on a cut of the film which is not the cinema cut and, since most final edits involve removing scenes to get the movie to the length you want, it will therefore contain stuff that the movie does not.
I dunno. In the fourth movie, two aliens slice’n’dice one of their own so the victim’s acidic blood will let them escape from their pen. Sounds pretty cutthroat to me.
Yeah, but those are aliens infected with human DNA. So obviously they got it from us…
How long can they live in a vacuum, though? A few minutes, sure, but other then that, we really don’t know. All this means is that they are very tough, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t suffocate like everything else after about 5 minutes.
It looks very much like the eggs were being transported, or else they wouldn’t have been neatly arrayed below the field in the cargo hold that reacts when broken.
They also shot scenes in which the alien is able to cocoon its victims and start a process which turns them into eggs, with facehuggers inside.
Since the second film shows that a queen lays the eggs, this scene is no longer cannon
Doc Cathode: True, that. As I understand, those were the scenes restored to the flick for last year’s Hallowe’en rerelease. (I never did get to catch it in the theaters.) Matter of fact, I think they were included on the original laser disc issued way back when, as well.
The scene with the airlock was never finished, that I’ve heard tell. It just got written out earlier in the process, I guess.
Correct - and on the laser disc thing, I think.
I don’t see any reason why the scene shouldn’t be canon anyway. Worker bees are capable of turning eggs into queen eggs; this is just a more advanced way of doing the same thing. It would also be natural for the aliens to have a way of guaranteeing a queen egg in every colony.
But worker bees cannot lay eggs themselves. Only the queen can lay eggs.
Think of it this way, if an alien worker can cocoon humans and make face huggers, then a single alien can over run an entire planet. Instead of killing prey, it cocoons them. This leads to face huggers. These beget chest bursters. These become workers. These workers cocoon their prey. And so on. . .
I’d imagine Aliens make sure each colony has a queen the same way ants, bees and others do. The queen produces extra workers and the workers raise a queen larva. Upon reaching adulthood, the new queen takes the extras and founds a new hive.
IIRC (and I know we have a few beekeepers on the Dope who will correct me if I’m wrong) The hive always keeps a supply of royal jelly. When the queen dies, the worker bees immediately use the jelly to make several queen cells (the cells used to raise queen larvae are different from those used to raise drone, or worker larvae. Though, they start out as the same larvae). As soon as a queen emerges from her cell, she destroys the other queen cells and takes over.
In one of the many Darkhorse comic book mini-series spun off from the movies, this is pretty much how the aliens spawn new colonies. Once the colony reaches a certain size, a new queen will be hatched, and she’ll peel off from the hive, taking a handful of drones with her.
The royal jelly used to create a new queen, it turns out, bestows superhuman strength and agility to any humans who consume the stuff, for a limited time.
Of course, that’s drifting outside the canon of the movies.
Oh, and back to the restored scenes in the original movie:
I seem to recall that the alien was using Brett, whom it had lobotomized with it’s striking teeth, to create a new egg. Dallas had just been immobilized, to be a host for the new facehugger.
Or possibly the other way around. It was using one to make an egg, and storing one as a host, whichever way it went.
True, but its not like they’re going to get promoted, or receive a bonus from their bosses like Burke would have done should he have got specimens back to Earth through Ripley and Newt.
And how does genetic memory run through birth? I dont have any of my Mother and Fathers memories. 
It can also be used as a hallucinogenic drug. The Church Of The Queen Mother gives out small doses of it as a sacriment.
Jelly addiction features in Aliens-Music Of The Spears, and Aliens-Hive.