Actually, it’s two keys. You must have hit the dreaded [tab] [enter] sequence.
Funny, I was under the impression the blast of the explosion shot back up the stairwell and sent Crowe flying as he was looking over the railing (and Hicks was trying to pull him away). When the Alien quadrilogy boxed set gets cheap enough, I’ll pick it up.
I’ve never heard that the black guy dies first. In fact, I find he’s frequently one of the last to go. But go he does.
One of my favorite movie cliches is related to Askia’s Expendable Negro, but is a little different. It is the False Ending, usually found in cheesy sci-fi movies and thrillers. And how do you know you have a False Ending on your hands?
We’ll turn to the excerable Leviathan and the hilariously awful Fortresss for two perfect examples:
Well, you start with a movie where a group of diverse individuals are stuck together in A Bad Situation. In Leviathan, they were stuck in a deep-sea mining vessel with a mutant sea-monster on the loose. In Fortress, they were in the jail of the future, where disobedient prisoners were killed off in gruesome ways by the artificially intelligent computer jailor.
Your Diverse Individuals should include a variety of different ethnicities, ages, etc. In Leviathan, they included your slutty female, your sleazy guy, your doctor-who-only-cared-about-himself, and of course, your all-around good buddy of a black guy, played by Ernie Hudson. In Fortress, you had your wise old black man, your super-nerd, and your effeminate Latino.
Make sure you have a Hero and a Love Interest. In Leviathan, our Hero was Peter Weller, and our Love Interest was one of his coworkers on the mining vessel. In Fortress, our Hero was Christopher Lambert, and the Love Interest was his pregnant wife, also being held in the prison.
The plot of the movie is that everyone trying to escape from The Bad Situation, but in doing so, they get killed one by one. The least sympathetic character or two will get killed off first. After that, the order of death is fairly random, with your more noxious characters going earlier than those who are supposed to be more likeable. The black guy doesn’t die first, as he is almost always a likeable character.
(Now, keep in mind that this type of set-up does not always lead to a False Ending. While it’s enough of a cliche that Roger Ebert dubbed it an “Ark Movie” in his Glossary of Movie Terms, it doesn’t have to be cheesy. Alien used this set-up to great advantage, though the lack of a Love Interest would have been a clue that things would come out a little differently. And of course, Stagecoach is the ultimate Ark Movie. But if it’s a crappy movie, chock-full of cliches and retreads of other movies, then it’s quite likely you’ll find a False Ending.)
Finally, the Hero, the Love Interest, and one of your Diverse Individuals escape to safety. The Diverse Individual should be either the black guy or some other identifiably ethnic male. In Leviathan, our Hero, the Love Interest, and the black guy swam to the surface of the ocean. In Fortress, our Hero, the Love Interest, and the effeminate Latino destroyed the computer, escaped the jail, and made it across the border to Mexico. We, the audience, are supposed to breathe a sigh of relief. Yay! It’s over! But the savvy viewer knows that Ernie Hudson is toast. He can’t possibly make it to the end of the movie alive. He is the Expendable Negro, after all. Same with the effeminate Latino.
So, in Leviathan, the mutant sea monster comes back for an encore and chomps poor Ernie, and in Fortress, the truck controlled by the computer jailor flattens our doomed effeminate Latino, leaving our lily-white Hero and Love Interest to celebrate their victory without having to deal with that pesky minority third wheel.
So, in the scenario of the False Ending, the black guy doesn’t die first, but you can be sure he dies eventually.
Frost falls, there’s an image of the bag burning, Hicks trying to pull Crowe away, then the explosion and two bodies flying. Cut to the APC and someone mistakenly saying “Wierzbowski and Crowe are down,” while the camera pans to show Frost and Crowe as the only two flatlined, and then you realize that I’ve watched these movies too often.
I suggest picking up the quadrilogy even if you already have the Alien Legacy boxed set, as there is a good deal of new commentary tracks and features that weren’t on previous versions.
Well, now, wait a sec. I could buy the burning ammunition bag didn’t go down the stairwell with Frost, but the line is “Frosty and Crowe are down”.
And I’ve seen it too often, too.
Hmm. I never thought of it that way, and it could very likely be right. I assumed it was the result of confusion from the fog of war. Watching it with English subtitles would hopefully clear it up. FWIW, Google has a few hits for “wierzbowski and crowe are down” but none for frost, frosty, frostie etc.
Actually, Apone was probably killed when an alien burst out of his chest, sometimes between the point they leave him there, and the point where the aliens attack the colony En Masse.
It’s unclear but I’m going to disagree. Barring the “five minutes from implantation to full-grown chestburster” we see in Aliens vs Predator, it’s pretty well established in the other movies that a significant length of time is necessary for the alien to grow and be born. While Apone was likely impregnated, I doubt he had died by the time the aliens attacked Operations.
Okay, I’ll admit that sounds right. And I’ll also admit that for years I thought Ferro’s first name was “Mira”.
But I knew all along what “five by five” meant.
Well…yes. She was hot right?
I don’t get your objection. 
The only one I’ve seen of these is The Fifth Element, and in that case I think Tucker’s character survived because he wasn’t merely The Black Guy. He was also The Obnoxious Comedy Relief Sidekick. As we all know, characters in this class never die. They don’t even die if you really, really want them to. This effect is, apparently, powerful enough to cancel Askia’s Law.
Holly cow! I was seriously thinking of starting a thread like this, but you beat me to it.
I haven’t seen vary many horror movies, but in the ones I have seen, if a black guy (or woman) dies, it wasn’t first.
Someone enlighten me: was Keith David’s character left standing at the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing? It was Kurt Russell and one other, either of whom {or both?} might be The Thing… I have a hunch the black guy made it to the end, but I have been wrong before. Once. For 20 minutes. In 1960.
Nope. Just Kurt Russell and T.K. Carter. Somehow he beat out Ji-Tu Cumbucka for the role of “big badass black guy” in this movie.
This thread reminded me of an exception: New Jack City, where a white guy dies first. Wesley Snipes throws him off of either the Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge, I don’t recall which. 'Course, most of the non-cop black guys buy it as the movie progresses, but since 95% of the cast and all the bad guys are black, what do you expect? Maybe Askia’s Law works in reverse for movies with a predominantly black cast?
Given its new nickname, (and thank you, Case Sensitive) I decided to take a couple hours and do a little scholarship into the matter. Comments welcome.
CLICHE’S NAME: The Sacrificial Negro, aka (on the SDMB) Askia’s Law.
DEFINITION: It’s a cliche frequently seen in the action movie, horror and sci-fi movie genres. Whenever there’s a deadly something on the loose killing an eclectic, diverse group of people of many races and creeds, the black guy in the group always gets killed. This is often done to partly to underscore the impartiality and implacable nature of death, partly to show the severity of the danger the rest of the cast is in. To a lesser extent, this tendency to kill off the black guys happens whenever there’s some serious shit about to go down in crime movies like *The Sting * (1974), Goodfellas (1990), or TV crime series like *The Sopranos * (1999). The situation doesn’t always happen (Reggie Veljohnson survived De Hard) but that has more to do with studio enlightenment or increasing black star power at the box office than witers suddenly frreeing themselves from non-formula screenwriting.
ORIGIN OF CLICHE. The cliche has been around for decades – King Kong (1933) is probably among the first to show black people dying under Kong’s fits of pique, but I hestitate to include it simply because none of the black people had particularly well-defined parts other than being natives. Hollywood regulated most blacks to servant roles and onscreen entertainers in comedies and dramas until well into the 60s – until then, blacks did not usually appear in genre movies like westerns, war movies, science fiction and muscials, period. My guess is the cliche didn’t start getting going good until mmmmaaaybe with Woody Strode’s death as the defiant slave Draba in the gladiator epic Spartacus (1960). After that, I’d probably cite James Bond island operative partner Quarrel’s death (played by John Kitzmiller) in Dr. No (1962), then Jim Brown’s death as Jefferson in the war flick, The Dirty Dozen (1967), and most influentially, the unexpected death of Duane Jones as Ben in the final seconds of Night Of The Living Dead (1968). [note: Happy to include earlier cites, if you have any.]
ORIGIN OF PHRASE: In a moment of sarcastic teenaged clarity, right after watching Ernie Hudson’s character get eaten in the last ninety seconds of Leviathan (1989); dubbed any black character who has no chance of surviving a movie alive “The Sacrificial Negro.” Deliberately chose the word “Negro” as a provokative term… in 1989, at my Politically Correct high school, it was verboten to use the word “negro” as a contemporary term.
SIGHTINGS: The entire James Bond franchise with the exception of Halle Berry as Jinx in Die Another Day (2003) and mmmmaaaybe one lucky black thug in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Every black character in the entire Alien franchise. The entire Freddy Krueger franchise. The entire Chucky franchise. Every Tarantino film, . Every third movie Samuel L. Jackson ever starred in.
MISCONCEPTIONS: The cliche has been misconstrued to mean that black characters are always the first to die – sometimes, quite dramatically, as in Vivica Fox in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. While that sometimes does happen, it is actually pretty rare.
EXCEPTIONS:
SALT AND PEPPER MOVIES. The lead black and white partners in “buddy movies” rarely ever die. Think Sinatra, Dean and Davis, Pointier and Curtis, Pryor and Wilder, Gibson and Glover, Snipes and Harrelson, Jackson and Travolta, among many others.
COMIC RELIEF TYPES. As pointed out earlier, characters played mostly for laughs even in dangerous-situation action movies rarely die. What a shame. because if ever a Sacrificial Negro’s death could immeasurably improve a movie, it’s Jar-Jar Binks.
STAR POWER. Top-billed stars don’t die unless they’re unknown actors or villains… it’s in their contract. Hence, Usher survives The Faculty, Brandy Norwood lives in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Sanaa Lathan somehow defies type and gets cast in the lead of Alien vs. Pedator. Duane Jones – the top-billed black guy in Night Of The Living Dead – dies because he’s an unknown actor in a cast of unknowns.
Weirddave. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen New Jack City, but I can tell you from seeing every ghettolife thug drama from Boyz In The Hood to Barbershop that there’s no collorary token white guy you just KNOW is going to get killed. The token white guy in black movies – especially comedies – is usually the Amiable Wigger.
In the first draft of my above post, I actually dubbed this the “Jar-Jar Binks Effect”. 
Jar Jar’s a brother?
Not anymore. Three years back, myself and the other voting members of FUBU (Federated Union of Brothers Unlimited) decided there WERE limits and booted Jar Jar out.
Samuel L. Jackson addressed the attendees and assured us that the BMF inscribed on his lightsabre does not mean “Bad Motherfucker” as we all assumed, but rather, “Binks Must Fry!” We’re hopeful.
I never fail to enjoy your posts.