Here’s another little goody related to ABC’s 1984 broadcast of “Alien” (1979) — the intro to it on “The ABC Sunday Night Movie,” complete with a content warning.
I am linking here, by the way, to the totally cool people at the Retro Channel on Youtube.
If you are even remotely familiar with Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” then you know that ABC’s marketing staff was not.
John Hurt is looking pretty spry. (At least they had the good sense to leave Ian Holm and Veronica Cartwright out of this mess.)
Anyway … did it really take “Alien” five years to reach network television? I seem to remember (falsely, I suppose) that it hit TV when I was still a very young child. Yes, HBO carried it only a year after its theatrical release — maybe that’s what I’m remembering. (People just called it “Home Box” back in the day. Being a little kid, I thought they meant the physical “box” –the converter — that sat atop the television.)
Yet I also seem to recall my family having Showtime, but not HBO … and people on my street still just called any premium channel “Home Box?” Whatever … it was a verrrry long time ago, and I wasn’t the brightest kid out there, anyway.
Source: Screen Gems on Facebook
So here it is.
Okay … in a deleted scene for “Aliens” (1986), Ripley is shown to have had a child, blah, blah, blah. But deleted scenes are not canon, My Dudes.
Postscript — my fellow nerds know that this message works equally well with Ms. Selina Kyle.
You can read Kiefer Sutherland’s tribute to his father right here at People magazine.
If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the priceless actor from roles in movies like “Murder By Decree” (1979) and “The Puppet Masters” (1994). But nothing can beat his memorable turn in 1978’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Rest in peace, thespian.
Photo credit: https://people.com/kiefer-sutherland-mourns-father-donald-sutherland-after-his-death-8666601
20th Century Fox.
I noticed this last night. Ridley Scott is a Cinema God, and I should be cast out for nitpicking his genre-defining masterpiece. (If you need to ask which movie I am talking about, I’m not sure we can be friends.)
But the word nerd in me needs to point out that the computer here probably meant “ensure” instead of “insure.”
Marvel Comics.
THERE IS A STRANGE MAN IN MY HOUSE.
That’s okay, though — it’s me.
Pop Rocks!!! These fizzy little candies had a genuine mystique to little kids in the late 1970’s — and they were pretty damned good too! (I am linking here to the Bionic Disco Youtube channel for the video.)
Of course, no reminiscence about Pop Rocks could leave out the morbid, wide-eyed awe we kids felt at the fate of poor Mikey, the beloved little brother in the classic Life Cereal commercials. The finicky tike had perished horribly after a concoction of Pop Rocks and soda had literally exploded his stomach.
It was all bullshit, of course — and maybe the first example of pervasive “fake news” affecting me in my lifetime. But the bizarre and grisly myth got the harmless candy yanked right off the market after sales plummeted.
Does anyone else remember the original “Going In Style” (1979), with George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasburg? It was a really funny movie in which three old men become bank robbers.
It got its share of air time on 1980’s television; it was actually a big family favorite. I’d been looking around for information about it for years (because movie trivia keeps me up at night), but I remembered the title wrong — I kept thinking of “The Sunshine Boys” (1975), which was a different George Burns movie entirely.
They actually remade the movie 2017 with Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 