9 Things We Might Know About The Alien/Prometheus Space Jockey

9 Things We Might Know About The Alien/Prometheus Space Jockey From "Screen Junkies" Approximately 4 Hours ago. Alien is a science fiction classic. It introduced the world at large to a good number of incredible talents, like Sigourney Weaver, Ridley Scoot, and H.R. Giger’s cavalcade of biomechanical boners with teeth. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1sjok.jpg[/img] But there is one creature from the film that hasn’t received a great deal of attention: the Space Jockey. However, thanks to Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus, it’s about to become a lot more high profile. In case you are unfamiliar with the term “Space Jockey” let me bring you up to speed. If you have seen the original Alien, he is the creature fused to a giant gun/telescope/penis thing found on the derelict ship by Tom Skerrit, Veronica Cartwright and John Hurt. He is also referred to by some as “the pilot.” In the original movie, he did nothing more than be dead and give a hint to what was going to happen to at least one character later in the film (IE, explode). However, just like Star Wars with its crazy Expanded Universe, the Alien franchise has grown independent of the movie series, like a geeky fungus filled with extra apostrophes in names and back stories the original creators never dreamed of, not to mention some weird tidbits they did imagine and just left out of the film. So, after researching a lot of this mumbo jumbo, here are nine things we might know about the Space Jockey. [b]The Space Jockey Was Big (But Not That Big)[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1sjok2.jpg[/img] 20th Century Fox, being the budget minded (AKA, “Cheap as hell”) people they are, didn’t want to spend any more than they had to on the sets of Alien, especially one that lasts a matter of minutes. They conceded to some of the money for the scene, but a certain amount of creativity had to be used while shooting, which in layman’s terms means they built a single wall for the set. The entire set was hand-airbrushed by Giger, partially to save money, but mostly because he is/was dead set against anyone screwing with his art, and the only person he trusted to do it right was himself. The fact that the creature appears to be sitting on a chair built into a disc is not an accident; it was constructed that way so they could rotate the set and get different angles of the actors, all the while using the one wall Fox gave them the money for. Imagine having to write an essay, but for budgetary reasons, removing the letters U and M from your keyboard. That is what Fox left them with, but luckily since science fiction movies are 90% bullshit anyway, an extra 1% never hurt anyone. The ultimate cost-cutter for the scene, and the major part that sold the Jockey as some massive, elephantine alien creature was that Ridley Scott put his kids into scaled down space suits while filming. That way, they were able to squeeze some extra virtual feet out of the set and make the Jockey look like it would be 20 feet tall if he were standing. [b]In The Comics, They Are Intergalactic Dicks[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1sjok3.jpg[/img] Because no sci-fi franchise will ever be safe from its own fans, the success of Aliens lead to a comic-book series about them. The story eventually took the characters (originally Hicks and Newt, but later changed to Wilks and Billy because the movies… um… killed the original characters) to the alien home world where they run in to the Space Jockey, in this case, completely alive. In this story, the living Jockey communicates with the humans! (Cool!) He’s telepathic! (Awesome!) He wants to help them kill the hated aliens (Sweet!) And then he and his boys are going to totally enslave the human race and turn their planet into a frozen hell-hole. (Supe- Wait, what?) Yes, in the comic-book series, the Space Jockeys were tools that wanted the “aliens” gone, but only because they were like an acid-filled small pox screwing up their game of conquest. Kind of makes you like them better when they’re dead on the penis-cannon. [b]In Another Comic, They Have An (Unpronounceable) Name (Mala’kak)[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1sj4.jpg[/img] In 2005, yet another comic-book spin off was created, and this time, they decided that the Space Jockeys probably would have a different name, mostly because they probably, being aliens, had a different name for “space” and likely had no godamn clue what a “jockey” was. The name they came up with was “Mala’kak,” because ever since someone took the time to create a language for Klingons, alien words need to have at least one apostrophe to appear “genuine.” [b]They Might Have Made The Aliens[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a1.jpg[/img] Again, we are delving into more Aliens “Expanded Universe” here, but at various points in the Dark Horse comic book series and their eventual novelizations, it is suggested that the “Aliens” were biological weapons created by the Jockeys, and that the one shown in the original movie may have been at best, unlucky, and at worst, a screw up who killed himself on accident. Ridley Scott himself has gone so far as to say the Jockey was the ship’s pilot, as he saw it, and that the derelict ship was an aircraft carrier or bomber of sorts, that they dropped the alien eggs on other plants for them to wipe out the inhabitants. This coincides with point number two particularly well, because only a giant douche of epic proportions would do something like that. [b]Or they were there first victims[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a2.jpg[/img] Okay, so the same stories also suggest that the Space Jockey’s history with the Xenomorphs is more of a victim/murderer one and that the Space Jockeys hate the Aliens because they were almost eradicated by them. This does not mesh well with a ship full of them being piloted by the Jockeys, unless of course the guy in Alien was some sort of Space Jockey Al Qaida on his way to wipe out a city full of his own kind to earn 71 virgin snorkel-faced fat exoskeleton women. Although that is speculation on my part, and no doubt the subject of erotic fan-fic somewhere on the Internet. [b]The Novelization Of The Film Said They Were Noble[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a3.jpg[/img] The novelization released in 1979, based on an early draft of the screenplay (as most novelizations are), included some interesting tidbits left out of the film version. Apparently, Ash has even more exposition in his “I’m a head on a table and was going to totally feed your asses to the monster” speech, and he describes the Space Jockeys as “noble.” He didn’t stop there, he also described them as being larger, stronger, and smarter than us, too. He also admired the alien, so maybe Ash wasn’t so much programmed by the company to get an alien specimen, but rather, he just f*cking hated people, seeing as how he apparently liked everyone else better. Honestly, I’d feed your asses to a goldfish if the opportunity presented itself. [b]They Know The Predators (And Can’t Stand Them)[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a5.jpg[/img] So, it’s beginning to look like the picture the comics paint of the Space Jockeys is that they are a lot like early 20th century Germany; they just could not get along with anybody. In the “awesome” Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem, a Space Jockey skull can be seen on the Predator ship, suggesting that at some point a Predator killed an armed Jockey, possibly in a jungle surrounded by several other Jockeys for hire. Okay, that’s just silly. But the various back stories of these series imply that the Jockeys and Predators have their own uses for the aliens, and this has led to them hating each other, kind of like interstellar Israelis and Palestinians, with the aliens being a multi-mouthed Gaza Strips. [b]In The Scriptwriter’s Back-Story, They Were Just Unlucky[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a6.jpg[/img] Apparently, in a back story for the Space Jockeys dreamed up by none other than the original Alien scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon, the Aliens originally came from LV-426, and the Jockeys were just incredibly unlucky. In this story, they had landed on the planet they thought was dead, and one of their crewmen came back with a face hugger on him. They eventually managed to kill the alien, but screwed their ship in the process, and the last surviving crew member managed to send out a beacon to others to stay the hell away. Unfortunately, the next crew didn’t understand their language and managed to do the exact same thing themselves, which is kind of funny when you think about it. [b]The Comics Are Probably Wrong…[/b] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a7.jpg[/img] Ridley Scott has gone on the record saying that the Jockey we see in the movie isn’t a shot of the being at all, but rather the suit it was wearing, like the biomechanical suits the aliens in Independence Day were wearing (not that ID4 ripped off Alien for the idea. Surely it was from one of the other 20 old sci-fi films it borrowed from). But here’s a direct quote from the guy who directed the original movie, who may have a thing or two to say about it… “I think beneath that carcass… it’s not a carcass, it’s a suit. Inside the suit is a being.” So the comic renderings of the elephant-nosed creature with the hard exoskeleton are off base. Screw you for trying to be clever, comic artists! Of course, when Prometheus finally comes out, it will likely turn out that everything the other writers have speculated will be wrong, because Scott, if he is even familiar with them, would probably want to surprise the audience with completely original ideas, probably leading to large numbers of fat pimply comic nerds shrieking in rage. At least we can be sure that a new Alien movie won’t bring out the crazies. Star Wars showed us that only Star Trek fans are insane, mouth-breathing dorks with no distinction between fantasy and…. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a8.jpg[/img] Oh, right…