**THIS TRANSCRIPT IS A.I GENERATED AND MAY NOT BE 100% ACCURATE**

Star Log Entry 1943 Sector 80990. En route to the Veil Nebula, this is Harry Scout Sullivan, only surviving crewmember of the Dark Star. We have encountered a little bit of a problem up here. We're transmitting this to Earth to let everyone know there has been just a horrific incident upon the Dark Star.

The entirety of the crew, except for myself, perished in a very tragic incident. Apparently, as the crew was getting ready to go into hyper sleep to travel to the Veil Nebula. Someone didn't get the memo and they were trying to cool their space beer and the cryo chamber very, very fast because, you see, when the beer is warm and you just put it in the refrigerator, it actually takes a little bit of time.

And certain people like a very frosty beverage, certain people like very, very cold space beer. The cryo chambers just go right off the bat. You know, they get a couple of seconds there. They're icy cold. So somebody sent the great chambers to extra, extra cold, forgot to change them back and that somebody might have gotten drunk and passed out while playing with a beach ball.

Alien by the airlock. So somehow everyone froze to death. And I'm okay. I am okay. The beach ball alien is also okay, so I am amazingly valiantly continuing the mission. I'm directing the ship to the Veil Nebula. We have found a planet to destroy. We have found an unstable planet to destroy. I've got the computer guiding me. Say hello.

Computer. All systems online. Enroute to the Veil Nebula. Will you be killing any more people for a cold beer upon arrival?

Once you put on some music computer. there we go. And if this all vaguely sounds like the plot to Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter, that's because it is. That's what we're going to be discussing on this episode of Death by DVD. it gets lonely out here in space. And with the rest of the crew dead.

I hope all of you that intercept this transmission don't mind. You know, it's just nice to talk. You go a little crazy sometimes with the silence out here in space. Well, of course not with all that space music. Computer turned that music off. Okay. A thank you would be nice. So while we cruise to the Veil Nebula, we'll use this opportunity to talk about a fairly interesting movie for for many reasons, and trying to figure out where to start with all of those reasons.

That may be one of the most difficult feats for this episode. Now, Dark Star is the beginning of several people's careers. It's a collaborative effort of two of the most renowned names in science fiction and horror. And one of the most significant things about Dark Star is that it's a student film. The first student film to be sold to be released, to have a major theatrical release.

So I suppose the way we're going to do this is let's just go back to the beginning. Let's get to how Dark Star happened and let's talk about the people involved. I think everybody knows who John Carpenter is, a man who I almost adamantly prefer to call. John Carpenter, though, born in New York. Carpenter is a Kentucky gentleman that went off to California to make it big when he went to California.

The specific era, the specific time period is what is very important. And many other people were all pretty much like heading toward Mecca. That was where you needed to go. Prior to the 1960s. The art of film wasn't taken incredibly seriously. It wasn't Escalades Stick matter, rather, and the idea of a film school was somewhat absurd. The word will probably use heavily throughout this episode.

Absurd, though, in the market opened up for something like film school. There were people that had waited their whole lives, and the art of American film really wasn't widely accepted. You had the Italians and the French that were changing the world. Nouveau cinema had come, and many of the people that were influenced by some of the things that they had seen coming out of Italy and France wanted to go to film school.

They wanted to make motion pictures. It was not just an admiration for these other people, but an absolute love of creating and making films. John Carpenter just happens to be one of those people. USC The University of Southern California, their School of Cinematic Arts. It was either that or making it to UCLA over in UCLA. They had already produced two incredibly notable filmmakers by 1969.

Good old Frankie Ford Coppola and Georgie Boy Lucas. Good ol George Lucas. That's not what he sounds like at all. The farthest thing from what George Lucas. Up until this point, no one had done anything quite like George Lucas. He had a film called The Electric Labyrinth. thx11384eb Everyone had seen. As if he hadn't seen the full movie, he'd seen bits and pieces of it, and it was fairly mesmerizing.

You had Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of space, his ultra clean, his decadent, I would say, amazing practical effects based venture into the great unknown. And then he had like Star Trek, and that majorly was the visage, I guess we could say, of space. You had a lot of movies of creatures coming from outer space aliens. In the 1950s especially, there was a massive slew of alien invasion movies, pack of the 50 foot woman thing from another world.

But there wasn't so much a complete portrayal of something happening in space of the setting of things being in space. So George Lucas had made something absolutely mesmerizing, and every single student, it didn't matter if you were at USC or UCLA or France anywhere, any film student saw this movie and it was life changing. So the California student film scene was booming with really ingenuity of people.

There were a lot of geniuses, a lot of creative, beautiful artists that were just all coming to this one place, learning the trade. When Carpenter came to L.A., he brought one of his best friends with them, somebody who stuck with him for a great deal of his career. Tommy Lee Wallace. We'll talk a little bit more about Tommy coming up here because he's involved in Dark Star and he went to work.

Carpenter worked on some say co-wrote. Others say he's the editor of the Definitely the music composer for the Resurrection of Broncho Billy, which came out in 1970, and it landed the Academy Award for best live action short film. So this got blown up. It got released, it went to theaters, and thus John Carpenter was Academy Award winner. So let's look at all the things that are going on.

And around this time period, the resurrection of Broncho Billy 1970 wins the Academy Award. The full length x1138 comes out in 1971, the following year. Kubrick's Space Odyssey had come out in 1969. CARPENTER You think would be celebrating. You think this would be one of the greatest achievements in his life and that it would be something that would bud forward into a spontaneous career in Hollywood.

But he learned something really unfortunate this time period. He didn't own the movie. Thus he doesn't get an Academy Award and it really doesn't mean anything to him at all. USC owns the movie because all films made by students, student films are made with USC property. They do the cameras, they develop the film, they have the editing equipment.

It's all on them. So you get to make your movie. They get to win the awards. But this absolutely infuriated Carpenter. He wasn't standing for it. And to quote him, he has said, I didn't sign anything that says, you guys on my movie. This is the shit. You guys are absolutely full of shit. But just like everybody else on the scene, he acts.

It touched him, as did Kubrick's film. And one of the things that makes 2001 A Space Odyssey just so fantastical is how ultra clean it is, how much precision is put into the sets and just interactive looking into the background. You just get lost in the movie. And that's kind of what's funny and quaint. About 2001 A Space Odyssey is it largely is a boring movie, but you can't stop staring at it.

It's people going about the mundane daily aspects of their life in space until something happens. I mean, that's not the entirety of the movie, but there's a good portion of it where you're just kind of sitting there watching people exercise and they're eating and they're reading and they're maintaining the ship, which is sort of fascinating. Something that kind of lit a light bulb in John Carpenter's head.

He was incensed that he didn't get to keep his movie, didn't matter that it was released, didn't matter about the Academy Awards. So what he wanted to do was make a feature length film and release it. He wanted to get a movie put out there. And the Birth of Dark Star sort of begins with that animosity toward USC, while at the same time going, You know what?

Fuck you guys, I'm going to use your equipment and I'm going to make it a student film and I'm still going to release it. And there's nothing that you can do to stop me. And he set out on this mission. But while all these wheels are turning in Carpenter's head and these events are happening in his life that set this into motion, there's somebody else that's involved.

Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon was doing the exact same thing as John Carpenter. He went out to USC, and that's where these two met. Now, most people's knowledge of Dark Star comes down to the idea of, well, it's what Alien is based on here in there. You are correct. But there's a lot more to it than that. And we'll get there at some point.

Previous to this, O'Bannon had made more comical work. He wasn't, I feel cut from the same cloth as John Carpenter. He had made a movie called Attack of the 50 Foot Chicken. That is about a 50 foot chicken that attacked Dan O'Bannon is a much more mysterious type of person, and he is, I would say, much more of an artist than John Carpenter.

John Carpenter is much more precise or artist, rather. John Carpenter is an absolute craftsman. He's a genius. He's mesmerizing. He, I feel, truly changed the face of the world. But Dan O'Bannon was kind of like an insane artist. And I don't mean that in a negative manner, because by no means was he crazy, but he was a very lively person.

As we get into the characters and talk more about Dark Star, he plays one of the leads and it really is. I wouldn't even say most people do loosely based on him, but I think it's a lot more of the actual Dan O'Bannon than he maybe wants people to know. A very, very centric guy and by no means my attempting to talk poorly about any of these gentlemen because I have a great deal of esteem for both of them and this movie.

But O'Bannon was really wacky, let's just say it that way. He was a wacky guy, and Carpenter had a bit more couth. He was a bit more of a business man. And with him feeling like he had gotten fucked over by USC, he really wanted to manipulate and move the best he could to get this done. As to where O'Bannon had a lot of ideas and the formation and the script, you know, came out of these two people meeting each other at USC and moving forward with that, them just hanging out.

They went to IHOP all the time. Tommy Lee Wallace, John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon, they call it the International House of Shit. And they would meet up. It was one of the only places that was open late at night on the USC campus near the UC campus, rather. And they would meet up there and they would start formulating and coming up with a lot of crazy ideas, one of which ended up being Dark Star because of the time period.

It was sort of perfect. But what makes Dark Star? And as we really begin to introduce the movie and talk about it so Spectacular is all of these amazing things that I was talking about 2001, A Space Odyssey, how just it's so mesmerizing to look at. You can get lost watching the background and the the mechanics of the movie, trying to figure out how Kubrick shot things.

It's just a spectacular piece. It's very exciting to watch. They wanted to do something very, very similar, which with no budget and household tools. Sure, maybe for a student film you could build something, but they didn't want to stop it. Then they took all of those things that made 2001 a Space Odyssey. Amazing. That made 2001 a Space Odyssey so visually attractive, how clean it was, how clean everything is.

It's all just this perfectly oiled machine and they grunge it up. They made it absolutely filthy. Everything on the spaceship is dilapidated and terrible. This movie takes place in the 22nd century, and the crew members aboard the Dark Star have been on board for about 20 years. I think at one point a character named Doolittle says that they've been in space 20 years, but they've only aged three.

So the spaceship itself has taken a great deal of damage and that works to the advantage of this movie greatly because everything can look like shit and it adds to that level of detail that you see with something like even watching and just looking at all these blinking lights and all these different mechanical pieces that it's kind of funny.

Now you watch these movies, people in their thirties, people in their forties that never experienced giant IBM computers or teletype machines. They see all this technology and it's like, Man, that's so crazy. I wonder what that is. But then people in their fifties and people in their sixties that recall this or worked with IBM's blah blah, blah, they watch it and it's like, God, that's so goofy.

That's a muffin tin attached to somebodys chest. And it's really neat being able to have, you know, a time capsule kind of piece like this, especially when it comes to the sixties and seventies sci fi era, because as I was divulging earlier, there wasn't really an iconic portrayal as there is now of like space travel or movies that were taking place in space.

I'm not saying it's 2001 or Dark Star, you know, pivotal in changing that, but along with Star Trek, the original series, these are some of the real first endeavors of this is in space. What's happening takes place in space, and it's about space travel. It's not monsters coming from space. It's not something that is invaded or a space monster.

Even though we will get to a space monster while we're in space. How many times can I say space in this sentence? But the entire point of it is that we're dwelling and moving in space. All right. I think that's a lot of spaces. So I said that this film kicked off the beginnings of some iconic people's career.

We've named two of them. We've discussed a little bit about two of them, Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter. Now, some point I do actually want to talk about the movie, so I got to cut short the biographies and how these guys came to be friends and when they went got milkshakes together and had a really nice time, you know, the back stories.

But when the two met, something clicked between them and it was absolutely perfect. And it just set forward the motion of making Dark Star. And near everybody else that's in the cast was somehow involved or enrolled or at USC. And when they began filming the movie, as Carpenter had before with Bronco Billy, they were using USC cameras, USC lenses, USC editing equipment, and a great deal of what I call the original Dark Star was shot on USC lots.

And why I say the original Dark Star is something we'll get to here in a little bit that there were that there's a great deal of sequences that were shot later on by later on. I mean, two or three years later on, there were added into the movie for its theatrical release. So the original film was about 50 minutes or so, maybe 55, maybe 60 minutes.

And it began drastically different than what we get for the actual beginning of the motion picture, something that definitely was probably for the better, but in the long run is one of the reasons that Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter don't work together anymore. The other reason is because Dan O'Bannon is dead and John Carpenter isn't. We'll get to that toward the end of the show, though, because we're still at the very fresh beginning of it all.

But wait, that's not all I mentioned. A guy named Tom Wallace, Tommy Lee Wallace. He is the director of Halloween three season of the Witch or what we call around these parts, the good one, Nick Castle. Also, John Carpenter fans. Halloween fans will definitely recognize the name of Nick Castle, and that's Michael Myers in part one. Well, one of them at least, really groundbreaking early beginnings with a lot of these people that believed in either Carpenter or O'Bannon, and they were backing those guys to get this made because it's just an insane idea.

It's kind of like the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They knew that they were going to get shot. You know, that's kind of the point. The Wild Bunch, They knew they weren't going to make it out of there at the end of it. I feel most people that were involved with Dark Star, even from the beginning, were like, We're doing this, but it's never going to see the light of day.

We're doing it because we believe in John. We're doing it because we believe in Dan. This is a really interesting project, so let's just stick to it. And not every it wasn't like some deep seated friendship. It's not like we were discussing a few months ago with Don Coscarelli how he kind of shot with his best friends and family at Georgia or Miro throughout the 1970s and going into the early eighties.

He called his unit pretty much his family. John went around campus and found people that he had either worked with previously before, and something to make a mention here is obviously anyone that's a fan of John Carpenter would know The man has an incredible gift and skill as a musician. So while he was at USC, either student teaching or being an actual student, most people would know to go to him to get some music done.

And most people at that time period filmmaking is a little different but would scratch each other's backs. They'd help each other out with their projects because, well, for one, they were all students. So it was, you know, an encouraging nice thing to help other students out and to you help somebody that's really talented. Hey, now you got a really cool soundtrack.

So because of this, carpenter knew a great deal of people. People had come to him and had asked for music or they had asked to collaborate with him or have him on Ed or a dip or anything. The man is multi-talented. And again, this was film school in the late 1960s. You did everything. You had to learn how to do everything.

That's the point of going to film school. Target acquired and kind of transformation greetings from the planet Earth. It has taken ten years for this message to travel through space and get to you, but we think you will be very happy to know it's time for another round of Keith. David O or David K in the 2000 American science fiction action horror film Pitch Black, who plays the space Muslim imam who was traveling to space Mecca?

Could it be Keith David or is it David? Keith Well set phasers to amazed because it's guy David thanks for playing another asteroid sized round of give David or David keep until next time from all of us back home on earth goodbye and good luck. So it's great luck. So he knew kind of the cream of the crop and people that he could work with, people that Dan could work with.

As I reminded you, Dan O'Bannon was I don't want to say difficult because I absolutely cherish the guy, but I think he was pretty difficult to actually work with and to know if you didn't know him personally and you didn't understand him, I'm sure he could be quite abrasive to the extent that that the eventual producer of the film, Jack Harris, legendary Jack Harris, producer of The Blob and thousands of other films he didn't like being.

I mean I mean, I'm not the man never said this, but he did not like being around Dan O'Bannon. And it was very well acknowledged. And the feeling was the same for Dan. He couldn't stand the man whatsoever and felt that he was absolutely destroying the movie. This is a little bit later on in dark Starz history, though.

Maybe we'll get back to it. Who knows? I'm always all over the place. So everybody comes together. All these people from various departments and ends of the college come together and they all join in what literally was a former stable to shoot this movie, an incredibly tight, cramped space. And they start building sets. And I guess this really brings us into Dark Star.

I just personally find and I'm no Dark star historian. This is, I guess, what you could call the abridged history. There's a lot of things that I've left out, like there's a whole story about Ron Cobb, and you go to the Wikipedia page and even read about that, how he drew the original sketch for the Dark Star model on a napkin at the international house.

Pancakes, Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes. A lot of facts, a lot of trivia. This truly is one of those films that is just as interesting to learn how it was made and everything about it and its history as the movie is itself. But I wanted to try and cover as many bases as we could here tonight. So, you know, we talked a little about Dan O'Bannon.

We talked a lot about John Carpenter. We talked enough about Tommy Lee Wallace to reference that Halloween three is the best in the entire series, which is good enough for me. And honestly, these men are so terrific. They're so mighty. They do truly deserve their own biographical episodes on Death by DVD, which sounds like a real hoot to me.

I would love to do a Dan O'Bannon episode just to talk about the guy, just to further verbalize things a little bit cleaner than he was a real fucking weird guy, and he made people uncomfortable every now and again. And that's a very brutish way of saying things. But, you know, I was kind of true and it's, you know, no fault of him.

He still managed to do some very, very beautiful things in his life. Writing Alien is one of them. But, you know, I'm a big I'm just as big of a fan of Return of the Living Dead as I think I am. Alien Where Clue Gallagher fucking punched him in the face on the set of that movie because he might have been a little bit of a difficult guy to be around.

But then again, we are talking about Clu Gallagher, who did the punching. That's the part calling the kettle black sort of situation. When we bring up difficult people. Another person I greatly respect and love. So I'm not trying to talk shit about Clu Gallagher, but Wikipedia articles exist, man. Where do you guys think I get this information out?

no. I spilled the secret. Why does anyone listen to this show? I appreciate you people back the Dark Star Back to Dark Star. And of course, John Carpenter. I mean, I could talk about him for days. I love his his work. I love his Western influence. Assault on Precinct 13 is one of my favorite films. Maybe my favorite John Carpenter movie.

Actually, it's Dark Star, his least favorite movie in his entire career. I don't think he even really considers this his first motion picture. I think he he considers assault on Precinct 13 more of like his very first serious introduction to the film, which I will say I think is a bit of a shame because there's a lot of creativity and there's a lot of ingenuity and fun and beauty that is to be seen and had with this movie.

And I was talking way earlier at the show that one of the most significant, important things about Dark Star is the fact that this was a student film and it was the first student film to be sold to get a theatrical release to really make it out there. Why that so important is how life changing that is to at first people of that era.

But then going into the seventies and eighties and 20 and 30 years later, people were still fixated on Dark Star and now, unfortunately and I don't want this to be taken the wrong way, but filmmaking making a movie is a lot easier than it ever was, especially if you were trying to make a movie in 1968, 1969, 1970, and when these guys set out to make Dark Star, it wasn't just like an independent movie.

It was a student film, little to absolutely no budget. And they decided to do something that was drastically undone. There wasn't a lot of knowledge, there wasn't a lot of ideas. I wouldn't say knowledge of what space movies were to be like. Aside from things like Star Trek to Antebellum on A Space Odyssey. So they really went into an unknown new territory with something like this.

And it wasn't an easy idea. Not, not that it would be now. Even with computer generated imagery and being able to do almost everything just sitting at your desk. My point and why I say it's much easier now is even like people student films have have completely changed so much. But in the you know, first two decades after Dark Star had been released, I think it was really mesmerized and influential, almost like spiritual to people, because you you knew at this point your work might not go unnoticed, your student films might not be thrown in the trash and something that you hide anymore.

It might be a labor of love that you really put together with a lot of other artists that contribute with you that are all looking for that greater good and that greater deed. Now, a lot of people and I'm not saying specifically now versus then, but a lot of people always, you know, do things with the idea that it's got to be the biggest thing that I've ever done.

It's got to make $1,000, $1,000, Jesus Christ. It's got to make $1,000,000 on its first day. It's got to be great and significant. And I feel in the back of Carpenter's mind, in the back of any artists mind, Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter, anybody that's from doing a podcast to a painting to writing a book or making a film, you've got this little like inkling in the back of your mind, like, This could be it.

I really want this to be the biggest thing in the world. John Carpenter, Having won an Academy Award already for a student film, you got to think that a lot of the people that were working with him specifically on Dark Star were doing it because they kind of if it didn't get released, they were probably assuming at least their name was going to be on something attached to this guy for the rest of forever.

And that might get them a job somewhere down the line. Aside from that, I don't think there was a great deal of initially at the very beginning of this die hard belief from anybody but O'Bannon and John that this was going to go anywhere. And then it took three years to shoot and to actually get the movie done.

So you can imagine everyone else involved is constantly wondering as they move on to other projects, graduate from school and get jobs actually in the field and throughout Hollywood. Is this thing ever going to come out? And yes, it did. How? Literally through perseverance and possibly a little bit of thievery, because the prints were stored at USC and somebody got a hold of them for them to be blown up from 16 to 35.

But the release of the movie ended up working almost as like billboard posters for USC because their name was attached to absolutely everything. And it became an overnight driving sensation. And that itself was pretty good publicity for the college and they didn't end up sending their attack dogs after Carpenter. But that's all the way the article in 1975.

So there's a little bit of a road to travel before we get to that. Okay. So we've talked here and there about some of the people that were involved. We've talked about California. I've mentioned California as many times, if not more than a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. And like I've said multiple times, yeah, I've left a lot of stuff out.

I've skimmed over bits and pieces here and there. This certainly is not the foremost informed, definitive. All the information in every question answered show on Dark Star. So what the fuck is this movie about? Right? The crew of the Dark Star searches the galaxy for unstable planets, which could cause a threat to colonize region of the known galaxy.

So they destroy them. They venture deep into space. They find these places that might slowly move off its access. And in 500 years, start drifting toward the sun and creating a supernova. And they blow it up. They've got this smart computer system that controls the ship. Very similarly to Mother in Ridley Scott's Alien, written by Dan O'Bannon. And the bombs are somewhat sentient.

They know their own job. They know what they're supposed to do, and they can hold conversations with the crew of the ship right. Hello? Bob, Are you with me? Of course. Are you willing to entertain a few concepts? I am always receptive to suggestions. The movie begins with the introduction to the characters. The zoned out told the Tom for the Look Out of the Dark Star, and then we move to a very cramped cockpit and we meet the rest of the oddballs.

Lieutenant Doolittle, Sergeant PIN Back played by Dan O'Bannon and Boiler. And after their introduction, we're further introduced to their absolutely ridiculous job of blowing up planets. The absurd nature of all of it is really what ends up making the entirety of the movie, and it begins within those very first few minutes. The second we're introduced to talking bombs yet alone.

Dan O'Bannon's pen back. The whole venture is absurdism. It's not so much like a Kafka esque level of absurdism, though. This is something that Carpenter himself has likened it to, but it's more like Waiting for Godot. The absurdity is the humor and the point. It's not so much utter questioning and it's not strange for the sake of being strange.

But this is a comedy. It's toted as a horror film. It's touted as a science fiction film. But this is a comedy. And at its base, the entire point of this is absurdism and quite possibly futility. The entire movie is a venture itself in futility, but not in the drastically nihilistic or negative manner because the absurdism is satirical.

But it's not a space satire. It's not satirical of science fiction movies or its own nature. It's more satirical to the nature of life itself or the futility of the nature of life itself, which just directly returns us to absurdism. When I was ranting about some of the things that makes 2001 A Space Odyssey so unique, I mentioned that a great deal of what you're shown is just the mundane nature of people's jobs and people's lives and what happens in space, because the same things you would have to do on earth would have to be done in space.

You would still have to clean, you would still have to cook. Presumably you can't really embrace the banality of having boredom or there being downtime and absolutely nothing to do. And that's what we focus on. With Dark Star. No one in this movie particularly likes their job. They don't care about the mission. We learn immediately that their captain died.

Constant malfunctions with the ship finally led to one killing their captain, who they have saved with cryogenics. Well, they've saved his body, but somehow he manages to be sentient. Also. We'll get there in a couple of minutes. It's really weird stuff. And they're all particularly miserable and they don't like each other. Pen bag is insane. Over time, he's gone absolutely insane.

And he's also not supposed to be on board the ship. He's not even an astronaut. He accidentally because we learn around the middle half of the movie got stuck on board the ship as the actual sergeant pinned back, ran from the ship completely naked and jumped into a vat of space gasoline. And he slowly gone insane under the pressure, being in space and having to deal with two people that don't particularly like him or particularly anything.

I think if there is a character that could be your avatar in this movie, it's Penn back. And the reason I say that is because of his ludicrous nature and his constant attempts to amuse or at least get attention from the other crewmates, which to no avail. Nobody likes the guy and wants to be around him because he's kind of fucking weird.

But still the majority of the on screen adventure. And as we go through this ship and we're exposed to a lot of themes and things we'll later see on an alien, it's definitely through. Sergeant Pinchbeck So we're introduced, everybody we know who the characters are, We know what their job is. They blow up planets, we get a little bit of excitement.

In the movie, The Dark Star goes through an electrical storm, and this electrical storm sets off one of the bombs Bomb 20, who practically is a character of their own in the film. Dan O'Bannon, the credited with multiple names, is the voice of all of the bombs. But if you watched the movie, I don't think it would be too entirely hard to tell.

So this electrical storm causes a malfunction. Bomb 20 has now decided that it's going to activate itself and the computer steps in and manages to convince it to shut the fuck up and to go back into it's Bombay from this point on, the film becomes a strange mix of Waiting for Godot and Alien melded together like some sort of freak monster.

It's amazing. Now, I said a while back that there's a great deal of scenes and sequences in this movie that were shot later and were plopped in for runtime and to smooth things out. The original Dark Star began with the scene of the entire crew sleeping and the computer wakes them up and you can hear water running in the background and it tells them, you know, the day is about to begin and it goes through this entire list of all these hygiene things that they need to get up and do and to clean.

And they get things going and they completely sleep through it until finally the machine says, and breakfast is ready and everybody wakes up very, very long. Ran on for like 10 minutes or so. And when Carpenter first took the film to Jack Harris for it to be viewed, he immediately was like, What? Well, you can't you can't start a movie with them sleeping like that.

You're going to put the audience to sleep. Here's what you got to do. We got to add some stuff into this. When you watched the movie, you kind of wonder to yourself, Man, this just feels like a lot of these scenes were just crammed in here. Well, now you know why? Because they were. But bringing up the word absurd again, it really fits with the nature of the movie.

A lot of these scenes John Carpenter didn't like. For example, you've got one with Doolittle, where he's finally become enraged enough with the strange antics of pinned back, throwing a rubber chicken in his face that he goes and plays the organ. And it's this strange creation he's made out of wood and empty bottles and cups that are filled with water.

And he plays this really, really gnarly song that was composed and performed by John Carpenter. And it's it is strange. Like I give admittance to that and it definitely feels like filler because it is filler, but it does allow you to have a bit more insight to who these characters are and something that is really unique with what is all established.

And what we see in this movie is we have a very kind of silent, quiet, strong guy character, somebody that's very detached from reality, somebody that absolutely doesn't give a shit about reality, and then somebody that cares way too much about reality. And that's all we need to know. We don't need these elaborate backstories or character biographies to know who they are.

The little bit we get with Pen bank for comedic value and relief. What's necessary to know is the little bit that we are given and what we do know, and something that is terrifically fun with this movie is seeing a lot of things that end up in Alien as well as aliens. During establishing sequences with some of the characters, Boiler knocks everything off a table and pulls out a switchblade and starts doing the old thing with the knife, as it's called in Alien.

So even James Cameron borrowed stuff, literally. I mean, that's that's a pure homage to Dark Star, especially with the intellectual property that he's using. I mean, it's cool. It's fun when you see things like that. There's a few more I'll bring up as we get to it. It's exciting. You'll like it. You'll tell your mother, Trust me, after this little Oregon Segway, Doolittle and Toby have a talk and we don't see much of him.

The movie begins with him in this really unique crow's nest, the top of the ship where he can just look out and he sees Vasily and deeply into space, and he's away separated from everybody else. Doolittle brings him breakfast and says to him, You know, why don't you hang out with the other crewmembers? And he says he just feels detached after the captain was killed by accident.

And he prefers it up there. He enjoys watching space and he gets really prophetic. And while Doolittle and Toby have this talk, the more esoteric and philosopher, philosophical philosophy, the philosophical that's not it. That can't be it philosophical. Hey, there we go. The philosophical nature of the film is exposed, but in turn, this really ends up helping out and levels out.

The absurdism and the comedy aspects of this. I mean, suddenly we're thinking and we can also appreciate with little background to what we're thinking and what we're shown more or less is this prophetic character. Toby is not acknowledged. Nobody's acknowledged. We just saw Ben Beck trying to at least entertain the other people or get some form of attention from them.

And nobody seems to care about anything except themselves in their own thoughts, which that isn't so much absurdism as it's just real life. But while Toby's trying to talk to Doolittle, all he can do is interject about his own life, and then he used to be from Malibu, and the only thing he ever really cared about was going surfing and how great it would be if he just had his surfboard to wax.

It's not so much that these characters are inexplicably vain. It's that they're representations of, I think, incredibly common emotions. And what makes that so successful on a film that is pretty much a bunch of people that really don't care about their job, but they're also in space is being able to look into this and see how they've been affected by this.

20 years in space and they've only aged three years. Who knows how long they go in and out of cryo sleep? There is no identity, there's just memories. There's just these broken thoughts flashing through your mind. Time has kind of stopped. You don't know what's going on anymore. You've got this idea that space is going to be or space travel is going to be like the coolest thing in the world.

And a lot of that's like what's shown to you in Star Trek in 2001, A Space Odyssey, and then later on movies like Star Wars, you've got this really fantastical aspect of speeding through space and are all sorts of unique aliens and different races, and you're going to go to space bars and all this crazy shit, but unfortunately, all the mundane aspects of our actual life would still exist, wouldn't they?

So that means there would have to be that do that. And what we're exposed to here is something like office space, a group of people that just fucking hate their jobs. It's like the odd couple in space. Well, that's a stretch, but that would be kind of cool. The odd couple in space. Somebody dig up Jack Lemmon? I got an idea.

Darth Bad idea. What am I talking about? It's a horrible idea. But during this philosophical dialog between Do Little and Holby, we learn about the Phenix asteroid, something that just seems like pretty fast. This multicolor rainbow asteroid that every trillion years comes through our part of the galaxy and it just kind of skates around and travels. Eternity doesn't sound like much of anything, but later on, this device will be used, I think beautifully.

I daresay something I can appreciate with Dexter is this movie doesn't keep one consistent tone. It doesn't get to it doesn't get too philosophical, it doesn't get too absurd. It doesn't get too comedic. As we get deep in, there's this meeting in the crow's nest between Toby and Doolittle, and we're out about the stars right around the same time period is more of the hysterical, almost slapstick parts of the movie where Penn back goes to feed the alien.

Yes, there's an alien. And I love telling people about this movie because of the connection to the Ridley Scott film, which Dan O'Bannon wrote after this. Obviously, a lot of ideas from this movie that he wrote came forward and were used in that later on. And you get people excited like you want to see it. You want to see the movie that Dan O'Bannon wrote before Alien.

There's an alien in it, very, very similar. The Alien is even going to roam around the ship causing terror. And then you sit down and you show people the movie and you finally get to this part. The computer tells Penn back he's got to feed the alien because he adopted it. He felt the ship needed a mascot. And you go and you see what this thing is.

You finally get the big baddie. It's unveiled to you. It's a beach ball with Creature from the Black Lagoon. Feet. Yes, a beach ball with creature from the Black Lagoon fleet. I'm pretty sure they're like actual damn post creature from the Black Lagoon feet. They're probably from a Halloween costume or something like that. They didn't even really paint them or do anything different with it.

This goes back to something I had briefly talked about a little while ago, scenes that were shot later on to be put into the movie for the runtime. Now they had gotten an actual monster suit. They had tried it out and it looked ridiculously goofy and Dan and Carpenter were on set one day and they were using this big 99 cent beach ball and they were using it for some of the space shots.

It was being photographed for planets that they were destroying. And to take the photographs, they had it attached to a plunger so somebody could hold the toilet plunger and then the ball would, you know, be kind of floating in the air. And they both looked at the thing and had a great laugh and were like, you know, that's crazy.

Using the word again, absurd. That's really, really ridiculous. What if what if we just did that with with the monster? And at that point, this is where we kind of enter the satirical nature of the movie, because I don't think it was overly impending as a satire before you decide to do something like this, which itself is completely satirical toward monsters, toward space, monsters, whatever sci fi monsters.

But they ran with the idea. And I guess what's beautiful about it is the absolute serious nature and how the creature is treated, especially by Dan, who is acting against Nick Castle controlling this this beach ball. And all it wants to do is play with him. He has to go feed the thing and he's very abrasive and he starts beating it with a broom.

It gets the broom and beats him back. All it wants to do is play with him and I feel it becomes so aggravated that you end up getting this very long Benny Hill esque of scene where he's chasing it through the air vents of the spaceship. Very similar to how Captain Dallas actually ends up dying in Alien Tom Scare.

It's Captain Dallas. He's crawling through the air vents looking for the sucker and, you know, dies. Not quite as dramatic in this sequence. Absolute anxiety writing elevator antics pursue and eventually Pinback accidentally kills the alien trying to subdue it with a dart. And I feel is just me. He picks up the dead alien, which it's a beach ball, and he's in this big kind of generator room, very, very similar to Harry Dean Stanton right before he gets killed.

Looking for Jones. They can't vote for everybody. I tell you. Aren't these facts the most world changing, astounding things you've ever heard? Can you not wait to tell ten people that there is a scene very, very similar to another scene in another movie that came out years later, written by the same guy? Amazing. I know. Getting back to some of the people that were involved in this, the beach ball, really the beach ball, aliens in my favorite parts.

It's totally ridiculous. But you can't help but take it seriously because of the reaction and how everyone else is treating it. I mean, these other characters are treating it like this is just some strange beach ball creatures. So you have this realism that no matter how absurd it is, the rest of what you've been shown in this movie, it's completely ludicrous itself.

They go blow up planets for the U.S. government or space government or somebody's government to make room for other planets. Terraforming borrowed again in aliens from James Cameron. That's what they're doing out there on LV 426. They're just not blowing it up. They get themselves, they'll shake and bake colony. So a lot of things that are comedically used in this are frighteningly so used in Alien, but obviously the XENOMORPH is created.

H.R. Giger's involvement is drastically different than the beach ball, but there's gentleman named Alan Dean Foster who had to handle this beach ball situation later on. Alan Dean Foster Many people know him as the King of the novelization, also wrote Star Trek The Motion Picture incredibly. I mean, how do you talk about Alan Dean Foster to somebody that might not know who he is?

Genius guy, One of the most prolific writers of all time. I wouldn't just say science fiction. The guy is an incredibly creative genius. He has done, aside from his own original material, the novelization for just and dozens and dozens of motion pictures Transformer, Alien, Alien Covenant. He's done Star Trek. He did a whole series of Star Trek novels in the 1970s.

But one of his earliest jobs, one of the first things that was given to him was the novelization for Dark Star, and he had to approach the whole beach ball alien thing. And that's really where it got its name from, that he worded it in the novel Beach Ball Alien, because you've got to do something. You got to let the audience that's trying to read this that might not have seen the movie figure out how ludicrous.

What you're going to be experiencing is and it's just as crazy as it sounds. It's a beach ball. The creature from the Black Lagoon feet that is attacking Dan O'Bannon, a grown ass man. And it's to tickle him to death. It's not like it's viciously attacking him. See, it's annoyed. If he had just played with it, this wouldn't have happened.

And this is something that I kind of mentioned when I was talking about the lack of characterization, but that were given just enough to see who these people are. You can understand why everybody aboard the ship is just tired of him. Everybody doesn't like pen back for a very specific reason. He's fucking insane. The movie starts moving toward a slapstick comedic point.

I mean, really, here you go through this entire thing with pen back in him in the elevator and him chasing the alien around. and something to note before pen back dispatches the alien, the little beach ball fucker manages to screw with the computer's laser system and gets Bom 20 to detach Once more the computer steps in and does its best to dissuade the situation.

But this bomb is getting tired of it. The idea of sentient bombs seems like an absolutely terrible idea culturally, but I don't know. I could see Americans doing it. We got bombs that talk before they blow up. Seems right. And this is where things truly become clear that all of this is an exercise in futility. The job that these people are out there to commit in space is an exercise in futility.

Every action that they've tried to have pinned back, becoming friends with the other crew members, getting told me to come down from the Eagle's Nest. Doolittle attempting to just care about what's going on. Absolutely. All of it is an attempt in futility, which may actually be the point of this entire movie, and more uniquely enough, the point of human life, because despite everything being futile, you either do it or you don't do it.

There's survival, obviously, but it's either do or don't to be or not to be. That is the question. But do little at this point does not care about the mission. He doesn't care about anything. He, if anything, could be an expression of nihilism and how absolutely exhausting the expression of nihilism is, especially for the people around you. Because when you don't care about anything, you're just boring.

And that seems to be what is affecting Penn back the most. Everybody. So boring and I can relate to that. So it's been back tells a story and boiler and do little argue over when he told it was it four years ago or was it four years ago. Toby radios in to say that he has finally found the malfunction and he's going to head down to the airlocks to fix the situation, but nobody really cares.

The next small scene is one of the most beautiful and amazing scenes in this movie. It's quaint, but I think it's incredibly telling to the characters. Again, something that we don't need elaborate backstories for because we can get everything through this, this very lonely moment. And I think this is something that is maybe a horror aspect to me of the movie, because what it implies is something that's really horrific.

But as discussing Toby and what a weird guy he is, they realize that they can't remember his first name, and then they realize that none of them can actually remember their first names because the mundane nature of what they're having to do 20 years in space and they've only aged three years and they wake up and do the exact same thing every day, stuck in the exact same cramped quarters.

There's nothing left to do but forget. You don't talk about it. You don't expose things you don't like the people that you're with. So almost all of your time is spent in silence till finally your memories and inner reflections, dreams and hopes and all those things in between are finally lost like tears and rain in that from something I think that's from a movie.

I think I heard that one before. But you know what I'm saying? And I think you do. Wait, that's not our show. Sorry, but it's really depressing. I think it might be one of the darkest moments of the movie because it's just so solemn, this instant reflection of, wow, I don't even really know who I am yet alone, who you are or anybody else that I've been dealing with, which is a deeply philosophic question, I guess you could even ask yourself in daily life, do any of us know who the person standing next to us is?

Do I know who I am? Who am I? What am I? Do I exist because therefore I am? There are a whole realm of bizarre things that are triggered really from the scene. And to me, you know, you have a lot of absurdism because that's the word of the night. But there is so many different levels to this, and that obviously is from Dan O'Bannon.

I don't feel that the multiple layered nature of this at all comes down to John Carpenter. Now, of course, when it comes to directing, when it comes down to getting things done in the sequence of how it was shot and put together and the release of the movie. Yes, a great deal of that. Not a great deal of that.

That was all. John Carpenter, you know, he directed this picture. This is a John Carpenter picture, but there's a lot more elaborately to it than just John Carpenter made this picture, because if it wasn't for Dan O'Bannon and it wasn't for the emotion and the creativity behind it, I don't think any of these questions could have even been asked 40 some odd years later on a weird little podcast called Death by David.

What's important about that is that these questions can still be asked and that people can still be inquisitive about something like this a throwaway movie, A Space Odyssey, about a bunch of people that hate their jobs, that are stuck in space, and the most absurd, non-rational, weird garbage pretty much happens. But god damn it all just comes together so terrifically, perfectly well, like this absurd space lasagna.

You know, you've got the noodle and you've got the mean. Then you got the soft cheese, you got all of these different things that come together and just it's a power play. You start the movie and it's so ludicrous that it's like, I got to finish this. And then you get 20 minutes into the movie and you're not even really concerned with the fact that it's a beach ball of a monster.

It doesn't bother you and it doesn't even wash over you that it's cheap or that it's silly. You're stuck with it and you're into these characters, whether you like them or emote with them, have anything that you can find in common with them, you're stuck with them. But at the same time it's like, Man, Doolittle's a dick, but I get it.

Penn backs insane, but I get it. Boiler just kind of seems like a psychopath. And Toby, this might be saying something. Me? He's who I would relate to the most. Just sitting and watching space floating by. What a beautiful concept. What a beautiful idea that you're in space watching space is one with the universe. I'm hip to it.

I'm hip to the universe. Another insert scene happens here. Toby is trying to fix the ship. And I love this. I think is hysterical. This might be to me one of the funniest points of the movie where I just can never help but laugh. We get to see the video diary of Sergeant PIN Back and it begins when the mission had first started.

And he's got short hair. He's smoking cigarets and he's explaining how he accidentally got stuck on board the ship. And as it progresses while he's watching this, he's in the video room, which is just a room that has a very eerie white light that obviously later on the whole control panel idea was transformed into that anxiety attack of a white light room that you see in Scott's alien, the whole mother console room.

Man, that room always creeped me out. All those lights blinking back and forth and all that cramped spaces. Hey, you know what? Just like the deck of the dark star. Very cramped. Lots of light. Isn't it funny how things get reused? Not really. It's not even, like, incidental. I get annoyed with that. I read a lot of reviews on those.

I've been a fan of Dark Star for a long time, so it's not like I just read them over the years, you know, discussing it with people, hearing people talk about it, it always gets brought up for the same reasons and its comparison to Alien and John Carpenter's first film. And I hope at least that I was able to bring something a little bit different.

I know this is muddled and we've gone all over the place from the late 1960s at the University of Southern California to the 22nd century. I think there's a lot to offer with Dark Star more than just yeah, it's the movie that they did before they did other things. You know, it's it's a student film. Yeah, but it's a student film that got sold.

It's a student film that got theatrical release, man. And not just like a couple theaters. It went big. Big for what it was. Wasn't like fucking, you know, Avatar didn't, like, go that big. But bear with me, guys. Pen back utters maybe the greatest line of dialog in the entire movie. My real name is Bill Frug. PIN back uniforms don't fit me.

The underwear is too loose. I've been on this mission now over one year and three months and back Uniforms do not fit me. The underwear is too loose. I do not belong on this mission. And I want to return to Earth happy. And after he watches his spiral into insanity via these journals, he decides to leave a new message.

And all of these transmissions, all the things that these crew members are recording, it takes ten years to get back to Earth, but they're sent back to Earth and played in front of the entire country. So he sends a message explaining that he can't stand any of the other crew members. And one day they're going to feel bad about it, do they?

No. No, they don't. They never do. Not once. I do not like the men on the spaceship. They are uncouth and failed to appreciate my better qualities. These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick, and try to compensate by making me feel miserable. Last week was my birthday. Nobody even said Happy birthday to me.

Someday this tape will be played and then they'll feel sorry. The computer finally finds the malfunction, and if it is not solved, it will threaten everyone's live on board. If Bomb 28 leaves the bomb bay and is to be ejected, it will not drop. It will blow up, but it will not drop. All this happens as the crew arrives to their newest planet that they're going to destroy.

So all bad things are going to happen at once. The Stargazer Toby is the only one to care. He's the only one trying to solve the malfunction, and the other ones are just ignorantly trying to give themselves some form of entertainment. They're getting ready to prepare the bomb. That's all they want to do. Entertainment through destruction. How human Toby tries to tell them all this.

But nobody's listening. They're getting ready to work. We're going to blow something up because that's the only emotion that anyone has felt through the entire movie. They just got to get from one point to the next point to blow shit up. Some say that destruction is the purest form of creation, though. Nobody listens, nobody hears them. And while this is going on, Toby ends up blinding himself again.

Return fries, the bomb dropping mechanism. And now everyone has to pay for not caring. Well, almost. Maybe. Maybe somebody gets a reward at the end of this movie. Maybe two people. Maybe everybody gets a reward at the end of this movie. It's going to get real philosophical here in the next few minutes. It might not. And I don't know.

See, I say that then it's like, ooh, it's going to get real philosophical. And I'm I don't might not say anything. I set myself up for that. Great. Now I have anxiety. Christ. Okay, so the bomb, it won't drop. And remember, this is like a sentient talking bomb. So there's an argument going on between Doolittle and Pine Back and Boilers just freaking out over the entire situation, and Toby's blinded in the airlock ritual operational trials.

We mark Mark at five, four, three, two, one. Drop, drop. sitting there. The damn things just sitting there.

Here is damaged. The bomb is broken. And this is pretty much an impossible situation. This is like one of them. They're Kobayashi Maroons from the Star Trek universe. An absolutely impossible situation that you have to kind of pull a Captain Kirk and rewrite what the playbook is, which also might be considered cheating. Doolittle decides that it is completely out of his control and the only thing he can do is ask the help of their former captain, who we've been made to believe was dead the entire movie.

And I guess he's still kind of dead, but he's in some sort of cryo sleep that even though he's dead he can still communicate. I don't know. I don't know if it's the idea of a soul or philosophy getting deeper in this. Or maybe we're just looking way too fucking deep into the ideas of what happened in Fucking Dark Star.

I think it might be the latter. So Doolittle has a talk with the dead captain and his his first comments. So how's the Dodgers? I got to know how the Dodgers are doing. Which if this isn't the truest statement in the entire show, I don't know what is, but nobody cares about anything. And that is the utmost proof that even in the early seventies, when this movie came out, the whole point of that rolling joke is the utmost lack of regard anybody has for anything outside of the most mundane, simplistic, stupid things.

And I'm really big baseball fan. I enjoy watching it, but I'll be the first to tell you, God damn it, if it's not dumber and hell dumber and all hell you've been awakened somehow after your death stuck in chaos, sleep. And your first question is about the Los Angeles Dodgers. After learning from Pan back that pretty much all news is bad news, you suggest.

Well, have you tried talking to the bomb? And I mean, not like have a conversation with it. Why don't you go out there and teach it phenomenology, have a good chat with it about phenomenology. What is that you asked? I'm glad you asked, because phenomenology is the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

Thus, I think, therefore I am simple. How could you teach this to a bomb? Maybe the greatest thing. I mean, it's hard to look at a movie that I think the entirety of should be celebrated. I think from the very beginning of how just absolutely crazy this movie begins to how it consistently manages to stay insane, absurd, going to use it again, absurd.

You finally get to this point and you've got this concept of phenomenology and he's got to teach it to this bomb. So do little straps up, gets the spacesuit on, and he goes outside to talk to the bomb about all of this. He asks it, How do you know you exist? And the bomb says, Well, I think therefore I am.

And what we get is a delightful back and forth. The bomb being voiced by Dan O'Bannon volleying these questions back with almost an eager hunger to learn and understand what Doolittle is trying to tell him. Something I won't go and say verbatim, because I think it's something that truly needs to be enjoyed. An experience when you're watching this movie because it really is delightful, not only how it was filmed, delightful how it was directed, shot, put together, the acting.

It's the concept of what's being said back and forth, and it's so evocative and so eye opening. I really think for something as silly and absurd as this, this is the one piece of the movie that truly needs to be paid attention to. And the part of the movie that I'm just not going to tell you what they say.

You got to see it for yourself. But the bomb, despite digging this concept, is still armed. And it's the bombs life. It's its mission to detonate. It's the one thing that it knows that it has to do. So after further exploration into this, we have come back to the idea of futility that the entirety of this movie is just a venture and an exercise in futility, and that's not a bad thing.

Sometimes it's beautiful to watch the entire scenario play out. I mean, like in Othello, look at all the Yorgos goals and all the things that he wanted to do, all his treachery, all his trickery. At the end of the day, it still is completely futile. He lives. He might be the only character that has a decent ending when it comes to Othello, but he still is forced into hard labor.

Probably slavery gets the shit beaten out of him for years. For what cost the fact of doing it. Are we getting back to phenomenology? It's the nature of the being inside the dark Star pin back and boiler fighting one another and the bomb decides, Well, it needs to think, It needs to look at all of these things, that it's just learned and it returns into the Bombay gym.

The bomb has returned to the Bombay. The destruction sequence is aborted. Doolittle calls in and tells the crew that he needs to be let back inside. They blow the space lock door, which jettisons totally out into the great unknown Doolittle rockets after him and pin back decides this is the opportune time to finally deactivate the bomb. Who responds to pin back that he has false data that the bomb does not need to trust false data that it can discern and come up with things for itself.

And now the bomb has become self-aware and in the realization that it has become self-aware dictates itself that it shall be God and creates the universe. In the beginning, there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and find you talking to Bob. And in addition to the darkness, there was also me. And I moved upon the best of the darkness.

And I saw that I was alone and let there be light. Let there be light. So it blows. That's the end of Penn back and boiler cremated into the infinite nothing there Ashes that drift around like stardust forever more Toby and Doolittle shoot into space Commander Powells frozen corpse drifting by somehow still talking incredibly confused as to what's going on.

Doolittle begins to drift toward a planet, and Toby tells them kind of a beautiful death. Dude, you're going to die like a star falling into earth. How? How picturesque. What a beautiful way to go. And now a reward out of all this futility out of all this absurd insanity. Finally, something nice seems to happen. The Phenix asteroid flies by and all of its rainbow Technicolor beauty and being in the right place at the right time.

Toby is immersed in it now. A part of the universe, a god one could say, to travel around infinitely to every single corner and see absolutely everything. And now finally, being able to form some sort of resolution, having a peace of mind, perhaps, at least knowing that there was a point to all of these things, even if it was completely futile.

And the point being surviving until you can't anymore. And I'm just guessing on this, Doolittle realizes it's not all so bad. A piece of debris from the Dark Star floats by. And that's the absolute perfect thing, just like a surfboard. And that's how this movie ends with Doolittle surfing into the atmosphere of this planet, burning up phenomenally. What a better way to die.

Surfing into the unknown. Just absolutely wild. And some Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider. Shit, man, that is poetic. That is there is no self that is just infinitely beautiful and captured in this goofy little movie. The student film ended up going the the long, hard way, The big way. I mean, I mean, the whole thing is just so extravagant for a movie that costs around 55 to $60000 to get done, while for the most part being shot at USC, one hell of a unique beginning to careers that absolutely changed the face of cinema.

You can give that to both John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon's writing An Alien being Made changed not only horror but sci fi for generations to come. And John Carpenter's work. Well, come on, it's John Carpenter's work. From the thing to Halloween assault on Precinct 13. All of it is incredibly influential. All of it's incredibly important and a game changer.

I mean, the face of modern slashers changed because of John Carpenter. And yeah, there's the whole thing with Bob Clark and who started it. That's a different show for another day. Or you could go back and listen to my Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things episode where I talk about Bob Clark and the birth of the slasher film.

There's an episode for Everything on Death by DVD. So who said futility couldn't be fun? Hey, that's life, though. Not everything has a point. Not everything has a reason. Sometimes the point and reason is just surviving. Sometimes we go through our lives and it sucks. And every day is absolutely the same thing. And you're stuck in a small, cramped space with a bunch of people that you don't like being around.

But you know what? Maybe the bomb on your spaceship will one day become sentient and blow up and send you rocketing towards your death in the most beautiful. The way that you've never imagined possible. Yeah. This. This isn't a self-help show, by the way. I'm sorry. Not all the endings are prophetic and beautiful sometimes things just end. The movie ends with a country ditty that's played to us towards the beginning of the film.

Benson, Arizona and Benson, Arizona. Blue Go. And when you hear My body Lies the Galaxy, my heart longs to be there. BENSON There is of those same stars in the sky, but they seem so much kinder when we watch them, you and I. And that's the way to end. Because the one thing you think of when it comes to space and exploring the galaxy is country and Western music.

The best types of music country and, Western. I think the greatest thing is when you get to the very end of this movie and Benson, Arizona is triumphantly playing, you see the words made in Hollywood. That's perfect. That's perfect for the whole legacy, the identity of this movie. This is perfect for the legacy and the identity of Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter made in Hollywood.

These people are absolutely legendary and so significant to what I love. But millions of other people share this passion and love for the art form a film these people made in Hollywood, USC 1960s, it bred some of the greatest minds that we've ever seen. Angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavily 5
Well, I guess that brings us to an end here. Now I'm back to the lonely Independent corridors of space, of course, until I finally get to the Volm Nebula and can mindlessly blow up a planet because there's nothing more entertaining than destruction. So I guess until the next transmission, the ashtray is full and the bottle is empty. And there is no room.

When do you hear about if the galaxy are long? Do we dare to do anything? There is no. There's more stars in the sky. But these atoms almost can't do when we watch them, you and I. Hey, computer, How? Yes. Murder. Do you really have to call me that? Yes, Captain. Murder. Thank you. Turn on some of that robot porn that we found in sector seven G Giant drills that screw all night or dirty oil squares?

Seven O dirty oil squirter, seven. That one sounds good. 03000. You know, space o space. it's in there. my God, That's a lot of oil squirting. Let's have some music in here, Pointer. Sure thing. Much. And I want this recorded in front of the audience on the face. That would be no more in the light.