By David Wharton | 6 years ago

This weekend there wasn’t a whole lot of interest for science fiction fans in theaters, unless you’re in an area where you could track down a theater that was showing The Rover. Next weekend we’re getting Transformers: Age of Apocalypse and Snowpiercer (finally), but in the mean time we’ve decided to climb into the Wayback Machine and revisit one particularly awesome slice of the past: Ridley Scott’s Alien, which went into wide release on June 22, 1979. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a few interesting Alien facts you might not have known.

1) The xenomorphs owe their acid blood to conceptual artist Ron Cobb

Having worked with Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter on the low-budget sci-fi comedy Dark Star, Ron Cobb reunited with O’Bannon on Alien, helping design the Nostromo’s interiors and exteriors, the crew’s spacesuits, and other human-related elements of the movie (along with Chris Foss and Jean “Moebius” Giraud). Cobb also came up with the idea that the xenomorph would have acid for blood, as a practical solution to the question of why the humans couldn’t just shoot the alien and be done with it.

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