{"id":35677,"date":"2021-11-10T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T13:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/?p=35677"},"modified":"2021-11-10T11:12:26","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T16:12:26","slug":"they-live-addendum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oafe.net\/blog\/2021\/11\/they-live-addendum\/","title":{"rendered":"\"They Live\" addendum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today's review<\/a> said that John Carpenter's They Live<\/i> was based on the 1963 short story \"Eight O'Clock in the Morning,\" which you can read here<\/a> or have read to you as an audiobook here<\/a>. But that isn't the only inspiration.<\/p>\n

\"Eight O'Clock in the Morning\" was adapted into comic form by Bill Wray in 1986's Alien Encounter<\/i> #6<\/a>, two years before the movie came out. Simply titled \"Nada,\" it's a much closer adaptation than They Live<\/i>, so close that Ray Nelson still gets credited for the script, but it does up the violence a little and adds at least one gag that was also used in the movie. See if you can spot it:<\/p>\n

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Does that mean They Live<\/i> is a comicbook movie? Probably not, because while there's a chance Carpenter might have read this comic, it's even more likely he read the original story and was working from that. It was<\/b> reprinted in a lot of anthologies over the years. So even with a shared \"unique\" scene, it could have just been parallel development that led to the similarities. Great minds think alike and all that.<\/p>\n

And because we know what you like, here's this:<\/p>\n