Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. When I wrapped up the last Monster Fact episode concerning the alien universe, I mentioned that I'd be back with at least one more installment. That is, provided alien Romulus gave us anything new to ponder, and it certainly did so. Here we are once more going to discuss the many strange and horrifying ways that xenobiology can interact with human physiology in this series. Fair warning, this episode is going to feature spoilers for Romulus, as well as other alien films and bits of related media. First and foremost, we have to remember that even the cores morph life cycle is one of horrific and deadly hybridity. The adult xenomorph is inherently a combination of alien and host DNA agent A zero slash thirty nine to fifty nine x point ninety one slash fifteen. The black goo works as an evolutionary accelerant on most biological modes of life. In the series, pushing them into stranger, more hostile, and more durable forms. So most of the individual forms and lifestyle stages we've discussed so far can be thought of as the most likely forms and morphs of xenomorphic life, but many other paths are possible. This is especially true when human engineer or android scientific manipulation changes the shape of things to come. In nineteen ninety seven's Alien Resurrection, set two hundred years after the events of Alien three in the year twenty three eighty one, we encounter United Systems military scientists who have not only created numerous clones of long dead Ellen Ripley, but also the xenomorph queen that was growing inside her at the moment of her death. Their results are numerous Ripley clones with varying degrees of xenomorphic biology, as well as an alien queen with human reproductive physiology. The latter situation results in the birth of a monstrous newborn hybrid, a pale humanoid xenomorph with various human features and a complex emotional state. Much earlier in the Alien timeline and more recently at our cinemas, we witness the birth of the offspring hybrid in Alien Romulus We get to this creature via various missteps. First of all, whalen Utani scientists managed to isolate the black goo from the remains of the original Nostromo xenomorph. Then they attempt to engineer it into a control biohacking agent that alters human physiology to make them more resilient. Offworld colonists a futurist concept that we've discussed unstuff to blow your mind before. Instead of terraforming other worlds into something more like Earth, what if we altered ourselves to better fit those worlds, or at least met them halfway. So give it up to wayaly Utani solid concept. Their execution, however, falls tragically short of perfection. In their vanity, they attempted to harness the biotechnological might of the engineers, and the violent trajectory of the black Goo could not be contained. We see footage of the supposedly successful resurrection of a dead lab rat via the formula let's call it gray Goo, only to later see the disastrous mutations that the specimen experienced. Now unaware of the latter complications, the characters in Romulus take off with the gray goose samples and sure enough one of them, K eventually injects it into their own system to bounce back from an injury. The gray Goo appears to work here, at least initially. However, the formula affects K's pregnancy, resulting in the rapid earth and development of a fast growing alien zeno hybrid referred to as the Offspring, a towering, misshapen monster with elements of xenomorph human and engineer features. Now, I wasn't sure exactly how I felt about this creature design at first, but it has grown on me, and I've seen that it clearly freaked out and revolted plenty of viewers, so it's very much serving its purpose in the film. So I eagerly await revisiting this creature when Romulus is released into our homes later this month. Now, the Romulus scientists we're far from the first to experiment with the black goo and charge its effects on various organisms. The engineers, of course, pioneered this science, and the rogue android David experimented exhaustively on the flora and fauna of an engineer home world, before presumably moving on to more human centric experimentations on the far flung world of our Guy six. In David's Notes and Drawings from the Engineer World and Covenant, we see exhaustive and increasingly nightmarish records of the black Goose effects on native species, as well as his own manipulation and proposed alterations of human and engineer physiology with the accelerant and altered strains of xenomorphic life. Interestingly enough, one of these images depicts a creature with the head of an engineer and the body of a xenomorph. It would seem that David's twisted imagination, if not his unwholesome experiments, prophesied the romulus offspring decades earlier. You'll see this illustration, by the way, in the compiled volume David's Drawings, published in splendid hardback, alongside a softback booklet about the artists Matt Hatton and Dame Hallett, who created the drawings and the notes that litter the set of David's laboratory in the film. The main book is a beautiful, haunting volume, and the accompanying booklet provides wonderful insight into the visual design process of the film. Now, the Extended Alien Universe contains numerous additional hybrid complications. The Alien RPG from Freely Publishing includes several of these related to the creation of the twenty six Dracona strain, a black goo based vaccine similar to what we see in Romulus, intended in this case to halt the development of a xenomorphic embryo in the human body. In the module Destroyer of Worlds, we see one complication in which the black goo derivative is introduced into the body of a human already impregnated by a face hugger. The accelerant, they write, serves as a genetic bridge, resequencing the DNA of human host and xenomorphic embryo into a single organism, essentially turning the human into a xenomorph from the inside out. The resulting body burster resembles a normal adult xenomorph, but with the skull of the human host embedded in the creature's cranial dome. This concept, in essence, originates in William Gibson's unproduced screenplay for Alien three, and plays on some early hr Giger suit designs for the original Alien. It's a fitting and horrific concept that Alien filmmakers should certainly come back to in the future, all right, that's it for this episode. Tune in for additional installments of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Anomalogus Dupendium each week. We'll run an omnibus of the Alien episodes later this month, and as always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. When I wrapped up the last Monster Fact episode concerning the alien universe, I mentioned that I'd be back with at least one more installment. That is, provided alien Romulus gave us anything new to ponder, and it certainly did so. Here we are once more going to discuss the many strange and horrifying ways that xenobiology can interact with human physiology in this series. Fair warning, this episode is going to feature spoilers for Romulus, as well as other alien films and bits of related media. First and foremost, we have to remember that even the cores morph life cycle is one of horrific and deadly hybridity. The adult xenomorph is inherently a combination of alien and host DNA agent A zero slash thirty nine to fifty nine x point ninety one slash fifteen. The black goo works as an evolutionary accelerant on most biological modes of life. In the series, pushing them into stranger, more hostile, and more durable forms. So most of the individual forms and lifestyle stages we've discussed so far can be thought of as the most likely forms and morphs of xenomorphic life, but many other paths are possible. This is especially true when human engineer or android scientific manipulation changes the shape of things to come. In nineteen ninety seven's Alien Resurrection, set two hundred years after the events of Alien three in the year twenty three eighty one, we encounter United Systems military scientists who have not only created numerous clones of long dead Ellen Ripley, but also the xenomorph queen that was growing inside her at the moment of her death. Their results are numerous Ripley clones with varying degrees of xenomorphic biology, as well as an alien queen with human reproductive physiology. The latter situation results in the birth of a monstrous newborn hybrid, a pale humanoid xenomorph with various human features and a complex emotional state. Much earlier in the Alien timeline and more recently at our cinemas, we witness the birth of the offspring hybrid in Alien Romulus We get to this creature via various missteps. First of all, whalen Utani scientists managed to isolate the black goo from the remains of the original Nostromo xenomorph. Then they attempt to engineer it into a control biohacking agent that alters human physiology to make them more resilient. Offworld colonists a futurist concept that we've discussed unstuff to blow your mind before. Instead of terraforming other worlds into something more like Earth, what if we altered ourselves to better fit those worlds, or at least met them halfway. So give it up to wayaly Utani solid concept. Their execution, however, falls tragically short of perfection. In their vanity, they attempted to harness the biotechnological might of the engineers, and the violent trajectory of the black Goo could not be contained. We see footage of the supposedly successful resurrection of a dead lab rat via the formula let's call it gray Goo, only to later see the disastrous mutations that the specimen experienced. Now unaware of the latter complications, the characters in Romulus take off with the gray goose samples and sure enough one of them, K eventually injects it into their own system to bounce back from an injury. The gray Goo appears to work here, at least initially. However, the formula affects K's pregnancy, resulting in the rapid earth and development of a fast growing alien zeno hybrid referred to as the Offspring, a towering, misshapen monster with elements of xenomorph human and engineer features. Now, I wasn't sure exactly how I felt about this creature design at first, but it has grown on me, and I've seen that it clearly freaked out and revolted plenty of viewers, so it's very much serving its purpose in the film. So I eagerly await revisiting this creature when Romulus is released into our homes later this month. Now, the Romulus scientists we're far from the first to experiment with the black goo and charge its effects on various organisms. The engineers, of course, pioneered this science, and the rogue android David experimented exhaustively on the flora and fauna of an engineer home world, before presumably moving on to more human centric experimentations on the far flung world of our Guy six. In David's Notes and Drawings from the Engineer World and Covenant, we see exhaustive and increasingly nightmarish records of the black Goose effects on native species, as well as his own manipulation and proposed alterations of human and engineer physiology with the accelerant and altered strains of xenomorphic life. Interestingly enough, one of these images depicts a creature with the head of an engineer and the body of a xenomorph. It would seem that David's twisted imagination, if not his unwholesome experiments, prophesied the romulus offspring decades earlier. You'll see this illustration, by the way, in the compiled volume David's Drawings, published in splendid hardback, alongside a softback booklet about the artists Matt Hatton and Dame Hallett, who created the drawings and the notes that litter the set of David's laboratory in the film. The main book is a beautiful, haunting volume, and the accompanying booklet provides wonderful insight into the visual design process of the film. Now, the Extended Alien Universe contains numerous additional hybrid complications. The Alien RPG from Freely Publishing includes several of these related to the creation of the twenty six Dracona strain, a black goo based vaccine similar to what we see in Romulus, intended in this case to halt the development of a xenomorphic embryo in the human body. In the module Destroyer of Worlds, we see one complication in which the black goo derivative is introduced into the body of a human already impregnated by a face hugger. The accelerant, they write, serves as a genetic bridge, resequencing the DNA of human host and xenomorphic embryo into a single organism, essentially turning the human into a xenomorph from the inside out. The resulting body burster resembles a normal adult xenomorph, but with the skull of the human host embedded in the creature's cranial dome. This concept, in essence, originates in William Gibson's unproduced screenplay for Alien three, and plays on some early hr Giger suit designs for the original Alien. It's a fitting and horrific concept that Alien filmmakers should certainly come back to in the future, all right, that's it for this episode. Tune in for additional installments of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Anomalogus Dupendium each week. We'll run an omnibus of the Alien episodes later this month, and as always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.