The Monsters of Metroid

In their early days, it was a proud tradition for video games to aspire to be “the game version of X”, where X was some other piece of popular culture—one could argue that it still is a tradition, it’s just that they’re better at hiding it (or are legally obligated to.) Back in the eighties, it was a copyright-skirting free-for-all, and developers were looking to take something else and put their video game spin on it—that’s the mindset that gave us Konami series like Castlevania, Contra, and Metal Gear, which were very blatant mash-ups of multiple movies, and it’s the same mindset at play in Nintendo’s long-running Metroid series, which began as a pastiche of Alien. This is not speculation on my part—as longtime series developer Yoshio Sakamoto (who started out as a designer and has since moved on to director and producer roles on most of the later games in the series) said in an interview: “I think the film Alien had a huge influence on the production of the first Metroid game. All of the team members were affected by HR Giger’s design work, and I think they were aware that such designs would be a good match for the Metroid world we had already put in place.” There are many games that look to Alien for inspiration (and maybe even more that look to its sequel—but Metroid actually released in Japan a little over a month after Aliens, and likely didn’t have to chance to be inspired by it), but it still feels like the entire Metroid series is the one that can claim the title of being “the game version of Alien.”. It’s not because the games have consistently been exactly like the movies—although there are certainly some parallels one could make—but because, more than any other video games, they are the ones that absorbed aspects of the 1979 movie’s core tension, the sense of strangeness and otherworldly menace, and iterated on them, maybe even more than that movie’s sequels.

Creature Classic Companion: Doctor Who – “The Ark in Space”

There are innumerable places out there recounting the long and complicated history of Doctor Who (which will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary next year), its place within the history of Science Fiction television, its importance to the BBC and UK TV in general, and its dedicated fandom. All of that has already been thoroughly interrogated, and by people far more knowledgeable than me.

So, instead, let’s talk about monsters.

As the old story goes, when the series was being developed in the early sixties, the top brass at the BBC explicitly told the writers to avoid stories about “bug-eyed monsters.” However, the second serial ready to be produced completely ignored this edict, and due to a lack of other suitable scripts, it went ahead—and unfortunately for the anti-bug-eyed-monster producers, the monsters introduced in that second serial were the Daleks, who became immediate pop culture icons in the UK, complete with novelty Christmas records. The show’s time and space-traversing format allowed the stories to theoretically go anyway and do anything, but from that point forward that anywhere often involved some kind of alien monster.

Unlike the other influential creature TV series I’ve written about from around the same time period, like The Outer Limits and Ultraman, there was never a requirement for a Doctor Who story to include a monster, and there are many that don’t—but the monsters in that series have become such a tradition (almost certainly because of the popularity of the Daleks, due as much to the distinctive visuals invented by production designer David Cusick as it was to the scripts by Terry Nation, although it was the latter who got the copyright) that the series, from the original 1963-1989 run or the current one that began in 2005, has never veered away from them. With a basic concept that gives them a near endless choice of settings and storylines, the possibilities for just what kind of monsters can show up are equally as endless, which has led to a panoply of highly imaginative monsters, some of them becoming recurring presences on the show like the Daleks did, while others only appeared once, but may still have left an impression. As in many classic monster movies, the creativity on display in the stories and monsters is crucial because the limited budget of a BBC production means that the special effects, back then and today, are never going to be impressive or believable, so they have to find other ways to engage, or terrify, the audience.

The original series reached its peak popularity in the mid-seventies, after the starring role of the Doctor was given to Tom Baker (whose pre-Doctor career we briefly touched on in the post about The Mutations—although the performance that got him the job was his turn as the villain in the Ray Harryhausen effects vehicle The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, another monster connection), the fourth actor to take the part, who brought a particular laid-back quirkiness to a role that had been defined from the beginning by eccentricity. Due to the length of his tenure (seven years, the longest any actor has played the Doctor) and the fact that his were the first episodes to air on US TV, Baker ended up becoming the most well-known lead for many years (it sounds like he was aware of this at the time, too, leading to some notoriously diva-ish behaviour on set.) His second ever storyline, the four-episode “The Ark in Space”, aired from January to February 1975, and is a fan favourite—it’s also an important one for the history of the show and its approach to monsters, signalling a new direction that has cast a long shadow over the entire series.

Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (1995)

In this third of three extraterrestrial review subjects, we enter an entirely new realm: the glorified fan film, based on a popular Sci-Fi TV property. Wait, come back! There’s stuff to say here!

I’ve found myself in and out of the Doctor Who audience over the years: first discovering reruns of the Tom Baker episodes in high school, getting on board the revival when it began in 2005, jumping off board when I inevitably lose interest in watching a TV show on a regular basis, and then watching a few new ones here and there before stopping again. Last year, when Twitch was streaming episodes of the older series non-stop for a few months, I was tuning in regularly—there is still something deeply enjoyable about that run from the sixties to the eighties, even with its low budget nature and the weak stories that are peppered in throughout. What I think always appealed to me about the show is that it often had the feel of a classic Sci-Fi monster movie, combining aspects of the fifties stuff with the darker atmosphere of a Hammer movie—no show had a greater devotion to weird concepts and adorably ratty, but often imaginative!, creature costumes—with the serialization only adding to the charming old-fashionedness of it all. While the show’s time/space-hopping format meant it could be something completely different from week to week, Doctor Who still ended up becoming a motherlode for monster fans, and many of its alien menaces have since become iconic on their own.