Details, credits, errata: This week we had the wonderful Sarah Welch-Larson, Alien franchise scholar extraordinaire, on to discuss the least-loved and weirdest movie in the series, Alien Resurrection. It was great.
You can read an excerpt from Sarah’s excellent book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, here at RogerEbert.com, you can follow her on Twitter here, and you can buy her book for yourself and then a duplicate in case you lend it out, plus copies for your loved ones, here.
Our header image is a collage of promo photos of NECA’s Ripley 8 figure (Sam misidentified the manufacturer as McFarlane Toys, a different beloved toymaker that caters to adult nerds). These toys are a slightly later addition to the shelves; the original tie-in toys for the movie, believe it or not, were made by Kenner and distributed at Walmart and other big-box stores in the children’s section, despite the film not being anything even remotely like a children’s movie. Alien³ received this treatment as well, though those toys were legitimately pretty cool and came with little tie-in comics. Not that anyone’s keeping track.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Alien Resurrection is copyright 1997 Brandywine productions and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
Episode 39: [Whispers to date] "That's the resurrection"