Nasty Little Thing Productions

Blade Runner Comic, AOD Alternate Ending

Blade Runner is one of my all-time favourite science-fiction films.  I was searching for images from the movie today, because I intend to do a drawing related to the movie sometime.  I did manage to get several images, video clips and other stuff (a lot from this site), but one link caught my attention and I felt I just had to write about it.

This site called Bladezone has the 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation of the movie online.  It can be viewed here.

The comic adaptation is written by Archie Goodwin, pencilled by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon, inked by Williamson, Dan Green and Ralph Reese, and coloured by Marie Severin.  I thought the comic was nicely done, capturing the feel of the movie well.  There's especially a double-page spread showing the cityscape of Los Angeles, 2019 that's really nice.  Of course, since the comic came out at the time of the movie's original release, it is quite in tone with the theatrical version of the film — there is no ambiguity in here as to whether Deckard is a replicant or a human.

The comic is 44 pages long, excluding the cover page, etc.  It will take some time therefore to read it online, but if you have a decent internet connection you can manage it.  I've downloaded all the pages.

This is just in!  For a very long time now I've been trying to find a clip of the alternate ending to Army of Darkness.  Finally, I found it at this page, and I just watched it.  No matter how many times you read about something like this, it can't beat actually watching it, and it was great.

At the end of the theatrical release version, Ash (who has been fighting the "medieval dead" in the 13th century) is told that if he says the words "klaatu verada nikto", he would return to his own time, and the evil would be stopped.  Of course, being the fool that he is, he doesn't say the words properly — and the evil follows him back to the present time.  There's a terrific fight with a demon in S-Mart (the supermarket where Ash works), and the immortal concluding line "Hail to the King, Baby".

The original intended ending, though, goes like this — Ash is given a potion by the Wiseman, and told that each drop he drinks from it would allow him to sleep for a century.  Ash goes to a cave and seals it, and then drinks the potion.  Unfortunately, he drinks one drop too much (being the fool that he is, of course)!  When he wakes up, he exits the cave, and to his shock, sees a desolate landscape with several wrecked earth monuments and a red sky — and realises that he is the only man left on the face of the earth!  The movie ends with his cry of despair, "No!!  I slept too long!!"  This ending was deemed too dark for audiences, and it was changed before the film was released.

posted by Karthik Abhiram @ 3:54 PM