Well, my very first encounter with the alien was very early in the age of 10 back in 1994! It was when the original Alien aired on TV and I managed it to get my mother let me watching it ...
Oh, I freaked out on several occasions! It was very intense and scary ... but also so interesting! So I could stand it (and seeing Ash freaking out and spitting "milk" was so funny, I just laughed and that helped me getting through the whole film without shitting my pants
) ... and got several nightmares within the next couples of days - always watched around my room at night, expecting the alien lurking in the dark all the time
2 or 3 years later, both Aliens and AlienĀ³ ran on TV and I really enjoyed them, especially Aliens! That film actually made me a fan of the franchise (although it was the film that made a franchise out of Alien at all) ... AlienĀ³ was not as good as I expected after the two great first installments, but still nice to watch (and hell, I remember when the guy fell into the huge fan - I laughed
) But the real great deal was: just after those 2 films they also showed both Predator and Predator 2 as double feature just a week later! So I expected first just another Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick (in the manner of Commando or Red Heat) but then I saw skinned corpses hanging on trees and thought "Wow, those rebels are really sick f**ks!" - That's what the film made so good - you totally expect something different first ... but after the mysterious cloaked entity was showed the first time it was clear that it would be really interesting now! And hell, what a fun to watch! The guy who played the Terminator was punched and kicked through the mud like a punching ball
never saw THIS again in another Schwarzenegger film! Great deal ... and with Predator 2, it was nice to see what kind of mess the Predator would do in a large city like L.A. - just perfect to me back then! But the biggest deal was at the end, when Danny Glover entered the Predator's ship and the camera moved over his skull collection and ... well, you probably know what happened then ... I totally freaked out again!
That was the magic moment, I was both at once - Alien AND Predator fan (since I always thought after the scene in Predator 2, that both are somehow connected in the same universe) ... so it was just logical to me to expect an Alien vs Predator movie some days - well, the 2 PC games came earlier ...
I also remember, back in 1997 I stumbled upon Alien Trilogy for PC and it was just a must have to me and picked it up ... as I discovered and enjoyed the good old FPS games (such as Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Star Wars: Dark Forces and such) back in those days
, so it was just a logical option
A couple of years later I watched Alien: Resurrection on TV, but it was not the same anymore ... I was just confused and disappointed ... Well, that's the magical moment, when a youngster learn, that
new doesn't automatically mean
better at all!
Instead of I got the 1999 AvP game for PC from a friend and enjoyed this much much more (even when Half-Life and Unreal Tournament were the better games back then
) ... followed a couple of years later by it's great sequel ... Then in 2003 the director's cut of Alien ran in the cinemas ... It was a nice experience, watching this classic on the big screen! And it was 9 years since I saw it the last time at all
Around christmas in 2004 I went to an electronic and media store ... well, in the first instance I was about getting The Seven Samurai on DVD - but then I watched around and easily put the Samurai back ... and instead of picked up all 4 special edition DVDs of the Alien movies
Well, the heart knows what it wants ...
And the next big deal was, that in all of those DVDs were free tickets for the upcoming Alien vs Predator movie (along with bonus DVDs containing sneek preview and making of materials for AvP) - So I took 3 of them each (tickets and preview DVDs), gave them to 2 friends of mine (one of them got 2 preview DVDs and passed it to another friend of his later) and we all went into the film later ... the 4th ticket and preview DVD I kept for myself and they now lay in my AvP/AvPR double feature DVD box ...
These were the wild first 10 years of me becoming a fan