Before there was Alien, there was Star Beast. Even before they had that, Dan O'Bannon had written the aforementioned first act of a script called Memory, but had yet to figure out what was going to happen to the curious crew of a ship called to an undiscovered planetoid. It was only when he went to France to work on an aborted adaptation of Dune that it all came together. Gonzo director Alejandro Jodorowsky's film fell through, but being in Europe allowed O'Bannon to meet up with a bunch of creative sci-fi minds...including eventual father of the xenomorph, H.R. Giger. With his antagonist in place O'Bannon had somewhere to go with his script. But that first draft remains very different. For one thing, it was called Star Beast, which is just terrible. There was no Ash, with the whole subplot of The Company entirely absent. Ripley was a dude, although the script specified that the crew was unisex (hence the names could be used for male and female actors). Oh and the ending would've involved the alien killing Ripley, then imitating her voice to gain access to Earth on her escape pod...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
