Eventually Spielberg settled on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in favour of King Kong or Superman (or Jaws 2, which he was inevitably offered and unsurprisingly turned down). It ended up being another huge hit for the director, and one which he revisited umpteen times in the decades after its release, constantly tinkering with it and introducing even more fanciful ideas to his story of alien abduction and mash potato moulding. Apparently he had sci-fi on the brain for a good while after, since the next project he tried to get off the ground had a similar bent. Night Skies was come up with to placate Columbia Pictures, who wanted a sequel to Close Encounters; Spielberg didn't want to do a straight sequel, but knew the studio could just make one without him like with Jaws 2, and so came up with a treatment for a sci-fi horror twist on the original film, originally called Watch The Skies. Creepy puppets were produced, Spielberg shifted to a producer role, and eventually the whole thing fell apart and elements were resurrected in two very different forms: ET The Extraterrestrial, and Poltergeist.
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/
