There are some other literary references in this list I wrote up for Sideshow:
Stan Winston of Stan Winston Studios was responsible for the film's creature effects, and constructed the original 1/4 scale rod puppet along with Winston Supervisor John Rosengrant, and their team of FX professionals.
Seated next to Stan Winston on a plane ride, Aliens director James Cameron helped design the now famous Predator Hunter creature seen in all three films.
Stan Winston won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Aliens.
Lydecker (Acheron Colony Administrator) is an FX technique describing wire effects.
[AVP SPOILER] Aliens actors Lance Henricksen ("Bishop") and Bill Paxton ("Hudson") have both played characters who suffer the ultimate Sci-Fi screen death hat trick of: death by Alien, death by Predator AND, death by Terminator.
Aliens actors Michael Biehn ("Hicks") and Bill Paxton ("Hudson") have shared screen time in five films: Tombstone, The Terminator, Navy Seals, The Lords of Discipline, and of course, Aliens.
The Smartgunner team of Mark Rolston ("Drake") Jenette Goldstein ("Vasquez") have shared time in six Hollywood projects, Lethal Weapon 2, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "24," "Alias," "E.R.," and Aliens.
The role of Lt. Ellen Ripley was originally planned for Meryl Streep.
The mechanism used to make the face-huggers scuttle about in the Med lab came from one of the "flying piranhas" in one of Cameron's earlier movies, Piranha II: The Spawning (1981). It took nine people on Stan Winston's team to make the facehugger work: one person for each leg, and one for the tail.
One of the Facehugger builders on Aliens was Stephen Norrington, who went on to direct Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
In Aliens, Michael Biehn's character Hicks gets bitten on the hand by Newt (Carrie Henn). This happens to him in every James Cameron movie he's in: The Abyss, and The Terminator.
Both the Nostromo and the Sulaco have perpetual motion devices on the tables of their cafeterias.
The names Gorman, Hudson, Hicks and Frost were taken from the book, "A Bridge Too Far" by Cornelius Ryan (he also wrote "The Longest Day").
Aliens gave the planetoid from the first film a more formal nomenclature, "LV-426," and its name, "Acheron." In Greek mythology, Acheron is the river of woe and pain, in the underworld land of the damned.
Alien director Ridley Scott's original casting choice for the actor to play Captain Dallas was Harrison Ford, who had just finished playing Han Solo in Star Wars. Although Ford was not cast, he went on to star in Scott's next film, Blade Runner.
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