“He has the same attitude towards us as we have toward a field of cabbages.”

89. Who Goes There? – John W. Campbell

I am very fond of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Very. It was the first one I thought of for my John Carpenter’s Guinea Pigs parody painting series and the first logo I drew was for The Pig, two years before I finished the rest of the painting. So, finally reading the novella that inspired the movie seemed overdue. However, it really wasn’t.

The original drawings for The Pig parody paintings.

 

And here’s Peregrine, who plays both Fuchs and MacReady with the logo painting and her as Fuchs.

There are many similarities, the radio isn’t working and blood serum explanations, and Blair is totally weird, but, there is far less action in Who Goes There? And the description of the alien is really, well, alien. it’s blue and has worms for hair and three eyes and there’s no questioning that it’s not of this earth at all. Who Goes There? is also very talky, super talky, which sometimes is good but in this case is delivering a lot of scientific explanations, which makes sense as they are all scientists and not as cool as Kurt Russell and his hat, but, it just takes the wind out of the sails a bit – and the dialogue is not as clever as the super talky original movie version, The Thing from Another World (I like that one too, mostly for funny dialogue like the title of this post).

I would say “it is worth to read,” which is a review of my own work from a forum that fits this situation since it is less than efficiently expressing quality. I was really glad the blood testing scene was at least present, although no one is tied to the couch, which leads to my favorite line in the movie also about being tied to the couch, which in my painting would be delivered by Ozma.

If anyone doesn’t want to spend the winter tied to this fucking couch, it’s Ozma (seen here looking at herself with Horace and Peregrine in that scene’s painting).