Now this film was not particularly well received when it was released theatrically.

As I understand it, a lot of the comedy didn't really land for people.

You know, I don't think they sold many tickets.

There are stories of the film playing to largely empty theaters and that kind of thing.

But by the 1980s, it had really

started to obtain a cult status that probably also had something to do with the success of

John Carpenter and people knowing his work and knowing his style from his other films.

Dan O'Bannon, as well, as Will mentioned, had a very important role to play on Alien. If people have seen Jodorowski's Dune, O'Bannon was one of the people, you know, as Joe D'Rowski is recounting in that film, you know, very entertaining film, Jodorosky's Dune, as he's kind of recounting all the lengths that he was willing to go to to get this team assembled, to get all the people he wanted.

O'Bannon was one of them. He wanted O'Bannon to do the effects. And if you've seen Alien, I mean, you can actually see a lot of parallels, I think, between Darkstar and Alien. I mean, Darkstar is more lighthearted. There isn't a big terrifying thing, stalking them in the bowels of their ship or anything like that. Dark Star is not

sci-fi horror by any measure. But I think in many ways, the overriding theme is very similar or even the

same. This is a film which, you know, coming out not that long after the moon landing, not that long

in the grand scheme of things, into the history of space travel and space exploration in general.

This is a film that like Alien imagines a future in which, you know, yes, we can travel through

space, but it sucks. The future is not utopian. It is quite the opposite. This is not Star Trek.

This is not even 2001 of Space Odyssey. This film, like Alien, shows us a future where people travel through space and they take

all of the inequities and exploitation of earthly life with them into the heavens.

The basic backstory in Dark Star, which I think is set in the mid-22nd century, is that

the ship itself, which is called Dark Star, is a scout ship.

It's got a crew of five people. It's got a computer that talks to them like in 2001.

And essentially, they're performing reconnaissance and doing various other tasks that presumably have to do with future plans for colonization and maybe mining as well.

And this is important because one of the things that they do is they execute or they blow up

planets that are considered unstable. And it's important that we never really hear too much

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