APRIL 2023 E-MEETING, POST 7 OF 7: Answers to Quiz, Wrap-Up

This post closes today’s MonSFFA e-meeting.

10) ANSWERS TO ALIEN AND CREATURE EGG QUIZ!

Were you able to correctly identify each of the aliens or creatures from the single film-frame provided showing their egg, or eggs? How about the movies or TV episodes in which they appeared?

Here are the answers to our quiz, which was posted at the outset of the e-meeting, earlier this afternoon (Post 1 of 7).

This egg is that of, or these eggs are those of…

1) The Xenomorph, or Alien, the titular extraterrestrial star of director Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien, and its sequels. This lethal threat begins life as a “face-hugger,” which emerges from its egg.

The Aliens are, perhaps, the most famous space monsters in all of sci-fi cinema, certainly among the most terrifying!

2) The Ymir, or Venusian creature, seen in Ray Harryhuasen’s 1957 monster movie, 20 Million Miles to Earth. Never actually named “Ymir” in the film, this designation is, nevertheless, well known by fans of Harryhausen’s fantastic films.

Brought back from Venus aboard a crippled Earth rocket, once hatched, the beast grows rapidly in Earth’s atmosphere from house cat- to elephant-sized, terrorizing Italy as scientists and the military attempt to capture it.

3) Velociraptors, the deadly dinosaurs featured in the Jurassic Park/World franchise.

Pilfered Velociraptor eggs are at the center of a pivotal plot development in Jurassic Park III (2001).

4) Crites, the rotund, voracious, hedgehog-like aliens of the Critters film and television franchise (1986-2019). Their large, wide mouths are filled with multiple rows of sharp teeth. A Crite can curl up into a ball, and many together can form a large sphere that rolls across the countryside causing destruction and eating everything in sight!

5) Dragons, the flying, fire-breathing icons of epic fantasy, these particular specimens appearing in Game of Thrones (2011-2019), the television miniseries adapted from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The popular HBO show featured Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons, and her trio of flame-belching reptiles.

6) The “Alien Cyclops,” a Martian monster using mind-control on human minions to help with a plot to plant its eggs throughout Manhattan in the 1980 sci-fi/horror film Contamination. The slime-oozing eggs have the nasty habit of exploding, spraying a toxic, viscous liquid on any person nearby, which instantly causes that person to, themselves, violently explode in a rain of guts and gore!

Contamination was an Italian/German co-production released in the U.S. as Alien Contamination. Writer/director Luigi Cozzi, working under the pseudonym Lewis Coates, freely admitted that his film was entirely inspired by Alien and parroted in many ways Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. Montreal-born actress Louise Marleau starred as a government operative assigned to deal with the situation.

7) The Roc, a giant, two-headed, mythological bird, as seen in 1958’s fantasy/adventure The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Travelling to the island of Colossa, Sinbad and his crew come upon a huge egg and kill the emerging hatchling for food, only to be set upon by the chick’s angry parent.

The Roc and other denizens of Colossa were brought to life on screen by stop-motion animation wizard Ray Harryhausen.

8) Q, or Quetzalcoatl, a dragon-like Aztec deity, as depicted in 1982’s Q—The Winged Serpent. Picking off hapless New Yorkers from rooftop terraces, Q has attracted police attention. The giant, stop-motion lizard has nested in the spire of New York City’s Chrysler Building, and there laid a single, colossal egg.

Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree are among those facing off against the winged serpent in writer/director Larry Cohen’s well-received monster movie.

9) The Raxacoricofallapatorians, or the Slitheen, egg-laying aliens native to the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius in the Doctor Who universe. They resemble something of a twisted cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and a Rancor!

Adversaries of the Doctor, the Slitheen are, in fact, a family of Raxacoricofallapatorians, but when referring to the species as a whole, their surname is used interchangeably with the proper designation.

10) Mothra, a daikaiju in the Godzilla monsterverse. When she dies, Mothra is reincarnated by way of the giant egg she leaves behind, effectively cheating death.

11) A vampiric humanoid race, the queen of which is featured in the 1966 film Queen of Blood. A beautiful, green-skinned woman, this Queen exercises hypnotic influence over the male astronauts aboard an Earth vessel.

After she kills two of the men by draining them of blood, and is herself killed by the lone female astronaut aboard, alien eggs are discovered hidden throughout the ship. It is deduced that the Queen of Blood sought for her race fresh breeding grounds. On Earth!

12) The Horta, an intelligent, utterly alien, seemingly monstrous silicon-based life form that secretes from its body a powerful corrosive, allowing it to effortlessly tunnel through solid rock. Featured in “The Devil in the Dark,” a 1967 Star Trek episode, the Horta’s eggs, numbering in the thousands, have been discovered by Federation colonists working a pergium mining operation on this, the creature’s home planet. Mistaken for valueless geological oddities, many of the smooth, volleyball-sized eggs were destroyed by the colonists. The maddened mother Horta responded in defense of her unborn children by wrecking the miners’ equipment and attacking colony personnel, her caustic expulsions instantly burning the men to ashes!

The Enterprise arrives, soon sorts out the terrible misunderstanding, and by episode’s end, the Horta and her newborns are helping the miners dig new tunnels to tap richer deposits of pergium. “The Devil in the Dark” is one of genre television’s finest examples of exciting, intelligent, thought-provoking science fiction.

11) THANK YOU!

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed your time with us these past few hours and encourage you to visit www.MonSFFA.ca regularly for additional content.

We thank Josée Bellemare, Kofi Oduro, Keith Braithwaite, and Cathy Palmer-Lister for their contributions to today’s programme. Thanks is extended, also, to all of our supporting contributors this afternoon.

And of course, to all who joined us today and took in our online get-together, we thank you for your interest and attention, and remind you to leave a comment!

12) NEXT MonSFFA e-MEETING

As club members are aware, our hoped-for return to in-person MonSFFA meetings has been stalled by lingering pandemic-related circumstances! We continue our search for an available, affordable meeting hall; we’ll keep you updated as to any progress in that regard, but frustratingly, there is nothing new to report at this time.

And so, join us next month, on Saturday, May 13, beginning at 1:00PM, right here at www.MonSFFA.ca, for another in our series of MonSFFA e-meetings!

13) SIGN-OFF 

Until then, fellow fans of all things sci-fi and fantasy, farewell and safe travels.