leading from: The Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman influence?
a) Ever since the trailer first showed the strange long limbs of some creature that would be later revealed to be the octopus like Trilobyte had I been looking for some signs of Pink Floyd as a point of reference. Since they didn't have HR Giger aboard the film project to offer creature designs that echoed rituals, beliefs and ideas that had been around for thousands of years, at least the creature department might be able to cope with paying attention to the dream worlds of 1970s rock music scene.
b) It was of course in October of 2012, days before the blu-ray DVD came out, I realised a connection between Steely Dan's Deacon Blues and the blue Deacon, and Deacon Blues also connected with the title of a Tony Scott movie Crimson Tide. However once I got a copy of the Blu-ray set, in the director's commentary for Prometheus, Ridley revealed that he used Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for Michael Fassbender to act to during the scene where his character discovers the orrery in the Juggernaut ship. How much further were the phantoms from the 1970s rock scene supposed to be coming out to haunt us? This might beg the question about what inspired the final Fifield, which itself looks like a cartoonish caricature of primal grotesquery with it's face like surface of a pizza and oversized buckled teeth
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| Gerald Scarfe's illustration of the Teacher |
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| Gerald Scarfe's illustration of the Teacher |
c) Over the months I took another look at the teacher from Pink Floyd, a fierce character drawn by the satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, a long limbed humanoid with a head roughly shaped like a kidney bean, and he was known for transforming his head into a hammer and shoving children through a meat mincer. I wondered how this might connect with the Prometheus world.
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| The giant Teacher stage puppet used during the stage shows |
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| Gerald Scarfe |
d) On April 8th 2013, I soon started to think about the alternate Fifield monster , the bean shaped head, the bluish skin, the elongated arms, I had finally found what for me was The Teacher. I can't claim to have a clue what the art department were told to create in relation to this but the end result is enough of an echo of the concept and I think this entity got into the design consciously or unconsciously. In England, Gerald Scarfe has been very well known for his editorial cartoons for the Sunday Times, and perhaps his creative influence like his contemporary Ralph Steadman, is one of those things that might be considered unavoidable for those growing up before the internet age.
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| WETA's alternate Fifield mutant |
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| (source Blu-ray.com forum user CRS through AVPGalaxy.net) |
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| alternate Fifield mutant later released online by Cinefec, August 27th, 2012 |
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