Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Terminator - Arnie's Hair and Sunglasses

I've been watching the Terminator films recently, not seen them for a while, besides the fact that my Terminator DVD had a layer of some gunk on it that had to be cleaned off, I'm not the only person I know in the UK that's had this happen to their disc, so if you have the Region 2 of Terminator and ain't looked at it for a while then check your disc.

Anyway what struck me in Terminator was his hair, the Series 800 Model 101 Infiltrator unit's come off a production line so you'd assume they'd all have the same hair, it's not until 36 minutes into the film after he's been through a fireball in the back alley that Arnie gets the now recognizable spiked hair we associate with the Terminator, yet at the beginning of T2 he shows up with pretty much the same spiked haircut, and not the one we see him with at the start of the first movie.
The background to the screenplay states that after Kyle Reese is sent through to follow the first Terminator they realize that another unit, the T-1000 has been sent through so they program another Series 800 and send that through to help John Connor out. The script for the sequence where they send Kyle Reese through time and then walk into the warehouse full of unactivated Terminators can be read in script form with concept sketches in Terminator 2: Judgment Day - The Book of the Film - An Illustrated Screenplay. Cameron wrote the whole opening with the Time Displacement Machine but it was deemed to expensive to film. Once the second Terminator gets sent through the rebels are all set to rig the whole complex and blow it up.

Also it's not until the Series 800 damages his eye in a fight that he's forced to wear sunglasses to hide the damage in the first Terminator movie, yet in T2 he seems to wear the shades from the off, more like a fashion statement.

As for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines I watched a version called Terminator 3: The Coming Storm off Fanedit.org in which lots of cheesy and unnecessary elements were removed as well as all the references to dates and ages that contradict the previous two films, with a new running time of 1h 28m as opposed to the original 1h 49m.

Again in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines he sports the spiked hair and sunglasses.

The word is during James Cameron's divorce with Linda Hamilton, she asked for the Terminator franchise rights which she promptly sold to Carolco Pictures owners Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna.

8 comments:

Morrisminor said...

Did'nt Reese say that "on the outside they're living tissue" or something to that effect and if that were the case then this organic material would be in a constant state of growth and thus always changing! If that were the scenario why then... any pattern or combination of hair follicles could be cultivaed!.........,Ahem!!

Andrew Glazebrook said...

I'm sure I was told once that Hair and Fingernails aren't living tissue, which means that both Reese and the Terminator would have come through bald and without finger or toe nails, as for Reese's teeth, I suppose he just had to keep his mouth shut.

dylan said...

I've always wondered how the T1000 got through.

Andrew Glazebrook said...

It would have been fun if the T-1000 had been wrapped in just a skin/membrane of living tissue, but then that might have given away the fact that he was the bad guy when we're led to believe he might be the good guy early on.

crookymike said...

Maybe they gave him a haircut which would be appropriate to the time he was sent back to. Imagine a Terminator prequel set in the 50's with Arnie sporting a quiff trying to save Sarah Connor's mum/dad. I bet it would be better than T3

Andrew Glazebrook said...

I seriously doubt the last survivors of the human race sending a robot back in time would have been in the slightest bothered about giving him a haircut to make him blend in or if any of them new what sort of haircut would be suitable for the 1990's.

crookymike said...

True, if I was Skynet, the hairdressers would be the first to die. Then students.

Andrew Glazebrook said...

I'd keep all the Nymphoid Barbarians alive though !!