The way I understand it there were a few heads made, 6 in total I believe & all were based on Giger's original sculpt. In the book Gigers Alien he suggests that one of the castings of the original sculpt was sent to Rambaldi to be mechanised, Rambaldi then set about recasting the head, chopping lots off of it & reinforcing it in various area's. If you look at the pic's of Rambaldi working on the head you can see the head looks nothing like the original. In an effort to bring the head back to how it was originaly sculpted, latex rubber castings were made & glued onto Rambaldi's modified, mechanised head. As a result the rubber peices didnt fit quite like the original & there are many differences in these two versions. Some of the more obviouse differences are the eye sockets, the cheeks & the jaw sides. The lip & tendon arrangements are completely different aswell & that seems to be due to the mechanisation of the Rambaldi head. I guess Rambaldi felt he couldn't get the mechanisms he intended to create to work with solid jaw sides at the time.
this, ironically, was about half of the information i set out to find when i stumbled across your thread. i couldn't figure out from
giger's alien how exactly the head went from sculpture to finished product on the screen. i knew that rambaldi received a casting to work, but i wasn't quite sure at what stage. the picture of him working on it, it looks he got a cast of it before giger did anything more than bolt the skull to the jai-alai racquet or whatever that thing is, and then he cut it up from there.
giger's jaw seems to have started as an extension of something basically like a human jawbone. it has the coronoid process, and is hollow behind it. i suspect that the casting was sent to rambaldi at this point, because you can see that coronoid process in the above photo of the rambaldi head. giger them seems to have sculpted over that something much like your solid jaw. i guess when the stretched the latex casting over his animated heads, it didn't fit right, so they just covered the whole section up with condoms or whatever.
this is just guess work on my part, but it's the best idea i can put together of how the animated rambaldi heads came together.
With regard to the tubes comming off the rear corners of the bottom jaw I used the HGC & Sano sculpts as reference to where they actually stop. From what I've found, it would seem the Sano bust is actually wrong in this area & the HGC version is accurate. My findings are based on trying to follow where the tubes end by closely scrutinising other original images & that HGC claim that their suit is taken from original moulds which I believe, though I dont feel that way about their head.
i'm really starting to think this was something they half-assed, and it wouldn't be in the molds. someone mentioned earlier in the thread that the wires for the animated rambaldi heads ran through those tubes, which would explain why they're loose. looking over giger's alien again, there's another shot where a tube seems to have come out. i can't find any good pictures of the back including this area, though. how they're supposed to attach on the giger head, though, i'm not sure. here's my best guess:
It would seem the tubes were permanently fitted to the jaw & slotted into the suit making it easy to remove the head.
almost certainly. there appears to be a break in the tube right around the shoulder, too. you can see in the current picture of the costume i posted above that everything behind that point is missing (which is probably why they faked it into the head). i sort of suspect that it's
supposed to join in somewhere under the piece that attaches for the "fin" (sort of like the sano model) and continue one of the rib tubes.
All these differences in the original mean making a bust that can be displyed & scrutinised closely is a difficult task. What I'm aiming to achieve is a bust that captures the essence & overall look of the creature from the first film by trying to incorporate all of the distinguishing features, in the process I'm left having to use a little artistic licence. Unfortunatly I can only capture the features as I see them, others may pick up on different features as more prominent.
and i think you're doing an excellent job. i've been an alien fan for years, reading the comics and drawing them when i was bored in class, and this is all stuff i've never noticed before. what (little) artistic license you're taking seems to be for the better. i'm quite impressed with how accurate you've gotten it, considering that the originals weren't even consistent. it's substantially better than most of the professionally-done replicas i've seen.
