Predator Culture, Biology And Technology

[Estelle]

I would think that the Predator life cycle is pretty much like ours. Only spanning out over a much, much, much greater period of time. I would at least like to imagine, that the young are cared for and taught, opposed to being abandoned after the manner of Earth's reptiles. And speaking of reptiles, I don't think Predator are reptiles. I think 'pseudo mammalian' would be more accurate.

I have noticed that as the films progressed, the Predator, seemed to become more reptile-like. The mostly smooth, mottled hide of the P1, of Predator 87', has given way to a hide sporting scales and keritinized skin plates/ridges by the time we see Predators ( super black Predator/s) you can also see this in the comics. But anywho, back to the subject.

I roughly see it like this
They reproduce after the manner of humans ( keeping it PG)
The females give live birth, but don't breast feed. I don't think they even have mammary glands, or breast. Sorry guys.
The infants are born helpless and dependent, as are our infants.
The infants are basically, smaller versions of the parents with typical infant characteristics..i.e large head, thin skin.etc.

 

[shadowedge]

I would think that the Predator life cycle is pretty much like ours. Only spanning out over a much, much, much greater period of time. I would at least like to imagine, that the young are cared for and taught, opposed to being abandoned after the manner of Earth's reptiles. And speaking of reptiles, I don't think Predator are reptiles. I think 'pseudo mammalian' would be more accurate.

I have noticed that as the films progressed, the Predator, seemed to become more reptile-like. The mostly smooth, mottled hide of the P1, of Predator 87', has given way to a hide sporting scales and keritinized skin plates/ridges by the time we see Predators ( super black Predator/s) you can also see this in the comics. But anywho, back to the subject.

I roughly see it like this
They reproduce after the manner of humans ( keeping it PG)
The females give live birth, but don't breast feed. I don't think they even have mammary glands, or breast. Sorry guys.
The infants are born helpless and dependent, as are our infants.
The infants are basically, smaller versions of the parents with typical infant characteristics..i.e large head, thin skin.etc.

Live birth would make sense since some of the Predator costumes have navels,

For breasts I agree that females would probaly nor have them, or if they do then they are small. Predators don't seem to have much body fat and their mouths are not really suited to breasts feeding. No lips.

For the infants being born helpless and dependent, I read one time that the reason why humans are born so helpless is because of out advanced brains. We get to spend more time learning language and reason.

Other animals can stand up and wold shortly after birth and can defend themselves from an early age. Humans just kind of sit there and cry for the first of year.

Predators, since they have equivilent mental capacity would probably be born helpless too.

For their lifespan we know that when they turn 100 is when they become an adult. Greyback gave Harrigan a pistol made in 1715. Predator 2 takes place in 1997 so that would mean that he was alive and hunting 282 years ago. The comic "Predator 1718" show Greyback a bit younger and still an accomplished hunter so it is likly that he was at least 100 then. We can assume that they at least live to be 383+.

 

[damagecase]

Question: Don't the pred out fits have nipples? That would indicate breast feeding...

 

[damagecase]

Also, reptiles aren't the only things with scales. Some mammals and most birds have them. What I was kinda thinking is having them have a larval stage of development where in the are kinda like tadpoles in a pond. Here they would kind of be fed and nurtured until they matured to the neonate phase. Here they would come out of the proverbial or literal pond and begin there adult lives. I would expect this to last two or three dozen years. Then from a certain age they would be accepted into the agoge and, after years of training to become civilized(as civil as a pred could be) they would be turned loose to recapture the essence of their being. Taught to fight and use weapons. To use stealth and camouflage. Taught now to embrace their most basic drives and use them to become the ultimate hunters. Then when they come of age their skills are tested and only the best, most worthy will survive to adulthood.

My two cents...

 

[Estelle]

Question: Don't the pred out fits have nipples? That would indicate breast feeding...

No. They don't have nipples ..I looked, really, really hard. The P1, P2, P2 elder are nippless

 

[Estelle]

@ Shadowedge, yeah preds have crazy life spans. In the Monett novel, the one LFlank, briefed about above, it was hinted that the predator was over 1,000 years old.I'm not sure how to take that to be honest. I personally like the span of 300-700 years.

 

[shadowedge]

@ Shadowedge, yeah preds have crazy life spans. In the Monett novel, the one LFlank, briefed about above, it was hinted that the predator was over 1,000 years old.I'm not sure how to take that to be honest. I personally like the span of 300-700 years.

I think in one of the comics a Predator hunted the same samurai for like 1000 years too. The samurai kept living by drinking Predator blood. I forget who won.

 

[Estelle]

I think in one of the comics a Predator hunted the same samurai for like 1000 years too. The samurai kept living by drinking Predator blood. I forget who won.

*smh* the stuff these comic book writers concoct. You'd think drinking blood would have the opposite effect..pathogen- city

 

[damagecase]

Nippleless...Huh...lol

 

[Lflank]

@ Shadowedge, yeah preds have crazy life spans. In the Monett novel, the one LFlank, briefed about above, it was hinted that the predator was over 1,000 years old.I'm not sure how to take that to be honest. I personally like the span of 300-700 years.

Yes, the book mentions that the particular Pred that was hunting Arnie's group had been to that very same spot previously to hunt Aztecs.

In fact, the book explains that the Pred had the ability to manipulate its cellular structure and build new bodies as needed if it got sick or injured, so it was essentially immortal unless it was killed by some accident or combat. That idea was of course dropped for the movie.

 

[damagecase]

Lflank- What do you think of the idea that the preds had a system similar to the Goa'uld from Stargate and had a regeneration chamber? I'm trying to stick with the original premise as much as possible. If that were the case some preds could be virtually immortal.

 

[Estelle]

Yes, the book mentions that the particular Pred that was hunting Arnie's group had been to that very same spot previously to hunt Aztecs.

In fact, the book explains that the Pred had the ability to manipulate its cellular structure and build new bodies as needed if it got sick or injured, so it was essentially immortal unless it was killed by some accident or combat. That idea was of course dropped for the movie.

Cool, so that's how you interpreted that passage of text? I took it metaphorically, mainly because, as I was reading I had, had the P1 from the film in mind. And I couldn't picture him being able to manipulate his physical body in such a fashion.

 

[Estelle]

Nippleless...Huh...lol

lol "nippleless" is a technical term.

 

[Lflank]

Cool, so that's how you interpreted that passage of text? I took it metaphorically, mainly because, as I was reading I had, had the P1 from the film in mind. And I couldn't picture him being able to manipulate his physical body in such a fashion.

Yes, there is the scene where the Pred transforms itself into a bird shape by manipulating its cells.

That's why the Pred was so interested in human internal anatomy-----the book says that on the Pred planet, the "higher species" don't die, and the Pred was interested in why humans weren't that way. "Only the lower species ever died on the alien's home planet. The higher forms so endlessly transformed themselves that they never inhabited a body long enough to die. They sloughed themselves like snakeskins. Therefore the creature dissected these killer soldiers as dispassionately as a clockmaker might dismantle an unusually subtle timepiece."

The Pred wanted to see how humans worked, because it was so different from how the Pred works.

 

[damagecase]

Yeah I gotta say I don't particularly like this part of the original design. Honestly the idea molecular manipulation by an organism, without some kind of tech. is almost too alien. I'm thinking that's why they probably ditched the idea going into the movie. I don't mind the idea as much if they have some kind of regeneration chamber though. I mean i can see them having this kind of tech which in turn makes what they do when they go to these far off worlds "heroic" in a sense. They could live forever but instead they intentionally put themselves in harms way.

We've kinda come full circle on this. Kind of interesting when you look back through our discussion thus far.

But back to my argument: If the pred is capable of all this change, it kinda renders all static ideas useless because they are so far beyond our understanding that we are wading way over our heads. That being said, for the sake of our designs, I was wondering if we could agree to use the movie design as cannon, at least physiologically speaking.

Can we agree to this?

 

[damagecase]

And yes Estelle, if nippleless wasn't a technical term, well it is now...lol.

Its really kind of strange when you think about it. There are so many creatures on earth with out nipples that as soon as you create a bipedal, humanoid, you almost expect nipples just because. It just initially didn't register for me that birds and reptiles and on down the list of organisms on earth do not have nipples...Ok enough on nipples...lol.

 

[Lflank]

Yeah I gotta say I don't particularly like this part of the original design. Honestly the idea molecular manipulation by an organism, without some kind of tech. is almost too alien. I'm thinking that's why they probably ditched the idea going into the movie.

They did try it in the movie. The original Van Damme costume was what was described in the book. The whole concept proved impossible to do with a costume. If CGI technology had been better back in 1987, the canonical movie Predator would have been far different than the one we actually ended up seeing. Stan's whole concept only appeared later, because the original concept couldn't be made to work with 1987 film-making technology.

The idea of "too alien" is perceptive. Even today, when CGI has the ability to make a space alien look literally any way we want, we still have essentially humanoids, with arms, legs, eyes, a head--essentially we still make movie aliens out of humans with rubber foreheads, though we use CGI instead of actual rubber now (consider the space aliens in District 9, for example). That is done because if the aliens are too alien, human movie-watchers can no longer relate to them. Humans are biologically programmed to respond emotionally to things that are like us, that have eyes and heads and legs. We have no emotional involvement at all with things that are too different from us. That is why virtually all movie aliens are essentially humans. In movie-land, aliens that are really "alien", don't work. They don't produce the emotional involvement needed to carry a movie.

 

[damagecase]

Exactly. That's entirely my point. At some point we do need those boundaries or we loose interest. We need to be able to relate, at least on some level. Otherwise, well, who cares. I think they have made a couple different low budget movies where I almost swear the alien looks like the original pred design and in them the alien is no longer a character but rather just an obstruction to the protagonist, which is human or very humanoid.

Its my thinking that this possibly the biggest success of the predator movie franchise. They created something completely alien yet relatable enough to hold and maintain the audiences attention.

So Lflank, I guess my question to you is, do you think they made the right call regarding the predator design? I mean aside from the purely logistical nightmare of trying to use practical affects in a jungle.

 

[Lflank]

So Lflank, I guess my question to you is, do you think they made the right call regarding the predator design? I mean aside from the purely logistical nightmare of trying to use practical affects in a jungle.

It would depend on the kind of movie they were trying to make. In the original concept, "The Hunter", it was essentially a horror movie, but instead of a ghost or demon or radiated lizard, it was a space alien. Going to something you said:

I think they have made a couple different low budget movies where I almost swear the alien looks like the original pred design and in them the alien is no longer a character but rather just an obstruction to the protagonist, which is human or very humanoid.

that is exactly what would have been--an obstruction or obstacle, not a character. As a horror movie, that concept of the Pred would have worked, and its very alien-ness would have been an asset, to make it even more . . . well . . . horrifying (the only space aliens that depart from the "look like humans" rule are the ones that are there specifically to generate revulsion in the audience, such as the facehugger). Had the film-makers been able to pull that off technically in 1987, it would have worked very well as a horror movie.

But of course the reason "Predator" still has so many fans after 30 years is because it was NOT just a horror movie--it was also a sci fi movie, and the Pred was a CHARACTER, not just a faceless obstacle. Indeed, we literally see parts of the movie from the Pred's point of view, and the Pred's motivations and backstory are an important underlying theme to the whole movie. Given that, the original concept of the character would not have worked even if they'd been able to pull it off technically. It would not have been relatable to a human audience. Stan's concept, making the Pred just alien enough to be alien, but also recognizably human, worked for the movie that was actually made. It made the Pred a character in the movie--indeed to many of us it made the Pred the hero of the movie, which is why we make Pred costumes.

For many fans, though, the franchise then took this "humanization" too far in the AvP movie, where the Pred essentially BECOMES a human and even gets a girlfriend of sorts. It went too far towards the "humanlike" side of the scale and too far away from the "alien" side, and the character didn't work.

 

[damagecase]

I have to agree with that, Lflank. Maybe someone can confirm this but didn't one of the original execs at the time describe what they were looking for was Rocky vs. Alien? LOL.

But yeah I think in AVP the pred did become a bit to human. I don't see them ever really befriending people. Further, Scar should have known that preds would just nuke the site from orbit if the queen got loose or the test got out of control. I do think a pred would recognize a strong fighting spirit though.