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Matthew Jackson and Mental Floss<\/a> present 10 Killer Facts About They Live<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Here are three of my favorites…<\/p>\n 1. THEY LIVE WAS INSPIRED BY A COMIC BOOK ADAPTATION OF A SHORT STORY.<\/strong> “‘Eight O\u2019Clock in the Morning is’ a D.O.A.-type of story, in which a man is put in a trance by a stage hypnotist,\u201d Carpenter told Starlog in 1988. “When he awakens, he realizes that the entire human race has been hypnotized, and that alien creatures are controlling humanity. He has only until eight o’clock in the morning to solve the problem.”<\/p>\n Though Carpenter liked the idea of the entire populace being controlled subliminally by an alien menace, he wasn\u2019t too keen on the hypnotism idea. He bought the rights to the story and began adapting it, changing hypnotism to the very 1980s notion of Americans being controlled via subliminal messaging.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 3. JOHN CARPENTER WROTE THEY LIVE UNDER AN ALIAS. \u201cIt was a reaction to seeing my name all over these movies,\u201d Carpenter explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2012. “I think the height of it was Christine. It was like, John Carpenter\u2019s Christine, directed by John Carpenter, music by John Carpenter \u2026 what an egotist!\u201d<\/p>\n Carpenter chose the pseudonym Frank Armitage, which is a character from H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s story \u201cThe Dunwich Horror,\u201d which he picked \u201cjust because I love Lovecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 5. THEY LIVE’S MOST FAMOUS LINE CAME FROM RODDY PIPER.<\/p>\n Even if you\u2019ve never seen They Live, you\u2019ve probably heard someone at some point in your life say: \u201cI have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I\u2019m all out of bubble gum.\u201d Ever since Nada delivered that line in the film, it\u2019s maintained a life even beyond They Live, becoming one of the most popular and frequently quoted lines in all of pop culture. According to Carpenter, the line came straight from Piper, who kept a notebook full of quips like that to use in his wrestling promos.<\/p>\n \u201cTraveling all around the country wrestling different people, those guys come up with a lot of stuff to hype matches in interviews. They have to come up with one-liners. Roddy had a book full of them that he carried with him,\u201d Carpenter explained. \u201cHe\u2019d sit on a plane and come up with these things. He gave me the book when I was writing the script and that was the best one in there. I think he was wrestling Playboy Buddy Rose and he may have said the line then.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Piper, the line actually didn\u2019t enter the picture until the day they shot the scene, but either way both men agree that he wrote it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Matthew Jackson and Mental Floss present 10 Killer Facts About They Live.\u00a0 Here are three of my favorites… 1. THEY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,56,53,54,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebs","category-comics","category-horror","category-movies","category-trivia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22536,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22535\/revisions\/22536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nThey Live is an adaptation of Ray Nelson\u2019s science fiction short story \u201cEight O\u2019Clock in the Morning,\u201d which was originally published in the 1960s. But John Carpenter\u2019s more direct inspiration was an Eclipse Comics adaptation of Nelson\u2019s story, which he stumbled across in the mid-1980s. Intrigued by the idea of aliens enslaving humanity, Carpenter then sought out the original prose work.<\/p>\n\n
\nCarpenter has always been a multi-hyphenate kind of filmmaker, directing, writing, producing and scoring his movies. But by the time They Live came around, he\u2019d grown a little disillusioned with the idea of continuing to have his name plastered absolutely everywhere. With that in mind, he decided that he\u2019d use a pseudonym for They Live\u2019s screenplay credit.<\/p>\n\n