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so long and thanks for all the fish

Carlo Rambaldi, Special Effects Legend and Creator of E.T., Dies at 86

by Alanna Bennett | 4:01 pm, August 11th, 2012


The Grey’s of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Alien xenomorph, E.T.. Carlo Rambaldi, Oscar-winning special-effects master, created them all. He passed away this Friday in his home in Italy.

One of the most memorable parts of the sci-fi worlds we see created on the big screen is always the monsters. Whether they’re the benign (E.T.) or the vicious (Alien), they stick with us when we leave the theater or pop out the DVD. Carlo Rambaldi’s job was to create these monsters, and he was one of the best at it.

“Fantastical” would be a good word to describe Rambaldi’s work. Here’s what the New York Times said on his creation of E.T.:

[He] used steel, polyurethane, rubber, and hydraulic and electronic controls to create an alien so ugly it was beguiling, with outsize eyes based on his cat’s and wizened skin (in some scenes E.T. was played by an actor in a suit). The alien was capable of 150 separate moves, like wrinkling his nose, furrowing his brow and extending his neck.

In a statement released Friday, Steven Spielberg referred to Rambaldi as “E.T.’s Gepetto.”

Making expert use of his knowledge of mechanical and electrical engineering and puppetry, Rambaldi won two Academy Awards during his lifetime–one for E.T. and the other for Alien.

Getting his start when asked to create a dragon for low-budget film Sigfrido, Rambaldi went on to create the title character in John Guillermin‘s 1976 remake of King Kong. For this he received a lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy.

Rambaldi had an illustrious career, one that will live long past today. He will be sorely missed.

(via io9, Blastr, New York Times)

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  • http://wrongsirwrong.blogspot.com/ Magic Xylophone

    Speaking of Gepetto, is he Martin Landau’s long lost twin?

  • http://profiles.google.com/fluffywarthog1029 m h

    Normally, I hate moralizing or lecturing like this, but…I have to do right by my high school lit teacher, and object to the use of the word “monster” to describe an otherwise weird or frightening fictional being. (She used to throw office supplies at the heads of students who used the pejorative while discussing “Frankenstein.”)

    Not once in Wollstonecraft-Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is The Creature referred to as a “monster,” or “monstrous.” And yet his character is universally referred to as “Frankenstein’s Monster,” (or simply, ‘Frankenstein’). The Creature is intelligent, moral, and clearly a human being, but is denigrated by the vast majority of media and society as a cheap scare, an even cheaper denigration of mental disability, or a cheaper-still antagonist.

    ET is clearly not a monster. Weird, creepy, and disconcerting, but contextually, he’s just a lost little kid.

    The Xenomorph isn’t evil; it’s just an animal. It doesn’t torture it’s host or prey, it just hunts and kills them in the most instinctual and effective way. It doesn’t know that it’s species can destroy all other life, it simply attempts to feed and survive.

    Calling King Kong a monster is even worse than branding the first two with the label. From the beginning, King Kong is an animal, but a primate who is clearly aware enough and intelligent enough to understand his environment. He’s climbing out of the “uncanny valley” of animal anthropomorphization; he’s animal enough to scare us, but human enough to make us feel sympathy for him.

    New “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” TOS have succeeded quite well at ethically challenging our preconceptions about ‘monsters’ and the otherworldly. Most media now puts “monster” as a parenthetical when discussing Doctor Who aliens, simply because of how the most recent series portrays them as either persons in their own right, or alien to the point that we have to adjust our own benchmarks for humanity.

    If you took the time to read this crap, then I apologize, but we lose a lot by labelling fictional creatures as ‘monsters.’ The more we can control the language we casually use, the more we can reflect on and consider the meaning and reasoning behind what we say.

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