Thursday 17 January 2013

Warrnambool Attacks! Part 2: Cyborgs & Aliens

In last week's post, I was walking through the Invasion exhibition in Warrnambool, Australia, when I turned around to be confronted by a shiny metal head with glowing red eyes...

... which was, of course, from the Terminator series of films and TV programs. No matter how fictional, still scary up close:


Around the corner in a darker room, I'd entered alien territory. Here's the Predator:


... and in the room beyond that, an Ood from Doctor Who. They look vaguely as if they could be related, don't they?


Next to the Ood, my favourite TV science fiction villain of all time: a Dalek. My earliest distinct memory of watching Doctor Who is the 1960s Patrick Troughton story The Evil of the Daleks, which featured a Dalek civil war in glorious monochrome. What's particularly interesting about the Daleks is that though they look robotic, they contain an evil blobby organic creature and thus are cyborgs.


Nearby was a future inhabitant of our own planet, from the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes:


Within a case was one of the prosthetic skulls used to turn actors into aliens in the excellent TV series Alien Nation (again, for some reason, I'm thinking of the Ood):


Also on the cyborg list was Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, at a difficult time in his career when he'd been re-engineered by the Borg. Looks like he'd be accepted into the gritty 1970s British TV series Blake's 7, no questions asked:


Finally, we peered through glass at this model of the robot from Fritz Lang's 1927 movie masterpiece Metropolis. It seemed somehow fitting that we should finish our journey back through time with one of the first cinematic robots:


Disclosure time... on this trip I was hosted by Warrnambool Tourism and V/Line. The Invasion exhibition continues at the Warrnambool Art Gallery, 26 Liebig St, Warrnambool, until 28 January 2013. Entry: adult $15, child $7.50. Warrnambool can be reached by V/Line trains from Melbourne and Geelong.

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