5 Questions: The Terminator
Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of The Terminator, which was released on October 26th, 1984.
The Terminator would be a huge boost for the careers of both James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie has spawned several sequels, including Terminator: Genisys that is set to be released July 1st of next year. It also gave the world a short lived but much loved television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of this action classic, I decided to watch The Terminator and as I watched, some questions came to mind…
1) Did Kyle Reese and The Terminator know where they’d land when they time traveled to the past?
Is the technology that sends Reese and the Terminator back to 1984 that sophisticated or did both of them luck out landing in dark secluded alleys with little detection? It is not sophisticated enough to send non-nude time travelers back, so I’m thinking luck played a big part in it. I assume they were able to pick the time of day they arrived, which certainly would help, but think about it… a naked Terminator showing up in the middle of a Dodgers game or naked Kyle Reese landing in the middle of an all you can eat buffet. The tone of the movie would have started off entirely different if either of those scenarios played out.
2) How many women named Sarah with the maiden name Connor were thankful they got married once the news broke about women named Sarah Connor being murdered?
3) Conversely, how many men with the last name Connor who married women named Sarah were hating life when the news broke?
4) Do you believe Dick Miller makes any movie he is in better?
I know I do. His role as the gun shop owner is short lived, since he gets terminated by his own merchandise no less, but I always enjoy Dick Miller’s work. His work as Murray Futterman in the Gremlins movies will always be my favorite Dick Miller role, but he also pops in some 80’s horror classics like Chopping Mall and Night of the Creeps.
5) Have you ever watched any deleted scenes and thought, “I have no idea why they cut that from the movie?”?
If I were a betting man I would say very few of you believe any deleted scenes you have seen would have made the movie they were deleted from better. I watched The Terminator deleted scenes for the first time since buying the Blu-ray and I was thrilled I never had to see those scenes in the actual movie. There’s one deleted scene titled “Tickling Reese”. Seriously? Tickling in The Terminator!
The only person who might object to my argument that the deleted scenes added nothing to the film would be Paul Winfield. A great deal of his scenes as Lt Traxler end up on the cutting room floor.
I forgot whether it was an interview with Henriksen or Winfield but one of them commented, perhaps humorously, that maybe Traxler and Vulkovitch should return in a sequel in wheelchairs and tell about the night that the precinct was ambushed by a certain killing machine. I would have liked to hear more words from that newscast item that you hear on the radio shortly after the conclusion of the escape by Reese and Sarah.
I am only guessing it was about that massacre. Oh we’ll never know.