The Pervasiveness of H.R. - L.

When exactly did H.R. Giger become so comfortably embedded in our culture that his influence extends to childrens' toys? That was the question I found myself asking the other day when my son proudly showed me the new Mission to Mars Lego kits he'd assembled. The kits included black 'Martian' ships that stopped me in my tracks when I saw them. The greenish-black colors, tapering curves, and organic ship hoses screamed "Biomechanoid!"

I quickly checked the Lego boxes for credits to Giger, and found none. I didn't find any connections on the web. The blogosphere was strangely silent on the matter, as well. I've been forced to conclude that Giger, weird as he is, has been around for so long and incorporated so thoroughly into our popular culture that today's toy designers, having grown up with Giger's organic machines, are unconsciously expressing his style in their designs.

I know *I* grew up with Giger present at every turn, from the age of ten and onwards. My big sister and I were huge science fiction fans. In 1980, I was ten and she was nineteen. Somewhere around that time, she signed us up for a subscription to Omni magazine. I rapidly devoured the magazine from cover to cover each month, pausing only at the strange full-page grim, unsettling paintings that invariably appeared at least once, sometimes more, in each issue, paired with the science fiction essays and shorts. Although I could recognize that they were by the same person, I didn't know the artist's name, and didn't care.


A couple of years later, I saw Alien. Somewhere around this time, too, my sister bought Debbie Harry's Koo Koo album, which featured a Giger cover. Without being told, I felt, rather than saw, the connection between the Omni paintings, the alien, and the Debbie Harry cover. It wasn't until high school, while working part time at the bookstore, that I stumbled across Necronomicon I and II and finally put a name to the images that had haunted me for six years through the Omni subscription (which we still had). At last, the twisted mind had an identity.

Giving the artist a name didn't lessen the squirminess of the images, however. Rather, as time went on, I kept running into Giger--Aliens, Species, the video game Dark Seed. His influence can also be seen in just about every horror or science fiction film made from 1985 onward.

At some point, Giger references became so common I stopped paying attention unless they were especially goofy, like this:


I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my son's toys show Giger influences. I don't know what it is that bothers me about it. Perhaps it's because as inured as I've become to Giger's images, I'm still not blase enough about them that I'm comfortable with their appearance in children's playthings. Or maybe it's that children's toys are, by nature, supposed to be harmless and benign. Benign has never once been a word applied to Giger's art. So now perhaps the question should be--have toy manufacturers gone too far by incorporating Giger designs? Or has Giger been dumbed down and defanged?

For me, surprisingly enough, I think the latter's worse.