[seek&speak via Super Punch]

You might have noticed this trope in the recent Day The Earth Stood Still meh-fest, when Keanu/Klaatu goes to the McDonald's to hang out with a fellow alien, who's been hiding out here for decades trying to decide whether we suck or blow. And doggone it, the old guy has totally lost his alien perspective. He loves McDonald's, for one thing. For another, he's seen enough movies to pick up that thing where he speaks a foreign language, until he's saying something really important — and then he switches to English.

Okay, sure, he still recommends that Klaatu sterilize the Earth. But he also encourages Klaatu to try those crispy apple pies first.

But he's not the worst sell-out. The worst is the Doctor from Doctor Who, who's totally gone human the first time we see him, in 1963's "An Unearthly Child." He's ditched his Gallifreyan tunic, with the attractive posture collar, for some pastiche of an English gentleman outfit. (I totally blame the lack of the collar for William Hartnell's bad posture.) But the worst comes in the early 1970s, when the Doctor spends a few years stuck on Earth and starts actually driving a car and eating at Wimpy's Burgers. (In the novelization of "Invasion Of The Dinosaurs." I think.) Did you ever eat a Wimpy Burger? They're a great example of truth in advertising.

Commenter Hamslicer points out that I somehow missed the aliens in Third Rock From The Sun, who get so assimilated they not only eat our junk food, they also get obsessed with our human innovations, like shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle.

Rule #1: You can always tell when an alien has gone human. They start eating our crappy fast food.

Sometimes they even forget their true nature, like Beth in that one Torchwood episode. She's an alien sent here to gather intelligence for an invasion, but she believes she's human — despite the huge spikes and alien tech that pop out of her arm like a really bad rash.

That's also sort of the premise of The Stranded, a Virgin Comics title that's (supposedly) being developed as a Sci Fi Channel series. Five amazingly stylish people realize that their entire childhoods are a lie, because they're Sleepers, aliens who were stranded here on Earth, with secret superpowers and stuff. (I think the Sci Fi version may be dead, which is too bad, because both the comic and the TV pilot were written by the great Mike Carey.)

Rule #2: Aliens who forget they're aliens always have amazing superpowers, and pretty great hair.

And then there are the aliens who remember they're aliens, and even keep sight of their reason for being here... but they just get obsessed with human trivia. Like Bridwell, from Astro City #5. He's been sent to Earth to decide whether his matriarchal insect-people race, the Enelsians, should invade. And he gets caught up in our trivial dramas, and obsessed with our petty vices, especially boastfulness. It's unfortunate he happens to live in the same building as the braggart superhero Crackerjack. But even Crackerjack's habit of taking too much credit for his exploits isn't enough to make Bridwell turn against humanity — it's a group of gossipy old ladies boasting that they always knew who Crackerjack was, that finally makes Bridwell decide to wipe us out. Humans!

Rule #3: Aliens who spend too much time here always get a little too close to our bad side.

Let's face it, the best kind of aliens living secretly on Earth are the ones who take over, without any of this "going soft" business. Like the aliens in They Live, who finally use our mass media and pop culture for the proper purpose — controlling us and turning us into brainwashed slaves. (But that means they have to work in the television industry, which is a kind of punishment.) Ditto for those aliens in the story "Four Eyes" in the anthology The Nightmare Room.

Of course, even when sneaky aliens manage to take over the Earth without losing their edge or getting distracted by all our shiny nice human culture, they still end up taking on our foibles and obsessions — like the alien parasite/symbiote creatures in Stephenie Meyer's The Host. (By then, of course, they're not secret any more.)

Rule #4: You can't even rule humans in secret without becoming sorta human.

The manga and anime of Osamu Tezuka routinely feature "reformed alien spies" as supporting characters, according to this fansite.

The animated version of Ambassador Magma, features a similar theme, as Murakami Tomoko, is killed and replaced by an alien. Tomoko was the mother of Murakami Mamoru, the main human character of the series, and the alien eventually became so absorbed in the role, that she believed that she was Murakami Tomoko, so much so, that she defended her ‘family’ against attacks by her own kind, losing her life in the process.

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor features an android spy named Harumi. However, she is much more than a mere spy, for she is the alien’s best intelligence analyst, and even a saboteur. Despite her best attempts, her attempts at sabotage always fail in humorous encounters with Captain Tylor’s dumb luck. Though she is an android and should be devoid of emotions, she eventually succumbs to the title character’s kindness and charm, and decides to switch sides.

Rule #5: Aliens! Don't make your spies too cute. It'll just backfire when they decide they enjoy our human fussing, and our fancy Earth ribbons.

Additional reporting by Katharine Duckett.

We cornered Mr. Cena at the premiere of The Day The Earth Stood Still and grilled him about vying for the part of Nada.

We heard that they may be remaking They Live staring Rowdy Roddy Piper and we were wondering if you would be interested in filling the role of Nada? You would be a perfect fit!

There is no way that I could recreate that fight scene in They Live, what did that last for 26 days? There is just no way I could do it?

But if you did who would you want to fight for 5 whole minutes...?

The only way I would want to be in that movie is to be able to say, "I came here to do two things, kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm almost [sic] out of gum." I think that is one of the classic all time lines. I certainly think Rowdy did an awesome job in that movie. If they're remaking it, their work is cut out for them. That's like remaking Back To School, Revenge Of The Nerds or Smokey And The Bandit, you just can't do it.

So if they offered the role would you take it?

Cena: Hell no I wouldn't do it. I couldn't hold a candle to Roddy Piper in that movie.

And then his pants lit on fire. Come on, Cena — you'd be perfect for this role, and you know you need a hard core scifi film to solidify your presence as an actor. While I agree with his conviction that it shouldn't be remade (and honestly that makes me like him a whole lot more than before, very respectful), but I bet if they offered it, he'd strongly reconsider for the free sunglasses alone.

Before everyone jumps out a window, I'd just like to point out that Strike Entertainment is the production company that came out with Children of Men and helped with Slither, two movies that were tremendously enjoyable in their own very different ways. So there's still hope for a remake about a down-on-his-luck wrestler, no construction worker, who gets his mits on pair of magical sunglasses that reveal a secret alien race living among us and breeding the human race into slavery.

The Rules For Remaking They Live

1: The role of Nada MUST be replaced by a wrestler (I'm open to The Rock Dwayne Johnson, but would prefer someone else).

2: Roddy Piper MUST appear in the movie somewhere, what he's not busy. If not as the lead, then as his dad or the creepy preacher.

3: Keith David should come back as Frank, because he hasn't aged a day.

4: The Magical Sunglasses may NOT be adorable hipster Ray-Bans.

5: The one liners have to be one upped in this. I don't know if someone can top, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum," but they should at least try, like Bond did with the martini, "do I give a damn" line. Is this possible? I'm not sure but they need to actually respect lines like this. Sit down with a lot of alcohol and drugs and come up with something that can at least live up to the original.

6: The five minute fight scene — this is hard. I say, should the producers or director stray from the amazing plot that is a subliminal alien take over and create new characters or make Nada a woman (ugh it hurts to even think that, but we have to assume the worst) this would be a great place to give a tip-of-the-hat to the original. Recreate the five minute fight shot for shot, no matter how far the remake strays. Sure it's been done but that's no reason for it to be neglected.

But until directors or a screenwriter is announced we'll all just have to hope and pray that this movie remake or whatever they will do to it will be respected.

Clip From Original They Live When Piper Figures It All Out (kind of):

[The Hollywood Reporter]

And of course, it's hilarious. Instead of spouting some speech about simulation Wachowski-Bros-style, Piper is basically dumbstruck. He finally lashes out at an old lady alien by telling her she looks like her face has "been in the cheese dip since 1957." Yup, those were the days, when high tech social control was solved with a nice wrassle and you didn't need any of them fancy computer hackers to do the job. If it were possible to force every human in the U.S. and Canada to watch this movie, I would do it. Using my MIND CONTROL BEAM.

They Live [Amazon]

A Brief History of the Reality Distortion Field

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• Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field: Apparently the Star Trekly-esque named Bud Tribble was working on a software project for Apple in 1981, and thought he had been given an unrealistic ten-month schedule from inception to ship date. When asked why he didn't just ask Steve to change it, he reportedly said "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field." Although it turns out no one could find a connection between that term and Star Trek, and thus a legend was born.
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• The Scramble Suits from A Scanner Darkly: In Phillip K. Dick's novel about drug addiction and the paranoid world on both sides of that issue, government narcotics agents wear "scramble suits" that change every aspect of the reader, shifting at a moment's notice so that people looking at someone wearing one will never be able to tell what they look like. In the novel they shift extremely quickly, but they slowed it down in the movie to show how they work. They alter your voice as well, making you the most visible invisible man/woman around: they scramble reality for everyone except you.
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• The Matrix in The Matrix: Nothing distorts reality more than entire system of machines set up to grow you from a fetus, nurture you, and feed your brain signals that tell it you're growing up normal inside a world that doesn't exist. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Sounds pretty distorty to us, although if they decided to make us some sort of science fiction superstar inside this simulation, we probably wouldn't mind. Then you'd all be invited to the rad parties we'd throw.
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• The Holodeck in Star Trek: Seriously, we could never understand why people just didn't stay on the holodeck 24/7. Sure, it's technically "not real," but it does everything you'd want a real world to do. You've got an entire library of billions and billions of option of things to simulate, plus you can even disable the security protocols making it possible to actually die while you pretend you're inside Alice in Wonderland. It's like a portable Matrix To Go (tm), so how did they ever manage to get any work done with one of these things around?
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• The world of They Live: You can blame our current obsession with this film on the fact that it's been showing up on cable a lot lately, but there's something about this Roddy Piper/John Carpenter film that makes it hard to hate. In their world, an alien signal is being beamed out that makes humans as complacent as cattle, and stops them from seeing the aliens as they actually are. Thankfully, Roddy gets some magic glasses that help him kick ass and thwart the fugly aliens. Although in retrospect, they just wanted to make him rich. Was that so bad?
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Image above from the Joy of Tech website. Full version can be seen here.

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• Geordi LaForge's visor: When Star Trek launched The Next Generation in XXX, one of the most striking visuals was Levar Burton wearing what looked like a car air filter over his eyes. The visor allowed his character, who was born blind, to see in the infrared spectrum, at the microscopic level, and to detect energy levels. He could even detect vital signs and tell if someone was lying, making him handy to have around. However, he must have been happy when the First Contact film came around, because he didn't have to wear that wacky visor anymore.
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• Predator-Vision: In the Predator films, the titular aliens have evolved to the point where they have developed their own infrared vision. However, they've invented helmets with enhancements that take the vision even further, letting them see with X-Ray vision, to detect radioactive sources, auto-target, and even (in the Aliens Vs. Predator films) to see with sort kind of electro-magnetic vision that allows them to track Aliens, who don't show up on infrared scanners. While those helmets looked sleek and cool with awesome functions, they still resembled fugly crab-aliens underneath.
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• Luke Skywalker's binoculars: When Luke was trapped on Tatooine as a teenager, he had loads of time to daydream and imagine what life was like on other worlds. So he'd frequently scan the sky and the horizon with his binoculars, hoping to find some sort of excitement. Plus, they came in handy when R2D2 and C3P0 went missing. No idea what all the different numbers and gauges mean, besides distance (maybe Luke had ganked his Uncle's golf binocs) but the view through them was 1977 gee-whiz tech.
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• Cyclop's visor from The X-Men: This special visor which was outfitted with ruby quartz lenses that have the ability to block his optic blasts. So, it might not allow him to see things closer or at the molecular level, but it does keep him from blowing the hell out of everyone and everything he looks at. If you ask us, that's not a bad enhancement. Later he was able to sport some ruby quartz sunglasses, although that sort of makes his "Cyclops" name a bit useless.
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• The glasses in William Gibson's Virtual Light: In this novel, the characters are trying to track down a pair of glasses that you can't see through. Instead, they use EMP drivers to send signals directly to your optic nerve. As a result, they allow you to see without having photos hit your retinas, and they can also pump more information into the signal. For instance, one of the characters describes that the glasses cost about the same as a "small Japanese car", and that when you look at things through them, "Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that." One pair to go, please.
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• Nanotech eyes in Deus Ex: In Warren Spector's dystopian future video game, you play a "nanotech operative" who has the ability to upgrade and enhance his body in the field, which you'll have to do in order to complete the game. One of the coolest modifications was upgrading your eyes so you could see in the dark and through walls. This usually comes in handy when people are trying to kill you, as you can imagine.
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• The HUD in Down and Out in the Magic Kindom: In Cory Doctorow's future, people live with onboard computers in their brains that allow them to make phone calls, record their daily lives through sight and sound, and provide heads-up displays in their eyes where they can check the time, read files, surf the web, and check other people's "whuffie" scores. Whuffie basically tells you "how cool is this person?" and becomes the currency of the day. As interesting as that is, we're most exciting by surfing the net on our eyeballs.
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• The sunglasses in They Live: In John Carpenter's "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" humans vs. aliens film, former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper finds a pair of very special sunglasses. They let him see the world as it actually is with fugly aliens controlling the human race, subliminal messages they keep them sedate and to "Obey." Of course, Roddy isn't too happy with this, and goes on a killing spree.
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• The Bionic Eye: In both the Six Million Dollar Man and the newly rebooted The Bionic Woman (sorry old Bionic woman, you got stuck with a Bionic ear), the main characters are both outfitted with bionic eyes that give them the ability to zoom in on subjects and see into the infrared. Not one was this one of the coolest Bionic upgrades in my opinion, but it also made for the best action figure I ever lost. Colonel Steve Austin's action figure had a big hole in his head that you could look through to "simulate" bionic vision. My parents probably thought I'd glued that thing to my head. Bionic eyes or bionic contact lenses, let's hope you get here soon.
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Famous names: John Carpenter, Rowdy Roddy Piper

Crunchy goodness: 4

Elevator pitch: "It's The Manchurian Candidate meets No Holds Barred!"

Stunt casting: Wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, whose wooden acting is oddly perfect for the now-classic line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Sights you'll never unsee: The final shot of the film: one of the formaldehyde-faced aliens having sex with a topless woman.

Life lesson: If a friend tells you to put on a pair of sunglasses, you'll have to kick each others' asses for five and half minutes if you refuse, so put the glasses on!

John Carpenter's They Live Site Must See by Sherilyn Connelly.