In the 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger made some of the greatest action movies in the history of ever. He created some of the best action heroes and villains of all-time, but what if those characters are even more connected than we thought? A new theory posits that not only are Predator and Alien part of the same film universe, but The Terminator is as well. In fact, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character from Predator was the physical model for The Terminator.
The first part of the theory is simple enough. In Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, a man who single-handedly takes down an alien murdering machine. He was set up by his military overlords who knew there was some serious shit going down in that jungle, so clearly, this was a test of some kind and Dutch passed it. The interesting part of this theory is what comes next.
According to Cracked, what happened next was the Aliens vs. Predator arcade game, which was actually one of the first pieces of media that combined those two franchises together. The game features a character named Major Dutch Schaeffer who is a cyborg and bears a striking resemblance to the barrel-chested crew cut version of Arnold that we see in Predator. This character certainly appears to be a mechanically augmented Dutch from the film, or possibly a biologically augmented robot that looks like him. What's important, however, is Cyber-Dutch's serial number, CDS-170A3. The theory argues that CDS stands for Cyberdyne Systems. Cyber-Dutch was the proto-Terminator, created by Cyberdyne itself.
While this could just be a coincidence, the theory states that the original plan for the Alien vs. Predator movie actually included a cyborg Dutch and that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have appeared in it had he not ended up becoming Governor of California instead. The fact that the movie was going to borrow from the game would imply the game is more than just a random tie-in.
Finally, we jump into the Alien franchise for one final piece of evidence. In James Cameron's Aliens, we meet Ash, an android with a serial number of his own, Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2. While the punctuation is a bit different, that serial number can be easily translated into the same format as the one from the Aliens vs. Predator video game, and since fans have long believed that Hyperdyne Systems is the company that Cyberdyne eventually becomes, it would seem to indicate that there is a connection here.
Some associated Terminator material, including a deleted scene from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines attempted to set up who the model for the T-800 was, but none are official. Certainly, Cyberdyne would want to model it on somebody who was as dominating and capable as they wanted their creation to be. Dutch's actions in Predator prove that he is so.
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