More sad news for genre fans Of a Certain Age: Via SamuraiFrog, I’ve learned that writer, director, production designer, and occasional actor Dan O’Bannon has died at the still-too-young age of 63.

O’Bannon’s biggest claim to fame is, quite correctly, writing the screenplay for the landmark movie Alien, from a story by himself and Ron Shusett. (It was O’Bannon’s disturbing idea to have the monster gestate inside a human host, like certain wasps and other parasitical animals right here on Earth.) But he also had a hand in many other fondly remembered (if not particularly significant) sci-fi and horror films of the ’70s and ’80s. He wrote two of the best sequences in the animated anthology Heavy Metal — “Soft Landing” and “B-17,” both of which I discussed here — as well as John Badham’s super-helicopter movie Blue Thunder, which directly inspired the TV series Airwolf. (O’Bannon, always outspoken and quick to grumble about perceived slights, has long said that Badham dumbed down his highly political screenplay into a simplistic action flick.) He also penned a pair of cult-classic B-movies, both directed by horror icon Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce, about energy-sucking vampires from space, and the 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars. And he directed the horror spoof Return of the Living Dead, which introduced the pitiful cry of “Braaaaaiiiins…” to the zombie mythos.

O’Bannon claimed credit for about two-thirds of the Schwarzenegger-on-Mars flick Total Recall; his story is that co-writer Shusett jettisoned his final act and substituted the ridiculous mess that pissed me off back in 1990 and now just makes me roll my eyes the way you do when your harmlessly senile granny starts rambling about the little man who lives in her pantry. And, for you Lucasfilm fans out there, O’Bannon designed and animated most of the tactical computer displays in the original Star Wars film.

All of those achievements aside, though, my first thought when I heard the news of his passing was of Sergeant Pinback, the lovably hapless buffoon he played in John Carpenter’s first movie, Dark Star.

If you’re not familiar with it — and I’d be surprised if very many of my readers are — Dark Star is a remarkable film. It’s not a good film, mind you, although it does have moments of brilliance, and I’m deeply fond of it. But it’s really notable as one of those rare confluences of early talent, a launching pad for a number of people who were later involved in Bigger Things. In addition to O’Bannon and Carpenter, Dark Star‘s production crew included artist Ron Cobb, who went on to do design work for Star Wars, Alien, and Conan the Barbarian; modelmaker Greg Jein, who has constructed miniature spacecraft for many of the sci-fi landmarks I’ve spent my life obsessing over, including Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, V (the original), and several of the Star Trek movies and spin-off series; and of course Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace, who were both frequent collaborators with Carpenter in the early days and have since gone on to successful directing careers themselves. (Castle is particularly noteworthy, since he directed fan-favorite The Last Starfighter in 1984, as well as being the first man to wear Michael Myers’ ghostly white mask in the original Halloween.)

Dark Star began as a student film about four burn-outs who’ve been in space for far too long aboard a starship that’s beginning to fall apart. O’Bannon co-wrote the screenplay with Carpenter and played one of the bored-out-of-their-skulls astronauts, Sergeant Pinback, who really isn’t Pinback at all but rather a fuel-maintenance tech named Bill Froog who ended up on the ship in a case of mistaken identity. Yes, the movie is a comedy. Or at least it’s pretty damn funny. It’s kind of hard to tell sometimes just what the intention was.

Originally only about 30 minutes long — the runtime varies, depending on which source you believe — Dark Star proved to be very popular on the festival circuit, eventually attracting the attention of one Jack H. Harris, an entrepreneur who’d recently produced a sequel to the drive-in classic The Blob. Harris talked Carpenter into shooting some additional footage to bring Dark Star up to something approximating feature length, and then arranged a distribution deal. I’m sorry to say that the padding is pretty obvious: The movie varies wildly in tone, some gags go on way too long, and the actors’ hair length and style frequently varies from scene to scene, because the additional material was filmed, in some cases, years later. On the positive side, however, the added scenes include a hysterically funny sequence in which Pinback goes to feed the alien creature that serves as the ship’s mascot. (It’s a beach ball with feet; no, really, the creature is blatantly made from a beach ball.) What follows is nothing less than the seed of Alien, only played for laughs, as Pinback tracks the beast through the dark, industrial bowels of the ship, gets trapped on the bottom of a moving elevator, and finally confronts the animal with a tranquilizer gun. You can imagine what happens when you shoot a beach ball with a pointy dart. This sequence never fails to leave me exhausted from laughing so hard.

O’Bannon’s performance as Pinback doesn’t exactly set the acting world ablaze, but he was funny and sympathetic in the role, even when he was whining about how the other crewmen mistreat him (well, they do!). Given what I’ve heard about O’Bannon’s real-life tendency to carry grudges and cry persecution, I tend to think Pinback wasn’t too far removed from the actor’s actual personality. But considering that I liked Pinback, I guess that’s not such a bad thing.

According to the obituary in the LA Times, he suffered from Crohn’s Disease, an unpleasant-sounding gastrointestinal disorder, and had been working on a new screenplay based on the experience. No word on how close to completion it may have been, which suggests it’s probably nowhere near ready for filming. And that’s all the more sad…