Unless you've spent the last 33 years in a coma or fighting an alien civilization on the other side of the galaxy, logic suggests you've seen Predator 2 more than once. One particularly memorable scene shows one of the Predators handing a strange trophy to Danny Glover's character: a pistol from the year 1715. How did that pistol end up in a science fiction project? What was the producers' original idea? Today we're going to answer that.
Predator 2 debuted in theaters on November 21, 1990, and quickly became one of the best classics on VHS. I've seen it more than twenty times, and I imagine many of our readers are in a similar situation. That said, today I'm going to talk about a scene (it's not a spoiler, and I refuse to recognize it as such)... or to be more precise, about an object in a scene. It's not the Xenomorph head hanging as a trophy, a detail that sparked the entire Alien vs. Predator saga, later adapted to film disastrously. Actually, I'm referring to this:
After fighting across the entire city and suffering multiple wounds, detective Mike Harrigan faces the Predator (known as the City Hunter in the lore) in a deadly hand-to-hand combat inside his spaceship, and with a clever last-second maneuver, he manages to come out victorious. The rest of the Predator clan watched the fight closely, "present" themselves before Harrison, retrieve the fallen hunter's body, and one of them does something striking.
In recognition of Harrigan's strength, skill, and determination on the battlefield, the leader (now identified as Greyback) hands him an old pistol as a trophy, with a name and a year engraved in bronze: Raphael Adolini, 1715. The simple idea that the Predators have visited Earth over the last 300 years made fans go crazy, and the question was automatic: How did the Predator get that pistol?
The Pistol of Raphael Adolini
Basically, the scene was developed because the writers and producers wanted to set up the possibility of a "sequel in the past", but that sequel never left the drawing board, and the saga had to wait decades for a continuation. The solution? Turn that story into a comic. Its name is Predator: 1718, created by Henry Gilroy and Igor Kordey, and published in July 1996.
The comic reveals that Raphael Adolini was the captain of a pirate ship, who at the time met the same Predator (again, Greyback) who gave the pistol to Harrigan. The Predator followed Adolini's activities on the Guinea Coast, where the captain had to face his mutinous crew. Naturally, the problem was money: the pirates looted a church and killed the priest, something Adolini saw as "a violation of the Code". When Adolini declared he would return the loot, the crew decided to put him three meters underground.
Camouflaged and as a privileged observer, Greyback becomes an unexpected teammate for Adolini, and together they take out the pirates. However, when everything seemed ready for a clean fight between the two, Adolini is shot in the back by one of his men. Greyback annihilates the survivor with a cannon blast, and with his last strength, the captain hands him his weapon, who returns the gesture by digging a grave and leaving his sword there. The story is short, barely nine pages, but the magic of the Internet has taken care of keeping several copies online, like the one you can find here (page 46).
Why did I decide to come back to this? Very simple: this origin for Raphael Adolini lost its canonical status due to the events of the film Prey. The young Comanche warrior Naru finds Adolini in 1719, who teaches her to shoot the weapon. The film is from 2022, and if you want to know more, maybe you should watch it...
