X-Files Icons at Smithsonian
Posted at 3:18 PM (PDT) on Wednesday, July 16, 2008

USA Weekend
The Who's News Blog
By Lorrie Lynch

'X Files' icons go to Smithsonian American history museum

Xfiles It’s official: the egg that haunted Sigourney Weaver in Alien and the ruby-red slippers that guided Judy Garland home have a new neighbor. Intern Lisa Gartner just got back from the National Museum of American History, where she saw Chris Carter, creator/director/producer/writer of The X-Files, donate a bunch of sci-fi goodies from the show to the museum’s entertainment collection. We’re talking the original television pilot script, Scully’s famous religion-versus-science cross necklace, and the FBI badges of America’s favorite fictional agents.

“Science-fiction has been a vital narrative strand in nearly every aspect of American popular culture,” said Jim Gardner, the museum’s associate director. “The X-Files series is a particularly important example of that tradition, with its quirky blend of the everyday and the paranormal.”

The Most-Likely-To-Haunt-Your-Dreams Object Award goes to the little alien maquette that was used to design the color and texture of the aliens in the first X-Files movie, Fight the Future. Other items include photographs and a poster from the I Want to Believe movie, autographed by Carter, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

“(The show) is representative of two very exploitable American qualities – fear and paranoia,” Carter joked. “I’m kidding, of course. Even though it was a dark show, even though it was a scary show, it was a show that represented a true American quality, which is the quality of hope.”

The National Museum of American History “has led the way in exploring and documenting America’s pop culture,” Gardner says, so it makes perfect sense to me that the X-Files paraphernalia belongs there. I mean, who was alive in the '90s that didn’t have an intense debate over whether or not Mulder and Scully should resolve their sexual tension? Keep on musing when the second X-Files film, I Want To Believe, opens in theaters on July 25, and the National Museum of American History re-opens this fall.