Remembering Operation Aliens

Since I grew up and realised what a pain in the ass it is to make money, I’ve not been all that much in to collectables and stuff, waste of money I reckon, but as a kid, I was pumped when I learned that a range of action figures based on Aliens was going to be released. I was, naturally, a big fan of the movies, Jim Cameron’s masterpiece in particular, and had long harboured fantasies of owning my own squad of colonial marines, as well as a horde of xenomorphs to pit them against. Of course plenty of scale models had been put out before then, but nothing that was really affordable to kids. So this was a big deal to me.

But when the toys actually hit the shelves, they were kind of a disappointment, looking back on it. That didn’t stop me blowing a shit load of my pocket money on them though. This being Alien day, I figured it might be a good time to take a retrospective look at some of those Aliens toys that Kenner put out back in the 90s.

The first ones I picked up were Corporal Hicks (because a Hudson didn’t appear until much later) and the “Scorpion Alien” (sold separately). Hicks wasn’t bad. I wasn’t keen on the shoulder mounted rocket launcher, but I guess it could’ve been worse, and that thing did actually fire it’s projectile a pretty long way. Still, no pulse rifle? The fuck? And where was his shotgun? What he supposed to use for encounters? Or to save Hudson’s ass? Harsh language? At least the Hicks figure actually looked like a colonial marine, more or less, which was more than could be said for the rest of the marines they put out. Like all the toys, it came with a collector’s card. To Kenner’s credit, they actually had a decent picture of Michael Biehn on this one, which was nice. I think Hicks was the only marine whose collector card featured the real actor, with the possible exception of Bishop, who’s card appeared to show the face of Lance Henriksen, but with a load of CGI crap dumped on it, making him look more like the terminator with damage.

The actual aliens were designed on the principal from Alien 3, whereby the xenomorphs would take on certain characteristics of the host animal. This wasn’t a bad idea and gave Kenner scope to legitimately diversify the figures, by having aliens based on different animals, such as the “Bull Alien” the “Preying Mantis Alien” the “Panther Alien” and so on. Sadly, no “Dog Alien” like in the film. How exactly you might get a scorpion alien I’m not sure. A scorpion big enough to play host to an xenomorph would’ve been a pretty terrifying monster in it’s own right. But, in any event, the Scorpion Alien was actually one of the best. Firstly, it looked reasonably like an alien from the film, second it had quite a cool action where the upper torso exploded into three pieces when you pressed a little switch on the back, third, the collector’s card featured a real photographic still of the monster from Alien 3. A lot of the aliens’ cards had pictures of bugs taken from the films (usually from Alien 3 for some reason), but with CGI enhancements to make them look more like the toy, whilst others just had a crappy photograph of the toy itself. There were regional variations, in the States they had rather better looking artwork depicting the toys in the style of the Dark Horse Comics series.

Next up, Sergeant Apone. Looking back, maybe the Apone toy wasn’t that bad. But at the time, I thought it was pretty shit. First of all, instead of a pulse rifle it came with these shitty, rubber “grenades” that he was supposed to throw. To assist him in that he had this goofy looking mechanical arm. Why? And although I could live with the red, back-to-front baseball cap they stuck on his head, why the fuck did they decide to put him in that terrible, luminous yellow T-shirt with “no bugs” scrawled across it? The real Sgt. Apone wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing that shit, sweehearts. Which perhaps explains why the collector’s card didn’t have a picture of Al Matthews from the movie, but some no-name lookalike, wearing the shitty costume with a cheap looking mock-up of the Aliens set in the background.

Who else is there? Well Ripley wasn’t great. Could’ve been worse I suppose, but the massive flame thrower was rather oversized I always thought, and the costume looked pretty naff, with a silly looking handkerchief around her neck and those daft yellow boots, a far cry from Ripley’s cool, futuristic Reeboks that she has in the film. Drake wasn’t bad. He didn’t look much like Mark Rolston, but the army fatigues were passable and at least he had a smartgun. No flamethrower for when he ran out of ammo though, nope, just a mean looking detachable bayonet. Maybe that’s what Hudson was talking about, but if I was going to face an alien with a bayonet I think I’d throw it away and run as fast as I could without looking back.

Not only did Bishop look more like the Terminator, but he actually had sunglasses and a mini-gun. One nice thing about that was you could crank a little chain of ammunition through it by rotating the barrel. The only marine to have the iconic pulse rifle was Vasquez, who hit the shelves towards the end of the line. Vasquez also had an enormous missile launcher which she was supposed to have mounted on her back. Not good. I never had this one, but I saw it in a shop once, alongside Hudson (a UK exclusive), who was, alas, totally forgettable, looking nothing like Bill Paxton’s awesome character that we all know and love. In fact it was just a cheapo repaint job of one of the other figures. One other irritating detail about Vazquez was they got the colour of her bandanna wrong – blue instead of red. Fuck’s sake, did anyone at Kenner even see the film? Later repaints were an improvement.

Amongst the other aliens, there was the alien queen, which wasn’t bad, but for some reason had six arms instead of four. The projectile jaws were cool though, they used to spring out an inch or so when you squeezed the back of the head. There was also a “Flying Queen” which would seem to pay homage to Hudson’s notion that it’s like an ant hive.

The “gorilla alien” was a kind of stocky, midget alien which squirted acid (water) into unsuspecting marines’ faces. Even less defensible were the “Killer Crab Alien” (which fired out not one, but two chestbursters”) and the “Queen Facehugger.” Apart from anyhting else they were really fucking with the established alien life cycle. How can you have a queen facehugger? All of this troubled me much more as a kid than it does now.

There were some vehicles, but they were mostly shit and looked nothing like the vehicles from the film. A “mini-dropship” was created but never released. And no APC, major fucking oversight. In fairness there was a Power Loader, which didn’t look bad, although it’s design was altered somewhat with the addition of caterpillar tracks and a big gun on the top.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the toy line was the inclusion of some Predator figures. This was before Paul WS Anderson had excreted his dire Alien versus Predator films and ruined the whole concept. Most notably there was a twin pack consisting of an alien, arguably the best alien toy that Kenner released, as it was the most accurately modelled on the actual creatures from the films, along with a decent looking predator. The other predators, of which I had a couple, ranged from so-so to so-bad, the worst being the “Clan Leader” which featured “whipping dreadlocks” (growing out of it’s face) and some bizarre boots that had it looking more like a reject from some glam-rock band.

Although much better looking, more collectible, figures have been released since Kenner threw in the towel, you’ve got to hand it to them for giving it a go. There was even a cartoon in development, imagine what that would’ve been like. I saw a short demo reel for it on youtube a few years ago, but it seems to have disappeared for the time being. Thinking about it, I rather regret giving my entire collection to my nieces and nephews, they’ve probably destroyed them all by now. Looking at how much people are asking for the things on ebay I never should have taken them out of the boxes, but then, I already knew that at the time and I did it anyway…

How could you resist after watching this: