1980 Kenner Alien Catalog
It’s hard to imagine with all the decapitated looking monstrosities currently at Toys R Us but was downright crazy of Kenner to make toys based on the R Rated Ridley Scott film “Alien’.
It’s obvious that Kenner, high off the fumes from the model glue that is the Star Wars franchise decided to not let any other Fox Science Fiction film escape their clutches. The results were varied, Alien toys weren’t appreciated and sold poorly but now they are coveted secondary market pieces.
This is possibly the most famous item from the Kenner line, the Big glow in the Dark alien doll. Its nightmarish appearance and the fact that children had never seen the film resulted in poor sales. A series of 3 3/4″ figures were sadly abandoned by Kenner, which always bummed me out. They looked cool!
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The board game is most famous for having a picture of the doll on the cover and not the creature itself, it’s probably better that way..
Little Billy is being scarred as he keeps replaying the chest-bursting scene over and over again.
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I was an adult in 1980 but still paid attention to new cartoons and toys as a snarky observer. I remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the Alien toys — or maybe was the Jurassic Park toys (featuring “Dino Damage” patches of skin that came off to reveal muscle and ribs on the dinosaurs. There was also a human figure who had a removable arm). In any case, for a brief period such toy commercials had a vague text disclaimer along the lines of, “CHOOSE MOVIES WISELY”.
Was there any equivalent rumbling back in the early days of James Bond? The films went as far as they could in those pre-rating days, and while the toys focused on weaponry the ubiquitous marketing for the movies themselves emphasized sex.
To this date haven’t seen any of the Alien films. Still prefer my monsters lumbering around the Universal backlot in B&W.
Hmmmm…. I find it weird that there’s so much questioning of the logic behind the Alien toys. Space was popular, so were monsters…. seems like a winner. I DESPERATELY wanted one when they first came out, but it wasn’t until a few years later I finally found one in the discount bin at Zellers. (At a time when I was tragically too old to play with it. But it was a great display piece.) I sorta wonder if the poor sales were specifically because parents didn’t want to buy them, even if the kids wanted them. (I recall my friends all wanting one too.)