This week, I've been continuing to look through old pics. In the process, there was one thing I really couldn't avoid that definitely would have ended up here if I had made the find a little later. A year ago, I bought up a good part of a new line that's gotten a lot of notoriety than and since, the Lanard Alien/ Aliens direct-to-Walmart collection. Unfortunately, at that point, I was in a dark spell, so I didn't give them a proper treatment at the time. Eventually, I caught up a bit with posts on the colossal Alien Queen and the 35 mm alien lineup (as well as the Primal Clash megafauna from even earlier), but I knew I wasn't nearly done with this. Here for posterity is my big haul, which I had to bring home on public transportation.
To me, what made this line interesting was the mix of human and Alien figures. Dedicated collectors were quick to note that the humans were in fact re-issues of earlier Lanard toys including at least one figure from The Corps. Ironically, they also recycled an "exo-battlesuit" that had clearly been modelled on the Aliens power loader, which was simply recolored back into the movie's color scheme. My big haul started with an attempt to order this item online, but thanks to extra randomness, I got the APC instead. I then discovered they had had the power loader all along, so I got that one plus a cheaper set. Here are some unboxing pics I took at the time.
After this haul, I got one more of the cheaper sets, which came with the egg/ facehugger, another alien and a wonky space guy I'll get to shortly. Of the aliens, the pink one interested me most, because it put an alien in a quadrupedal pose. It's a nice, dynamic sculpt, except that it happens to be the only one with elbow joints, which makes it prone to face plant when set down. I took the other two as recolors of the same sculpt, until I realized just doing this post that they had the two different versions of the head from Alien and Aliens. What did stand out to me is that the upright aliens' poses tended to look very non-threatening. Here's some new and old pics to show what I mean.
"You're telling me I only exist because a prop was stored improperly?"
"It's cool, we're cool, everybody's cool. Just put... down... the chainsaw."
"All right, all right! It was my idea to kill Newt!"
Meanwhile, we have the people, and they are mixed. To start with, the Corps figure is obviously out of scale with everything else including the bike he came with in the box. The marines are from a related but separate line I've seen named by others but couldn't tell you offhand. Then there is the space guy, apparently from a middling 2000's line called Star Force. There's two strange things about him. First, only one of his hands will hold the gun that came with him, though we've already seen that doesn't mean they have anything to do with each other. Second, that hand is not only turned sideways but 180 degrees from the elbow joint, the kind of pose that's barely possible (I tried, and you owe me) but wildly unnatural. Finally, there's that damn APC, which I'm only mentioning because it was in the haul. For some reason, I didn't take any pics when I got it, and I'm not going into it now; maybe another time. Here's a lineup of the crew together.
After all the time I waited to post this, I hoped there might be some new acquisitions, as there was talk of a second wave for some time. Sure enough, a few weeks back, I found some more of the aliens on the shelves that already looked like they'd been pushed around. However, they were quite different, sized 6 to 7 inch without any sign of human counterparts. The aim is clearly to make them more like "collectibles" than toys, which to me makes them far less interesting. It doesn't help that nothing was done to make the joints any less visible at the larger size, making a flaw that was minor at small scale far less tolerable. I'm sure I'll get one sooner or later, but for now I'm saving my money for other things (like the Walmart spinosaur). Here's a pic of the next wave in the wild.
Finally, one more lineup, this time with the Truckstop Queen. Sometimes, I still forget how big she is.
That's all for now, more to come!
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