The Star Wars toy line is, by far, the best known and most popular of these toys, and every other toy maker in the business tried to emulate that success, most especially Mego, which had passed on making toys for the Star Wars franchise (and, by no great coincidence, went out of business a few years later).
So the market was flooded with itty-bitty, semi-posable representations of characters from such less-than-stellar efforts as The Black Hole, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Legend of the Lone Ranger, among many others.
One movie you didn't see such figures for, however, was Alien, the 1979 science-fiction/horror hybrid classic that featured Sigourney Weaver in her first starring role and an all-star roster of character actors (Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartright)...oh, and one big fucking scary alien. known affectionately (then and now) as the "Big Chap."
You almost saw those toys, though.
Kenner held the license to make such toys, and they did produce a huge, 18" figure of the "Big Chap" himself (a toy which is now hard to find and super-expensive). However, they only got as far as the prototype stage for the 3 3/4" figures from the movie before someone, somewhere no doubt realized that producing a line of toys from a gory R-rated horror film probably wasn't the best thing for the sleeping patterns of America's children. (Never mind that we would have thought those toys were wicked cool and cleaned the shelves of them...when our well-meaning parents weren't looking, of course.)
But lo, all these decades later, the fine folks at ReAction Figures have dug out those prototypes and produced the figures we never had when we were kids. Now the "Big Chap" cam loom over my computer monitor--and, when he returns home, harass my tiny Doctor Who and Universal Monster figures, too.
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