There are few phenomenon in toy collecting more well-documented or baffling than the volume of kids’ tie-in merchandise produced for 1979’s Alien. It seems as if licensors were pitched the hard-R sci-fi horror film from 20th Century Fox and only heard the “sci-fi” and “20th Century Fox” parts before letting wishful thinking fill in the blanks, presuming that Alien would be akin to Fox’s 1977 smash hit Star Wars. And while Alien was one of the biggest box office successes of 1979, it was hardly a bright, colorful space opera like Star Wars, with its psychosexual overtones, nightmarish alien design, and genre-redefining violence. It was absolutely not for children. That news came a little late for licensors, who had everything from board games to trading cards to jigsaw puzzles based on the film ready to go. Most famously, that included Kenner, who hoped to replicate their Star Wars success with Alien toys. Less famous, but no less ill-advised, was Ben Cooper’s Alien Halloween costume, letting kids trick-or-treat as H.R. Giger’s demented Xenomorph.
The Alien merchandise boom was short-lived, with parental outrage over the products seeing virtually pulled from shelves (Kenner’s planned 3.75″ figure range was canceled altogether) soon after release. With Alien still one of the most enduring franchises in science fiction and horror fifty years on, these products have become a favorite with fans and collectors. Scarcity and demand combine to make them some of the most sought-after toys of the decade, with the Ben Cooper costume that once sold for $4.17 now worth hundreds. Next week, Heritage is set to auction a mint-in-box sample, sold alongside a 1992 Collegeville Xenomorph costume — a relic of the second wave of Alien merchandise that came in the early 1990s. With the lot, Heritage has combined two of the most fascinating, bizarre epochs in the history of the Alien franchise: when irate parents helped take Alien off of shelves, and fifteen years later when no one seemed to care.
Alien, somehow, was far from the only R-rated movie to get its own Halloween costume. Some of the weirdest are early Rick Baker body horror The Incredible Melting Man and Jaws rip-off Nightwing, but these are all representative of a larger trend: everything got a Halloween costume. Beyond the obvious, like cartoons, super-heroes, or Star Wars characters, there were Halloween costumes of forgotten pulp heroes, contemporary celebrities, and even action figure characters. Though from 1980, this Ben Cooper catalog provides a great overview of what kids had available. Because of the method used by manufacturers like Ben Cooper or Collegeville to make their costumes, they were a low-cost, low-risk product, consisting of two parts: a vinyl smock with a printed design on its chest and a plastic mask. As the smock was standardized, the only real costs were sculpting the mask and the graphic design for the smock’s chest. This enabled gambles on seemingly-random properties and characters, today prized by collectors as the only merchandise produced for obscure seventies film and television.
There’s a charming garishness to the costumes, celebrated by collectors for their somewhat non-sensical design. A child wearing a Ben Cooper costume would have a (relatively) accurate mask of their character, paired incongruously with a colorful plastic smock emblazoned with art of that same character they’re dressed as. It doesn’t create the illusion for the child wearing the costume that they’ve “become” the character — perhaps for the best when a murderous Xenomorph is the character in question. In the case of the Alien costume, the smock is done mostly in black, broken up by off-white biomechanical “ribs” on the chest and on the mask. The smock sports a drawing of the Xenomorph’s head in its center, wreathed in glow-in-the-dark yellow. It is a cult favorite among Halloween costume collectors, and was an early entry into NECA’s Ben Cooper Halloween costume-based action figure line.
The 1980s saw attitudes toward R-rated movie toylines relax, and by the early nineties, Kenner had flourishing lines of action figures based on R-rated hits like RoboCop and The Terminator. With a third film in the Alien franchise released in 1992, companies dipped their toe back into the waters of licensing it. Kenner launched an expansive toyline spun off from ideas and characters featured in Aliens and Alien 3, this time without serious controversy, continuing until 1996. Collegeville released their Alien costume into this environment, sporting a more movie-accurate design than its Ben Cooper predecessor. The two costumes are actually fairly similar, as the only major changes needed for “movie accuracy” was removing the day-glo Xenomorph from the costume’s chest. Its mask is less detailed than the Ben Cooper costume, though it does sport a sculpted depiction of the Xenomorph’s famed eel-like inner mouth.
Today, outside of a 2020-2022 line from Lanard Toys, the Alien franchise is largely absent from the toy aisle. Figures, like those produced by NECA still abound, but with a key distinction from the Alien merchandise of the seventies and nineties. These are “collectibles,” with the same intended audience as the films themselves: adults. But for these adult collectors, as cool as screen-accurate, highly-articulated Alien collectibles are, there’s something irresistible about the older, child-oriented products. Maybe it’s the almost-comedic mismatch between their demographic and source material. Maybe it’s the ingenuity of their designs, and the appreciation one has for how these characters were translated to children’s toys. The end result is the same, an iconically bizarre collection of cult-classic collectibles, now finally in the hands of an age-appropriate audience.
