The Colonel Steve Austin (Red)
is a really nice figure. Zica Toys attempted to out-Kenner Kenner (and
Funko) and basically pulled it off - this feels like it would be on the
shelf next to Adventure People and Walrus Man, and the head sculpt is
right on the money. Just popping it out of the amazing packaging with
the 1978-style price tag box is quite the experience, although it does
seem to do slightly better than Kenner's own product from the day.
While not tops on my list of preferred characters, Ash
makes for a pretty good figure. As a driving force for the movie's
malevolent feel, Ian Holm's character is the perfect fodder for term
papers everywhere. Not only does the character place duty above safety,
but he works as a metaphor for the film's criticizing of itself - at
one point he attacks Ripley with a rolled-up pornographic magazine,
literally trying to cram the role of a subjugated woman down the throat
of a major step forward for the roles of women in film, particularly
genre stuff. Few movies to grace the pages of Starlog have a
star without a Y chromosome, so someone smarter and better than I am at
this no doubt has crafted some wonderful piece on Alien as a
change to a brighter future for women in sci-fi, although, arguably,
this brighter future never actually arrived. (See: Slave Leia, Carol
Marcus, Megan Fox in Transformers movies. And arguably the shots at the end of Alien
too.) But I digress, and I am not an expert in the area of gender roles
in film in the slightest plus I could probably go on about this for
pages.
When I first saw it in Action Figure Digest, Kane in Nostromo Space Suit
stood out as being overly memorable. If memory serves the identity of
the character was called into question (i.e., who was in the suit?) but I
do distinctly remember their writing that it looked more interesting
from the back than from the front. This isn't a stretch. The Alien
space suits are wonderfully distinctive works of art, looking like an
old diving bell while retaining some rather fanciful armor-like elements
and various protrusions.
