Her royal plastic highness!
In this article, we'll be looking into Kenner's first incarnation of the alien Queen, the Deluxe Queen Alien figure.
The figure was released in late 1992 as part of Series 1. Technically a "Deluxe" figure (as later indicated by a sticker), she did not come packed with a mini comic. She did have a chestburster though. A closer look reveals it's modeled after the queen chestburster image from the Alien³ poster.
In retrospect, it's a wild interpretation of the Queen seen in the film. It's stocky, with 3 pairs of arms, and crazy tree trunk legs. But at the time it was the best a kid could hope for. Despite its wild stylings, it looked good and had a great tail-swinging action. That secondary jaw action was awesome!
The figure itself is not known for any variations. There is some speculation among collectors that the Queen comes in different degrees of silver and black. But definitive examples have not yet been confirmed. What can be confirmed are variations with the packaging. It came in 2 waves, on 5 distinct cards.
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".00" version with warning sticker on upper right
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The ".00" version has a clean graphic of the Queen on the front and no "Deluxe" sticker. On the back is the space station diorama featured on all first wave Series 1 figures (more on that here). She also has 3 different warning variations: no warning at all, a sticker warning, or a printed warning on the bottom right corner. These warning inconsistencies are common with the Series 1 figures.
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| " .00" cross sell |
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| ".00" version with printed warning on bottom right |
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| ".00" version with no warnings |
By "clean graphic of the Queen", I'm referring to the fact that it's missing the red-orange highlights visible on the ".01" version.
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| "clean" graphic (left) & "modified" graphic (right) |
The second wave of the Queen features a graphic with red-orange highlights, visible in the comparison above. The "whipping tail" action description is broken up with ellipses, and it has a standard cross sell on the back. It also has a printed warning on the bottom left corner, naturally.
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| ".01" version |
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| ".01" cross sell |
The description of the Queen on the top of the card also differs between the 2 versions; ".00" has "deadly" in quotes while the ".01" version has "chest hatchling" in quotes. Odd differential.
There are two versions of this 2nd Wave Queen, identical in all ways except that one might have a "Special Deluxe Queen " sticker on the bubble.
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| ".01" with Deluxe sticker |
These variations make sense; the earlier wave famously featured the "diorama" cross sell for greater impact in attracting kids. Additionally the Queen graphic was likely delivered as rendered, clean and unmodified. The "Attacking" description was clean and succinct, no thought given to dramatic grammar. "And" is just too wordy.
I can confidently say that this will bring the articles pertaining to variations in the Aliens line to a close. There may be updates to existing articles. There might even be a later, newer article on the subject - variants among this line may still be undiscovered!
Of course, there's plenty more to explore and examine from the other Aliens and Predator series of figures from Kenner: the KB repaints, the Alien vs Marine 2-packs, and the Hive Wars series.
Thank you for following me on this exploration.
-Me
