UPDATED: This listing has ended, presumed sold for US$145.

Here’s a 1979 Kenner ALIEN toy on eBay that’s had its arms severed and had them repaired. The arms often break off these four decades old toys and incomplete figures missing limbs are common. Let’s take a look at this forlorn, broken down old toy. It’s not just the arms on this item that are glued in place but the legs are too.  Such repairs as these render these normally articulated joints immovable making the figure  permanently fixed in this stance. The tail, hands and tongue all look like they can operate as normal but the major limbs will not move. That’s a sad waste of a potentially good figure that could have otherwise been salvaged and fully repaired retaining its full articulation.Sometimes, the glue on such repairs weakens. Those limbs may have been fixed in place a couple decades ago and the glue may have perished. I’ve seen glued limbs like these simply fall off the figure and the detritus of the failed adhesive easily picked at and removed from the shoulders, ball joints and hips, leaving a fresh start to repair the figure. On the other extreme, some glues cannot be removed and the limbs are permanently attached. It’s going to be pot luck which extreme this figure will fall into. So reversing the repair on this figure is suspect and not guaranteed.

There are other, better alternatives to reattaching arms to the figure; and tightening up loose legs.  Glue should be used only as a last resort. On the other hand, some people don’t want to invest time into disassembling one of these vintage toys, investigating its potential and repairing it fully and properly thus retaining its original abilities.

All in all, such repairs involving glue degrades the figure significantly. In this case, both arms, both legs and each of the torso halves are potentially ruined. That’s a high cost to sacrifice the mobility of the limbs when better options require little more than actually disassembling the figure and using one of many well documented methods to fix it properly.

Sadly, this figure is not worth the US$145.79. To find its real worth, this item is probably best sent to auction. Especially considering beyond the glued limbs and general scruffy appearance of the figure is the fact the left shoulder appears to have some melting damage. whether or not this damage is from heat or chemical incompatibility with glue that might dissolve the styrene these old toys are made of is unclear.

Here’s a group of 8 Kenner ALIEN toys I’ve repaired myself using improvised techniques. All the limbs on each of these figures are fully articulated and work as originally intended by the manufacturer without any compromise, so yes. I do know it can be done.-Windebieste.