UPDATE: Sold within a few hours. Wow… that didn’t take long.

Here’s a lovely sample of the 1979 Kenner ALIEN toy for sale on eBay for US$399.99 (or make an offer). He’s complete and does everything you would expect him to. At this price, you would want the box and poster to be included but this sample is as good as you can expect one of these 40 year old, high demand relics from the late 1970s to be, sans box.

It appears to be complete and has all the working features you’d expect to find on one of these ugly old toys. Complete samples like this aren’t rare, though. I wouldn’t even say they’re uncommon. They certainly do appear on eBay a lot. More than people may knowse and one thing you may not realise is more of them appear on eBay than I care to post on my blog. Yesterday, one was available for US$135. It was complete – but had a number of imperfections present. The dome had some heat damage and the glow in the dark paint details had been painted over – but at that price, it was an item that was guaranteed to sell very quickly. …and it did.

There’s always other samples of the 1979 Kenner ALIEN toys listed on eBay. Usually around a dozen or so are available and stock is always turning over. I’ve been told Kenner made 10,000 of these things (Thanks Steve for passing this info to me) before Kenner cancelled their production in late 1979. The numbers of these things constantly available on eBay – and there’s been a lot – suggests this figure would appear to be somewhat low. It’s been 40 years since this figure was available to 5 year old children and the number of them constantly available on the secondary market looks mighty high for a production run of 10,000. This figure comes from a source that worked at Kenner in 1979, it’s the best indication we have of how many were actually made but I’m inclined to believe more were made; and this figure probably doesn’t account for toys made outside the US.

-Windebieste.