There’s a great little article over at the Kenner ALIENS Toy blog that explores Kenner Products repurposing of molds to create new figures. This practice is nothing new and the motivations are frequently made by companies for the same reason. Re-using molds in new product means time, money and other resources are conserved. It means a fresh product line can be populated to the max and maintain a longer term presence in the market place with new product. An obvious re-purposing of molds can be seen when Kenner’s ALIENS series 2 Mantis Alien is compared to the earlier series 1 Gorilla Alien, as demonstrated with this image appearing on the blog. Despite the color differences, the same torso and arm manipulation features are clearly common to both figures.
Such re-purposing of molds extends throughout the 1990s Kenner ALIENS line, and the blog documents these in more detail. These days, this practice is still very much a part of product development. Super7 is notorious for such mold re-cycling. They managed to squeeze 48 figures/characters/variants from 8 character molds for their ALIEN ReAction line. NECA have also released many figures featuring repurposed molds. Many of their ALIEN movie, video game and comic book adapted figures feature re-cast body parts to create a “new” figure, or at least give a previous release a new identity. Significantly, look at how many times NECA’s Kane compression suit figure has been re-colored with swapped heads to create unique Nostromo identities. More relevant here, NECA also made tribute figures of both of Kenner’s Gorilla and Mantis Aliens – and these 7 inch scale figures both share the same torso molds, which itself were also re-purposed from one of their earlier ALIEN action figures.

Go read the fascinating article on re-used molds appearing in ALIENS figures of the 1990s. Thank you Eric Fischer for posting this article.

-windebieste.