Odd name, crazy product, and it was
actually a Walmart exclusive for
Easter last year, marketed by Wave 2 LLC
as The Loyal Subjects, but not really available to me at the time, in fact I
only re-discovered them by accident the other day! And it's been a bit of a
merry-go-round getting them here in time, but we managed by the skin of the
hairs on our chinny-chin-chins!
Not knowing how things were going to
pan-out I helped myself to all last years promotional images, which as they
differ from those on the packaging must be from Walmart's own PR department, a campaign which must have been
successful, because dozens of blogs, websites, 'zines and so on, covered them in full, at the time!
I actually managed to locate some
reasonably-priced mint ones; there are a fair few sellers around and about, but one is
considerably cheaper than the others, so I grabbed two sets in the hope of
finding a few glow-in-the-dark or rarer ones, but that's now for another day.
The
Loyal Subjects' packaging artwork, There are ten
basic sculpts with the glowing variants, and metallic rarities to find . . .
there's a silver one on evilBay at the moment for silly money, but they will
have sold in vast numbers a year ago (why there are still so many on feebleBay)
and even the rare ones will still be turning-up, in mixed junk lots, years from
now!
Pleased to see that Walmart put three aliens in their egg (you should get two and one
'other stage'), as I had done the same thing while I still had only a few! I refound
them by accident, when some chap was selling a few of the same colour (with Lanard space marines as
enemy!), and as soon as the first lot arrived, he listed another lot in a
different colour, so I bought those, only for the cycle to repeat a third time!
The cavern! And my three tumbling out of
their egg - after careful posing! I've missed out on one variant of blue wrap,
and there may be a second green design, but it's not clear from the promotional
shots. But all packs have two yellow eggs, so they are commoner than the blue or
green.
Not knowing if the eggs would have the
right mix, I then found a seller who was offering a set of all ten for a decent
price, but when they arrived there was two blue and no purple! So I shot them
against the hope a rabbit would be pulled from a hat . . . it was!
It was an honest mistake; he's obviously
opened loads to make up the sets, and with four of the poses being very similar
(red, green, blue and purple), had accidently sent me two alike, however he then fired-off the purple one in the mail (with a spare egg!) and it arrived earlier in
the week, so I could get them finished in time for today! Happy Xenomorphic
Easter![I'm sending him a UK food parcel (Marmite, Gold Bars, Tunnock's and
Jaffa cakes) by way of a 'thank-you'!]
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And this bears a digression - The
originals, like most evilBay stuff these days (which really should be called EVILbay)
were sent via the 'Global Shipping Program', which 1) isn't global, there's
only a few countries signed up to it. 2) Makes everything 8-14 days slower than
if they are sent through the normal mail channels, and 3) seems to be a revenue
generating scam for eBay, Pitney Bowes and Hermes (UK) while 4) possibly defrauding
HMRC (?) as well as hideously overcharging the buyer (and short-changing the
seller?), so all three 'agencies' can have a slice of purely invented pie!
Literally everything through the program is
taking 10-14 days or longer, with an endless wait at "Global Shipping Center, Erlanger, Kentucky", while everything sent through normal, national, mail systems takes about 5
or 6 days. And while they sit in Erlanger, spurious and nonsensical 'tracking'
notes are added every other day or so, dated to a day or two earlier; when
there was no note on that date!
Now - I have been told that there's a way
of opting out of the Global Shipping Program, but I can't find the button, so
any help/thoughts on the subject would be appreciated by me and probably a lot
of other readers?
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Facehuggers and Chest Bursters! There are
two of each, so a decent set of four eggs
should, could, might contain all four! Like the adult Aliens, both Facehuggers are similar, it's
really only the tails that differ, These are not in scale with the fully-grown Xenomorphs,
but - following the [fictional] 'science' - if the donor/infected . . . inseminated is an elephant or a rhino . . . !
I can't ever get the Spaceballs tap-dancing Burster out of my mind,
despite having seen the Alien one may more times! The fact that John Hurt
reprises his role "OH no, not
again" might have something to do with it!
I was hoping to use the eggs to do an
'opening' video, and might have if the glitch with the purple one hadn't been
sorted out, but it was, and I really am pushed for time at the moment (real
life stuff), so I'll hold them sealed for now and get it sorted in a year or
two, probably for Easter Day again. But; here's promo' shots with both the
glowers and a silver Alien.
As I mentioned, the initial seller was
including random Lanard troops (also a Walmart exclusive - in the 'States!) and
they do make for the best enemy, although Previews
Exclusive (PX) / DST (Diamond
Select Toys) carried similar sized Colonial Marine troopers from EMCE's 'Nanotoys' design range. For the
Facehuggers you'll need an Action
Man/G.I.Joe!
Initial shot up at the gravel works a few
weeks ago, and a full Xenomorph line-up, taken in the garden this week! The
yellow one is a nice sculpt, but hard to get to stand up, while the Orange one
is the most menacing, the others all look more curious, or surprised!
Oh! That's me on the radar, I'd better
scoot . . . now where's the damn cat gone?!!
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