The Preamble
That’s a lot of 20’s.
In an effort to provide more Substack content, I wanted to check to see if I could somehow embed my YouTube Channel videos here (Turns out that I can! Yehey!). With that out of the way, I can now focus on the heart of this post: A deep dive into the NECA Aliens Corporal Dwayne Hicks (Series 1) and Private Frost (Series 9) Colonial Marines Action Figures.
The Best Sequel of All-Time
Setting aside my obvious personal cinematic bias, Empire Online did list James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) at #1 and I am not about to disagree. Set roughy 86 months after the release of Alien (1979), the sequel follows former Nostromo Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley as she journey’s back to LV-426 with a rifle platoon of Colonial Marines in order to find out what has happened to the Hadley's Hope colony.
The clear draw here for me is the dynamics of the 12-man Colonial Marines platoon (13 if you include the synthetic named Bishop). The personalities of all but two or three of the Marines are established early on in the film and gets the audience to invest in them. Personally, if there were books written on the exploits of this group prior to Aliens (1986), I would have consumed those in record time.
Which brings me to our post today, featured in this video review are two of the twelve Marines in Corporal Dwayne Hicks and Private Frost. It is truly a shame that NECA does not have the likenesses of all the Colonial Marines actors. I would have certainly wanted to display the whole team on my shelves.
7 down and 8 to go
To date, here is a list of all of the principal movie characters and if NECA has produced a movie likeness figure of them:
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) [x]
Rebecca “Newt” Jorden (Carrie Henn) [x]
Carter J. Burke [Weyland-Yutani Corporation Representative] (Paul Reiser) [x]
Lieutenant Gorman [Colonial Marines’ Commanding Officer] (William Hope) [ ]
Sergeant Apone [Master Sergeant] (Al Matthews+) [ ]
Corporal Dwayne Hicks [Officer] (Michael Biehn) [x]
Private Hudson [Combat Technician] (Bill Paxton+) [x]
Corporal Ferro [UD4L Cheyenne Pilot] (Colette Hiller) [ ]
Private Spunkmeyer [UD4L Cheyenne Crew Chief] (Daniel Kash) [ ]
Private Frost (Ricco Ross) [x]
Corporal Dietrich (Marines’ Hospital Corpsman) (Cythia Dale Scott) [ ]
Private Vasquez [Smartgun Operator] (Jenette Goldstein) [x]
Private Drake [Smartgun Operator] (Mark Rolston) [ ]
Private Crowe (Tip Tipping+) [ ]
Private Wierzbowski (Trevor Steedman+) [ ]
Bishop [Synthetic onboard the USS Sulaco] (Lance Henriksen) [x]
+ With the deaths of actors Al Matthews, Tip Tipping, and Trevor Steedman, it is unlikely that we will see official NECA figures of these Colonial Marines.
About
Tedi Villasor is—among many things—an indie comic book writer (Lindol, OBIsessions) based in the Philippines.
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