Imagine one of the most shocking horror sagas in film history, whose villain virtually rapes and murders its victims while reproducing, backed by twisted biomechanical imagery, and rated "R" in all four of its main films… turned into a children's cartoon series. Yes, Operation: Aliens was a real project, and although it never made it to the small screen, some traces of its development still survive, including toys and a mini-comic.
The year was 1992. Production of Alien 3 had become a true nightmare, but after so many setbacks everything seemed ready for its release at the end of May. However, Fox executives had additional plans, and one of them followed the curious path of an animated series.
Operation: Aliens, the Animated Series
Rumors suggest that Operation: Aliens was going to air right after the X-Men animated series (which debuted on October 31, 1992), but that never happened. The poor reviews that Alien 3 received left the Xenomorph in a complicated position, and that would have affected Operation's development, though I'd lean toward the other possibility:
Fox executives stopped taking drugs for a day and realized they couldn't turn Aliens and Facehuggers into cartoons (no matter how great the desire to jump on the G.I. Joe train, or to do something similar to RoboCop, which had 12 episodes).
The Web managed to rescue some static images from Operation: Aliens, but there is no evidence that the Korean studio received an official order to create a pilot.
One thing is certain: there was a great interest in selling merchandise, and indeed many items reached store shelves, starting with T-shirts, posters, school supplies (pencils, notebooks, etc.), action figures, trading cards, board games, pins, putty molds, a portable video game, and even a child-sized Alien queen costume (!).
Perhaps the best source of material is a mini-comic published by Kenner that came with the action figures, which shows a kind of parallel universe where Apone and Drake are still alive, and join Ripley, Hicks and Bishop in destroying the aliens. If you want to download a copy, just click here (its .cbz format decompresses like a zip, or you can read with a comic viewer).
