Operation: Aliens
- cepmurphywrites
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
By Ryan Fleming and Charles E.P. Murphy
In our world, this show does not exist - but in another world, you can find DVD boxsets right next to Aella the Amazon, The Van Helsing Mysteries, and Night Mares...
The Alien franchise was no stranger to targeting a demographic far younger than their R-rated films would suggest. Right from the get-go in 1979 there was the infamous action figure that was intended to capture the same merchandising potential that had been achieved with Star Wars, but all it managed to achieve was to offend some parents and keep children that received it awake at night. The makers of that toy, Kenner, continued to have success throughout the 1980s with their lines based on Star Wars, DC Comics, and The Real Ghostbusters. The latter eventually saw the company veer away from the source material and develop new toys not based on any existing film or episode.
It was under this mentality that a new action figure line based on the Alien franchise, with a more PG mentality, was developed. The company went one step further, however, and whilst the third Alien film languished in development hell, they approached rights holders 20th Century Fox with an idea. They pitched an animated series that would become Operation: Aliens, a way to pitch the toys directly masquerading as a TV show.
Fox was on the verge of passing on the product. They were worried about the struggle to properly censor the gore and body horror of the franchise, and the US government had passed the Children's Television Act, which was going to shake up the content you were allowed to put on and undercut the twenty-minute-toy-ad model. Most importantly, Alien3 was soon to come out and the film department didn't want a children's show potentially undermining the franchise in the eyes of teenagers.
In the end, desperation saved the project. The new Fox Children's Network block (which would be Fox Kids Network when Operation: Aliens started) was shaky, its intended flagship Peter Pan and the Pirates underperforming. Fox Kids needed content that would hook kids, and it needed it fast. The Operation: Aliens gamble was made. A deal was made that the cartoon would air in autumn 1992, leaving Alien3 safe from looking like ‘kids stuff’.
Production
The Colonial Marines heroes of Operation: Aliens would be based on the designs for the Kenner toy line, themselves mostly drawn from the second film Aliens. As in the films, Lt. Ellen "Rip" Ripley was the first person to meet the xenomorphs, but here she did so as part of a Colonial Marines team – who were implied to have died but never explicitly called dead, an early warning about the censorship issues. Newt was in the original series bible as Ripley's ward but removed as not fitting an 8–12-year-old boy demographic, though Jones the cat remained as the comic relief.
Also returning from the film, despite both dying in it, were Sgts. Apone and Drake (the latter being promoted from Private). Apone was given a new bionic arm, supposedly courtesy of an acid bath on Acheron, and acted as second-in-command. Drake was added in place of the far more memorable, and popular, Vasquez, who was deemed as not meeting their target demographic. He was also given the background of a rehabilitated prisoner. Cpl Hicks would be the least changed in appearance but instead, the character lost his prominence and instead of a love interest for Ripley, he would have an adversarial relationship with “Rip” due to her caution and his gung-ho nature. The android Bishop would be drastically rewritten to be more like a flatter Data from Star Trek, and the toy's sunglasses were explained as a joke gift from Hicks to make him "look cool".
The last returning character, and the most radically changed from the films, was Carter Burke, here reimagined as an older, wise, reasonable civilian administrator who provided the team with missions. The silver-haired ex-Marine was a far cry from the sleazy corporate shill played by Paul Reiser!
The scripts had to toe a very fine line on both content and referring to the prior films. In addition to the fate of Rip’s former team being left up to the imagination of the viewer, there were plenty of other changes. The life cycle of the aliens was never explicitly mentioned: people could be kidnapped by the aliens and bound to a wall in their nest, but the exact fate that awaited them was never mentioned. This went both ways, with Ripley’s flamethrower (her trademark weapon in the show, aside from the power loader that seemed to crop up every other episode) would only serve to scare away the xenos rather than incinerate them.
Though the writers did manage to toe the line, they still ran into constant trouble with the censors. The changes requested usually amounted to little things like shortening shots of xenos exploding into a fountain of acid blood, but given the nature of the franchise it is no surprise that the censors went over each episode with a fine-tooth comb. It also began to give the powers that be at Fox cold feet. As long as they needed Operation: Aliens for ratings, however, they’d have to lump it.
But Autumn 1992 wasn’t just when Operation: Aliens aired, it’s also when Batman The Animated Series and X-Men both aired and hooked a generation. Suddenly Operation: Aliens was less important. As a result it could now be buried in the schedule, and production halted on the final episode of its original thirteen contract.
The Episodes
More than a few episodes would recycle the same basic plots. Marines hunting xenos in different biomes of the week was the most popular one. The first such episode was set on a desert planet, giving off more than a little bit of a Desert Storm vibe when that was still recent news – before it became recent news again. “Save the Sarge!” would see Apone taken by xenos to their hive under the desert floor, before being rescued by his fellow Marines.
A few episodes later there was the completely different “Rescue Rip!” saw Ripley kidnapped by xenos on a jungle planet, before being rescued by her fellow Marines. That episode was also notable for featuring gorilla-descended aliens based on that planet’s native inhabitants, just as the Gorilla Alien toy looked, but never explained how the xenos in the episode came to look so much like the local purple gorillas than the standard dark blue humanoid ones seen elsewhere in the show. As with every variant toy, the xenos just did that.
It was time for a forest biome in "Troy's Back In Town", where our cast meet Hick’s old platoon under the command of Lt. Troy. Hicks is tempted to join his cool old mates instead of stick with the 'less fun' Ripley. A lesson is learned when Troy and the others let Snake Aliens – how they’re snakes goes unmentioned, of course – carry a civilian off rather than risk themselves, and Hicks and Ripley have to save the day. (Next week, Hicks still clashes with her)
Another popular episode concept was Marines visit theme park planet of the week. The first of these saw the Marines take some much-needed R&R on a ranch planet portrayed as the Wild West but with the occasional hovercar floating past. “Keep Them Xenos Rollin’” would see the Marines team up with the locals to fend off the xenos that had suddenly appeared from the outlying ranches. Again, how exactly the xenos came to resemble the livestock was never brought up.
The ranch planet at least has some semi-plausible reason for existence, but the Renaissance fair world in “An Alien in King Arthur’s Court” is just an excuse to do a bunch of familiar tropes in a familiar setting. It is distinguished at least by a “stasis field” around the planet rendering their usual weapons useless, leaving the squad to resort to fight the single xenomorph kept as a pet by the titular monarch with swords, spears, and crossbows.
King Arthur and Troy were the first two of the handful of attempts to create an antagonist able to speak. Another was ATAX (Advanced Tactical Alien Explorer), a lone special forces Marine in a xeno-shaped power armour suit. ATAX would be introduced as something of a jerk in “The Wrong Stuff”, but after being captured by flying xenos and subsequently saved by the main characters he acknowledged that there’s no substitute for a good team, suitably armed to the teeth. ATAX came back in "A Cold Day in Space", where the biome-of-the-week is Arctic and the aliens are preventing terraforming. While working with the Marines this time, he's still a jerk and looks down on Drake as an "Astrotraz ex-con". He learns another lesson and apologises after Drake's lock picking skills save them from being trapped with a Queen.
A third talking antagonist would appear when, to the surprise of older fans, Ash from Alien became a recurring villain. His first of two appearances was "Safe To Go Back In The Water?", a story set on a beach theme park world of the week where the xenos are laying siege to the surf. Ash is pretending to be a helpful scientist, "Benchley" (after the writer of Jaws), while actually being responsible for the threat: he's a traitor to the Marines who Rip says "let the bug onto the Nostromo to study it". In a nod to the first film, he escapes capture by his robot head detaching and flying away!
In another nod to the films, “The Moonbase Infestation” would essentially remake Aliens as a far more PG-friendly tale set on a lunar colony. That the tale is based on the Marines helping a little girl, named Billie, find her parents has caused plenty of speculation that at one point the character was meant to be Newt before that character was removed from the show bible. Billie is thus another recycled idea from a show full of them.
A worn old cartoon standby, the body swap episode, happened in "Bishop's New Body", after Bishop and Apone test an experimental new VR system. Loving his new emotions and ability to eat food, Bishop doesn't want to go back and Apone must motivate the team with no passion ("kick adequate buttocks, men"). Bishop swaps back at the end for the greater good when a failed mission – though not one that kills anyone – shows the team need an experienced android and a fiery sergeant.
"Dangerous Game" copied exactly what you think, as Burke learns that corrupt Company execs are keeping Aliens on a colony so they can hunt them. Ripley and Burke himself end up trapped in the hunt, but in the end the Marines have to reluctantly save the rich goons (all named after Predator characters) when it all goes wrong.
In the last produced and aired episode, "Night Flight", Ash returns in a Universal Horror homage: working out of a mad-science lab on the pastoral colony Belalogo C, he has created the Flying Queen that emerges every night. (This is the only time the different look for a xeno is explained!) The Queen is, of course, weak against sunlight and the Marines have to trap it while proving to the locals that Ash is just a mad robot and not supernatural. Why that distinction mattered when the Flying Queen is still a monster killed by the sun is unclear.
The thirteenth episode was left incomplete when Fox axed the series and became the stuff of legend in fan circles for years. Some of these rumours were incorrect but fairly plausible (it would have introduced Vasquez and/or Hudson – both of whom made it into the second wave of Kenner figures), others were just blatant fan falsehoods (it would introduce the Predator), and another just wishful thinking based on leaked information that it would involve a space prison (it would tie in directly to Alien3). In reality, the episode would have been another rehash of earlier concepts, this one turning the infested moonbase of "Infestation" into an infested prison, the Astrotraz where Drake was incarcerated as a teenager.
Legacy
For the young fans who saw Operation: Aliens, it would act as a gateway drug for them into the wider franchise, much like the Kenner toy line itself and contemporary video games like Alien 3: The Gun. However, aside from a single episode tape (“The Wrong Stuff”) sold by the Alien War experience in the UK, there were no videos released in the 90s and the only legal way to see it again was the odd graveyard shift broadcast. The aired episodes became very popular tape trading material amongst fans in the 1990s.
Aside from a different episode (“Bishop’s New Body”) sneaking onto the Alien3 Special Edition DVD released as part of the Alien Quadrilogy in 2003 as an easter egg, DVD releases weren’t forthcoming either. Older fans, and those later introduced to the films, or comics, or video games first, would dismiss Operation: Aliens as an amusing footnote. For those that managed to catch it in 1992, however, it remains a core part of their fandom. Because of those fans, it would finally get released on Disney+ last year.
The franchise as a whole has been sort of embarrassed by Operation: Aliens, rarely acknowledging it before the Disney+ upload. There were some exceptions. When Alien3 contradicted events of Dark Horses first Aliens comic, the reprints renamed the older Newt as Billie, after her spiritual successor in the cartoon. Dark Horse would later publish a 12-issue limited series in 2016 with the same tone and designs as Operation: Aliens, with Hudson and Vasquez taking their rightful places in the squad. Ripley as a marine would crop up in a few video games starting with Acclaim’s Alien Trilogy, which combined the narratives of the first three films into a single, action-driven one. A planned DLC package based on the cartoon for Aliens: Colonial Marines was scrapped when it was decided to cut losses on the poorly received game.
Ridley Scott’s overseeing of the franchise with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant would seemingly spell death for acknowledging Operation: Aliens in the films, but with Alien: Romulus, reference may have snuck in the back door with a few characters using the “bad data” catchphrase from the show to refer to a worsening situation.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology. Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.