This blog is part 3 of 3 of the Alien Blog Series, so for those of you who are not into Alien, feel free to rejoice :P.

Want to vote on which figures you’d like to see in the Official vs Bootleg series? Head over to the OvB voting site!

Pricing

MSRP (without tax): ¥8,148
Price I paid for the official (inc shipping): ¥8,122 (£59.60)
Price I paid for the bootleg (inc shipping): $13.80 (£10.77)

The official figure I preordered.

Box

Figma bootlegs commonly come with their box, so I have a box for both the official and the bootleg.
Front:

Instantly we have two bits of missing text on the box – the Max Factory and GSC logos in the top left and the Fox logo and copyright in the bottom left.
Interestingly, we still have the “10 years anniversary” print on the plastic window, though the colouration is different.
The colour depth is also significantly poorer on the bootleg box – if you look in the bottom right where the box says “ALIEN”, you’ll notice the Alien’s tail a lot less distinct on the bootleg.
Another notable difference is this:

The postcard on the bootleg is visible, whilst the official it is not…. that’s because the bootleg lacks the inner card liner that Figma have in their boxes.

Top:

Again, the Max Factory and GSC logos have been removed. We also have some standard tape on the bootleg – my official figure has been on display, but the crinkled-up tape is the circular round “tape” that GSC uses.

Sides:

Not much to report here, other than the shoddy print quality. Oh, and the bootleg is creased up from not being packaged well before being posted.

Back:

Can’t see any edits here. Just some murky photos on the bootleg box… don’t want to show too many of the details off of the official product now, do we?

Bottom:

Again, logos removed. Well, at least the bootleggers got the correct box bottom this time, unlike the Revoltech Alien Queen.

Flaps:

Rotated this image, so the boxes are the wrong way around here. But notice what’s conspicuously missing? Telling you that the postcard is behind the “inner paperboard”, because the bootleg doesn’t have one. Interesting that they actually remembered to remove this.
Also the flaps are slightly differently shaped, which is an interesting change to make. Guess they already had some flap template they decided to use for the cutting.

So if you come across this figure boxed, it’s pretty easy to tell you’re looking at a fake due to the removed logos. The lack of backing card is also a big clue you’re looking at a less-than-official figure.

Accessories

Let’s start with that postcard:

Interestingly they’ve removed the logos off of the back, but left the copyrights on the front. Other than that, there isn’t really any big differences between the two – side by side there’s a difference in colour of the blacks, but if I saw the fronts one at once, I’d have a hard time telling them apart. So you do get a serviceable postcard out of this, but that’s not really worth £10.

Instructions:

Again, there wouldn’t be much notable difference here, other than the fact they’ve removed the Max Factory logo (top right of the first page)

Rest of the bootleg accessories:

Hmm, this isn’t how Max Factory usually packs these… The original official packaging I’ve long since disposed of, but it was the same style as other Figma – with a segmented bag for the base parts, and separate packaging for the other parts. The official facehugger tail packaging will appear later. The bootleg also lacks the Figma resealable bag.

You said facehugger? Yes I did:

The bootleg is a much more cheerful shade of yellow, and some of the details have turned to mush on the underside. We also lack the pale shading on the top of the flap parts.
Also the bootleg one has a major defect – I couldn’t disassemble it! They’ve painted it post-assembly, and the tail is now firmly glued into place, and no amount of tugging is likely going to get it to separate properly – I suspect if I do detach the tail, it’s going to take some of the peg with it. Or I’d just have to snip it off and go from there.

Let’s look at the alternative tails for the facehugger:

Unsurprisingly, they match the colours of their respective facehuggers. Here we can see how Max Factory taped the tail to a board so it wouldn’t get damaged in transit. I don’t plan to take it off the card as this thing is tiny, and I don’t want to lose or damage it. Interestingly, the bootleg has an extra shading detail, though it’s not one present on most facehugger interpretations. They’ve also painted the peg, so I suspect it’ll be a pain in the ass to attach to the facehugger, if I could even do so. The tail attached to the bootleg isn’t fully pushed in, so I suspect the peg would be too large anyway. The official has some paint drippage on the peg, but probably not anything that’d impede assembly.

Hands:

With both the official and the bootleg, you get one set of replacement hands. The black and silver are painted decently on both the bootleg and the official, and the moulding looks around about the same. However, what’s supposed to be the brown wash has been applied very patchily on the bootleg. A sign of things to come…

For the accessories, each one has a “tell” to signal it isn’t the official. Though special mention goes to the facehugger on mine, with it being nonfunctional. The tail that is stuck on isn’t even in a good position, so it can’t display well without being modified.

Base

Here’s the bases side-by-side:

The official stand arm has a bluer hue to it, and a lack of air bubbles. This bootleg stand definitely has air bubbles on show – which is a common trait of bootleg stands of this type. The bootleg stand also has a bit of flashing poking off the end of the peg – on Figma, this doesn’t tend to impede getting the figure on the stand much, but probably wants clipping prior to using the stand.
Bootlegs are probably the easiest way of getting a replacement Figma stand (sadly, would be nice if GSC sold replacement stands or stand parts). One thing to note is the plastic can be weaker, so if the screws are too tight to articulate the stand, unscrew them a bit first to prevent accidentally snapping it. And tighten the inevitably loose screws whilst you’re at it.

Base’s base:

Side-by-side, we can see there is a colour difference between the bases, plus there is a more distinctive frosting pattern on the official. On the bottom of the base we lack the copyright information on the bootleg.

Here is a close-up of what the copyright looks like on the official:

I’ve increased the contrast significantly, so that it is more visible in this photo. They can be kinda hard to see when looking at the base, but visible enough you can tell that it is there.

Overall, the bootleg base functions, but has the quality control flaws to be expected from cheap manufacture. It can be differentiated from the official by the lack of copyright on the bottom, and likely by having air bubbles in the stand arm. If you wanted to use it as a replacement for a broken official stand, it will work though.

Figure spin-around

Time for the main event! Let’s have a look at these two side-by-side:

The first things that stand out to me is the clarity of the dome and the fact the bootleg’s head is less hunkered down to the body. Oh, and the fact it looks like the bootleg has been rolling around in the dirt. The figure is supposed to have a subtle brown wash, however on the bootleg this has translated to a very uneven wash on the figure, which makes it look like mud. Can’t say I’m a massive fan of it on the official, but at least it is subtle enough to not look like dirt.
With the head, it’s not uncommon to see this on bootlegs – either they use a different joint piece or the holes aren’t drilled right, leaving the heads more prominent. In this case, it doesn’t look so unnatural to human figures, and not really noticeable unless you’re looking closely. It seems more visible in these photos than looking at it in person. It does offer one more test though – with the official, the head is practically straight when touching the upper back protrusion, but the bootleg is slightly looking up.

Figure close-ups

Right, let’s go back in time and get the bootleg figure out of the box:

Off to a good start with the bootleg!

OK, now for an articulation test after shoving the head back on:

Don’t think this Alien is going anywhere fast! With my bootleg copy, his right leg will fall off very easily, and did fall off once or twice when I was moving the figure around. Articulating the joint, it will definitely have a propensity to fall off. The upper arm joint was also fairly loose, but will stay most of the time. One of the arm joints is frozen and won’t articulate without doing something to sort it.
For my official, articulating it doesn’t have pieces flying everywhere (Mafex Alien could learn a thing or two…).

Whilst we have his leg off, let’s look at the bootleg leg joint:

Hm, so he’s muddy on the inside too! Almost wonder if they were using paint to sorta glue him together to go into the box… Didn’t work though as he fell apart not too long after I took him out of the box.
The joint itself is likely loose due to the “cup” part where the ball goes into being roughly cut resulting in the hole being too large to properly contain the ball joint. Action figures need a certain level of precision in their manufacture otherwise you end up with loose or too tight joints, and end up with… this mess.

Top of the head:

One of the iconic features of the alien. For the official, we have a darker shell. Some of the moulding detail is missing from the bootleg – the ribbing on the tubes that go from the front to the back and the outer bone pieces within the shell lack finer detail. The skull plate joins are also somewhat different. For the bootleg, we’ve also got a colour difference between the middle bits of bone and the outer bits, which isn’t a thing on the original. Outside of the head shell, we have a brown shading detail on the side of the head (bottom of the photo) that isn’t present on the bootleg.
For this, the bootleg doesn’t look bad, but comparing to the official, you get to see what you’re missing.

“Face”:

First thing that hits me is the poor paint quality of the teeth on the bootleg – both his inner and outer mouths are a mess. We’ve also lost some of the finer mould details, which adds to the messy appearance, especially for the inside of the inner mouth
Despite the bootleg’s dome appearing more transparent on top, it’s more opaque on the front, pretty much hiding the eyesockets. Quite a disappointing “feature” as this is one of the iconic parts of the transparent dome Alien design.

Inner mouth, extend!

I said extend. Yep, my bootleg is defective here, and it won’t pop out. I tried. For the inner mouth, the official is somewhat flawed, partly thanks to a mould line. However, what I can see of the bootleg’s, it doesn’t look like they tried.
We can also see how the clarity of the dome is much better on the official than the bootleg. It looks like they painted part of the dome to try and emulate the dark shading, instead of relying on the plastic’s thickness.
Here we can see how the brown wash is supposed to work, and how it’s just muddy spots on the bootleg.

Torso:

Here, the mould details are decently replicated, but the paint…. not so much. The black paint on the bootleg isn’t as shiny as the original, and isn’t quite as dark. Also, can we get the bootleg Alien a bath? Definitely looks like he’s been rolling around in the mud from this angle. The brown wash is much more evenly applied on the official, making it look much more like shading/detail and definitely nowhere near as distracting.

Back:

If I thought the official looked overly plain in spots, the bootleg trumps it with a lack of the knobbly textured effect that is on the flatter parts – especially noticeable on the buttocks.
The protruding parts are also all over the place on the bootleg – official shows how they’re supposed to go, but the bootleg’s are twisted all over the place. Not really a great look imo.
Oh yeah, and he’s also muddy. Did I mention that already? What do you mean the bath isn’t ready yet?

“Pipes” from the side:

Not got much to add here, but we get to see yet more of the mud and the way that the bootleg was incorrectly assembled.

Arm:

The limbs are all a fairly similar story, so let’s just compare an arm. The moulding seems to be a decent copy, but the paint job has suffered. We can also see on this hand how unevenly the wash has been applied on the bootleg. The silver nails, for the most part, have been painted OK though.

Close-up of the other hand:

You’ve been slinging mud around haven’t you, you naughty Alien?

Tail:

Well, we can definitely tell these apart! The tail end has been assembled incorrectly on the bootleg and points the wrong way. It’s not like they had an artist’s impression of this figure on a piece of card to tell them how it was supposed to go…
The curvature is also quite different – likely mostly due to poor assembly, but the bootleg also doesn’t have the two hidden joints that the official does. For some reason I didn’t take a picture of the official’s articulation, but this picture by YamiYumi shows what the articulation in the tail can do.

OK, let’s do some hand swapping:

Um, one moment please! Unlike the official, pulling the hand can sometimes result in the joint coming out. With the official, pulling off the hands will leave the joint in the wrist. The joints seem to be a bit short on the bootleg and a bit misshapen, which is likely the cause of this issue. And the hole not being small enough to hold it tightly.

Swap complete:

Wasn’t too bad, other than having to put the joints back in the right place when hand swapping. The wrist joints have more of a habit of staying visible than the official, but the hand swap is possible. For both the official and the bootleg I heated the hands to facilitate assembly.

Conclusion

Overall, this bootleg is a mixed bag. For just under $14, I can see why someone would want to go for this bootleg rather than forking out for the official, though it definitely has its flaws, with the poorly painted brown “wash”, missing articulation in the tail and some joints either too loose or too tight.
Telling them apart, the bad paint job definitely gives the figure away, as well as the missing logos on the box. If you have the accessories to tell the figure apart, the facehugger’s “flaps” not being a paler colour and the lack of copyright on the stand are two large giveaways. If the paper parts are included, the missing company logos on those parts also reveal if you’re looking at a bootleg.

Now for the first articulated figure of Official vs Bootleg, plus part 2 of 3 of Alien Blog Series. This Alien Queen was a bootleg I remember considering buying when I didn’t know very many places to get Japanese figures and really wanted an Alien Queen figure. In the end, I didn’t buy the bootleg back then, but was one of the first figures I wanted to do for Official vs Bootleg, and now finally I’ve gotten around to writing this blog. Yay!

Want to vote on which figures you’d like to see in the Official vs Bootleg series? Head over to the OvB voting site!

For the official figure, mine isn’t in the greatest condition as I bought it as part of Mandarake’s “Urban Mines”. One of the spines is broken, and the jaw has been reglued, which means I don’t have the inner jaw in place.

Show info about Mandarake Urban Mines

Pricing

MSRP (without tax): ¥3,429
Price I paid for the official (inc shipping): ¥2,000 (£18.66)
Price I paid for the bootleg (inc shipping): £14.97

I bought this item in “as-is” condition from the Mandarake Urban Mine.

Box

Front:

The front of the box is a direct copy, so not too much difference here. The print quality isn’t so good on the bootleg, and the colours are incorrect. Comparing the plate part of her head, we can see the bootleg box lacks some of the yellow colouring, and comparing her leg we can see where the print is blurry compared to the official.

Other sides:

Here we can see that the copper parts of the box are more of a brass colour on the bootleg. We’ve also got some poorer colour definition, giving us a more muddy appearance. From the way the light shines off of the boxes, we can see the bootleg box has a shinier finish.
Another thing of note is the barcode on the bootleg is actually for the Woody Revoltech, suggesting the bottom face of the box has actually been taken from Woody’s box instead of the Alien Queen box.

Back of the box:

Due to the difference in prints, the stone texture is quite a stark contrast between the two boxes. The bottom of the bootleg box is much more blueish in tone, compared to the official.

Flaps:

The side flap isn’t too different from its official counterpart, but there’s some definite spacing and layout issues going on, making it one of the easier parts to tell if you’re looking at a bootleg box.
However, interestingly they’ve neglected to add the text on the upper flap, leaving that as a more obvious sign of a knockoff box.

So the easiest way of telling the boxes apart is to look at/scan the barcode. If you get Woody (453807040107) you know you’re looking at a fake.

Inner packaging:

In the upper picture, we can see that the bootleg version lacks the recess for the Revoltech “coin”, and did not come with one. The clear plastic has a blueish tint to it, compared to the official.
With the lower tray, we can see that the official has a matte plastic, whilst the bootleg is shiny and cheap. This part of the box has the same indentations as the official.

Accessories

Accessory box:

The boxes are actually quite hard to tell apart, but there is one notable difference – the bootleg box doesn’t have a mould mark in the bottom left. During the photoshoot I did mix them up at one point, and accidentally edited the incorrect photo initially, d’oh.
Comparing them to the rest of my Revoltech boxes, the design on the back varies to some degree, which made it hard to match up which was which. The mould mark is consistent on all the official boxes though.

Sign:

Had even bigger issues telling which was official and which was not after I picked them up together and plonked them down. Well, after this photoshoot I’ve ensured that bootleg and official accessories don’t get mixed! Had to use some photos from a well-known retailer to ensure I had these correct. The print quality of the bootleg is about the same as the official, but the font of the lower writing is slightly different so the brackets are the same size as the numbers, and the upper text is slightly bulkier. Not something you’d really notice unless you had them side-by-side like this.

Coin:

Yeah, they didn’t even bother bootlegging this. If there is a bootleg version of this coin out there, here’s what an official one looks like should you wish to compare.
There were two releases of the Alien Queen – I’m not sure if both came with the coin, so it could be a first release was bootlegged instead of the second release.

The accessories have very little difference, so on accessories alone it would be hard to tell. However, this will change when we get onto the base and the figure itself.

Base

Very stark contrast in colours here – for the official base we have some grungy-looking concrete floor, with the weathering pattern continuing onto the grating. And the bootleg… we have a painted concrete floor and a weird squiggle that almost looks like a question mark. There is also no weathering effect on the grating. Yeah, deffo giving the points to the official base here.

Stand part for the base:

Would you like some air bubbles with that? Main difference here is the lack of air bubbles on the official, making it look much better than its bootleg counterparts. We do have slightly different clear plastics here, with a bit more clarity on the official. Not massively noticeable though.

Figure spin-around

Let’s have a look at this pair:

Hmmm. The bootleg is… very purple! Maybe Lanard Toys used this as inspiration for the colour of their alien queen…

Show picture of Lanard Toys queen

The official figure is a nice shade of blue-black throughout, but the bootleg is just a straight-up mess when it comes to colour. The body, tail and hands are tinted purple, whilst the legs and arms are the same blue-black as the official. Very odd combination, not sure why this happened in the bootleg production, especially as bootlegs tend to reduce the number of colours used.

OK, let’s do an articulation test:

The wrist joints are naturally a bit loose, and one of the spines is loose on my official. However, when it came to articulating the bootleg, it just fell apart. One of the more notable parts that fell apart were the feet – one of these on mine is really loose and will fall off without even articulating it and they’re a pain to reassemble. A couple of the limbs will also drop off without much provocation too. A lot of the joint holes on the bootleg are slightly too big, meaning it is prone to falling apart when you’re attempting to pose it. The bootleg did stay together when not being moved or posed, so at least it can be displayed without it falling apart.

Side of the head:

Here we can see the stark contrast in colouring. The official is definitely a translucent plastic, whilst the bootleg seems to have been painted an opaque shiny purple. Some of the mould detail has been lost towards the back of the head, but overall, most of the mould detail has been copied over.

Jaw:

The mouth parts on the bootleg look kind of odd, as they’ve been left transparent instead of painted so it doesn’t match the rest of the head. Also from this distance, we can see some stray red paint dots on the bootleg – not sure why these are a thing, but at my best guess I think that this paint colour might be underneath the purple to augment the “shiny beetle” effect.
Unfortunately due to the strange colouring, I can’t use the bootleg’s jaw parts to replace the broken jaw on my official without it looking super-weird.

Underside of the back of the head:

To my surprise, the bootleg has this detail and it is painted reasonably well. On the official we have some paint shading in the bone parts which isn’t present on the bootleg. Colour is completely off on the bootleg, but with the purple head, we’re way off base anyway.

Inner jaw parts:

The bootleg isn’t painted quite as neatly as the official, with the silver paint bleeding outside of the ribbed part (the paint is actually silver on both – but the light apparently reflected badly off of the bootleg). I didn’t take a picture of the teeth, but the teeth on the official look like teeth, and the bootleg is just… some random splatters of cream paint. You can see some of the mess in the side shot, though.
The mould details on the bootleg part are all a little less distinct than their official counterpart.

Back & spines:

The mould details are the same here, but very much not the colours. Looking at the top view, we can see the round plate parts on the spines don’t match in colour, which makes them look odd when you’re close to the figure.
The spine on the lower right of my official figure is indeed broken – unfortunately the tip of this spine wasn’t included so I couldn’t repair it. So… would I use the bootleg spine to replace it? No – the colour is all wrong, and the plastic is a lot more prone to curling up, as you can see in the above photos. I was sort of hoping they’d be a close enough match, so I could get some use out of this bootleg, but I wouldn’t recommend it for replacement parts.

Arm:

Another place where the colours are markedly different. Here, the bootleg gets to be more transparent than the official. It’s interesting we get some shading here on the bootleg, but it doesn’t work particularly well imo – the hands don’t feel like they match the arms. Silver on the fingernails is surprisingly good for a bootleg though and doesn’t look messy. The inner arms on the bootleg have the same purple tint all the way down, so look less out of place than the outer arms.
We seem to have the mould details copied across, but there is some flashing on the bootleg’s hands.

Leg:

The first thing to note here is the fact my bootleg came with two left legs – thought I may’ve assembled the bootleg with the legs the wrong way around (due to it continuously falling apart), but whilst writing this I checked – nope, two left legs.
Here is where the paint is most similar to the official – we have a blue that is fairly close to the original, but the protrusion from the top of the hip lacks the brown shading. The plastic itself seems to have less colour to it, comparing the bony protrusions from the lower leg. The moulding has suffered around here – the indentations are less defined and a little sloppy in places, but not so much you’d notice without the official next to it.
As the legs do work with the parts both ways up, I wonder if they actually bothered to bootleg the right leg, or if mine’s an extra defective bootleg.

Tail:

Wow, now here’s some stark contrast. For some reason the bootleggers have decided to paint the tip of the tail silver, which doesn’t make any sense if you bother to look at any pictures of the Alien Queen. The queens and most xenomorphs have their tail tips the same colour as the rest of the tail. If it was an OC, this may make sense, but with a well-established character… I guess they wanted to use more of the silver paint?
The official is the same translucent black as the rest of the figure, but the bootleg is the bright, shiny purple colour.
Also on the bootleg we seem to have a tail piece mounted backwards, as it bends the other way from the other pieces around it. Though they should be more rectangular plates anyway, as shown by the official.
Overall, the bootleg’s tail is a mess. It does have a wire in it like the official though, so you can still bend and pose it. Inspecting the bootleg’s tail, the wire seems to be fully enclosed, which can be a problem with some knockoff figures, but not here.

Lastly, this is me trying to pose both of the figures sitting:

Yeah, back to those bootleg joints – very loose. The bootleg wouldn’t sit up at all, so I gave up. You can pose her on the stand, but if you wanted to get more adventurous with the pose on the bootleg, it’s not going to stay in place. That’s if you have enough patience to try, with the thing falling apart every time you touch it. Fun fact: whilst writing this review, I brought the bootleg upstairs to inspect some parts to write about them. During writing this, its head, the mouth part, one of its legs and both of the inner arms have fallen off. And I’m not even trying to pose the damn thing!

Conclusion

Based on the bootleg I received, I’d firmly put the bootleg in the “do not buy” category. The colouring is awful, and it won’t stay together for more than about 10 seconds if you’re touching it. It’s not good for replacement parts – most of the parts don’t match the original’s colours, and those that are a closer match probably won’t stay attached without some work. The spines are likely fixable on the bootleg, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they curl back up over time.
If you’re looking at a copy of this figure and wondering if it is a bootleg – the box barcode seems a good place to start, but the strange colouring of the bootleg is a dead giveaway. This figure has been bootlegged for a number of years, so not sure if the bootleg colours will vary, but I suspect that they will be “off”, no matter the copy. The figure should be translucent over most of its body, with some blue highlights and brown shading in key spots. Also the underneath of the head detail should be a bone colour, not white/grey.