The Outer Space Men:
Mel Birnkrant Interview
The Outer Space Men, the classic creation of Mel Birnkrant, are headed back into your collection as a new line sculpted and produced by Four Horsemen Studios. Here at IAT, we weren't familiar with the original line and wanted to learn more about it to help us appreciate the new versions. We were fascinated by what we learned, but we still had a few more questions. For those answers, we turned to the greatest resource there is on the Outer Space Men, Mel Birnkrant himself.
This weekend, the Four Horsemen announced the acquisition of their first license, The Outer Space Men. The 4H provided some images of the figures in the line and, as usual, amazed us with their work. While we were looking at all the pretty pictures though, we realized we weren’t quite sure what we were looking at. Who were The Outer Space Men? We didn’t have much more than a passing awareness of them, so we hit the books. And what we found out only made the 4H versions more awesome. 
Forty-two years ago the space race between the United States and Russia was in full swing, and a full wave of action figures known as “The Outer Space Men” was released that caught the imagination of a generation. Although the initial salvo of characters was well received, the characters that were to be part of the second wave, collectively referred to as “The World of Tomorrow”, never made it into production and currently only exist as elaborate prototypes / production samples in the homes of a couple of fortunate collectors.