Dollar General Duke

by KansasBrawler

The last member of the Dollar General wave is probably my least favorite of the ones I picked up…at least in his current form. However, I picked up Dollar General Duke because of his potential to fill an annoying hole in my current collection. It’s a simple change, but one I haven’t gotten around to yet since a lot of my modern figures are still boxed up from my move due to a lack of space to display them. With the arrival of the Eaglehawk back in July, though, I have dusted off those boxes and will probably be fixing up Dollar General Duke quite soon so I wanted to make sure to review him in his original form before I make a few quick changes to him.

Dollar General Duke is a combination of relatively early 25th Anniversary parts with a Pursuit of Cobra head put on top. The arms and torso come from Snake Eyes while his legs are shared with Clutch and his head comes from Pursuit of Cobra Dusty. What really surprised me on this figure was his hands. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the lines, Hasbro decided to make a pair of ungloved hands for this mold and Duke used these too. I’m glad to see that somewhere along the lines, the glove wrinkles got removed from those hands. Unfortunately, the use of such old parts does have its drawbacks. The initial version of Snake Eyes’s torso was a little wonky because Hasbro was still fiddling around with how to make the chest joint look natural and Snake Eyes’s original torso really dropped the ball on that front. While all figures with this style of articulation wind up with a bit of a gap, it was really pronounced in the early days of the modern line and so Duke’s torso suffers from this problem just as badly as many of the others from that era. The webgear also isn’t that helpful at hiding the gap so it’s really pretty obvious on Duke.

Honestly, I liked Duke in the old-school, Original 13 uniform when they released him that way in a comic pack, however, I’m not totally sold that a PoC Dusty head works as Duke. It’s a good head, but it’s awfully generic. Whatever criticisms you may have of Duke as a figure and a character, his head sculpt has always been pretty distinctive and I just don’t think that the Dusty head does him much justice, but the generic nature of Dusty’s head is part of why I picked him up. I was never terribly obsessed with the Original 13 until the 25th Anniversary line. By happenstance, I eventually managed to get twelve of them, but I was pretty unimpressed by the Grunt released exclusively at Toys ‘R’ Us with a lame pairing of Duke and Hawk and just kind of moved on, figuring Hasbro would do him again at some point. At the same time, I was also beginning to doubt whether Hasbro was going to make all thirteen of them. However, after I added Zap thanks to the Cobra Island set, I was a little more annoyed that I didn’t have all thirteen of the original Joes in 25th Anniversary form. I’d even managed to get the really hard to run down Short Fuze because the Target in South Dakota that I frequent was deeply clearing the Ultimate Battle Pack for $25 in an effort to get them off the shelves. Unfortunately, Grunt still eluded me…or he did, until now. Once I dig out my Short Fuze, I plan on doing a simple head swap (and an eventual hair color change) to make a more accurate version of Short Fuze and a nice, new Grunt.

His equipment also helps make him a nice stand in for Grunt. You can’t get more generic army than an M-16, a pistol and a helmet. I’m not sure who the M-16 originally came with, but it’s a really great piece. I also appreciate that Hasbro used PoC Dusty’s helmet alongside his head for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it fits his head very well which is not something you can say for a lot of helmets included with 25th Anniversary figures. Secondly, it’s a far more detailed sculpt than the classic helmets. I understand wanting to recreate the old, undetailed helmets, but the detailing on Dusty’s helmet really does a great job at making that helmet look good. My only complaint focuses on his pistol. It doesn’t really fit well in either holster and I would have liked to have seen him come with two pistols, one for each holster. I just don’t understand the rationale of using the Clutch legs if there’s not a pistol to fill the holster. One empty holster looks natural since that means the gun is in his hand, but a second just looks like he forgot to grab his backup piece before heading off to battle. Duke is also wearing Zap’s webgear, which is another reason I’m keen to do the head swap with Short Fuze. When Short Fuze was first created in the 25th Anniversary line, the proper webgear for him (which he also shared with Zap back in the day) hadn’t been created yet, and wouldn’t be made just for him since Short Fuze was a store exclusive. Instead, they gave him another set of Snake Eyes webgear. Fortuitously, Grunt originally shared Snake Eyes’s torso so a head swap will put this new Grunt into a look closer to the original and give Short Fuze his original look as well.

This version of Duke is also where Hasbro made up a lot of their costs for the wave on paint. With only three real colors, he doesn’t need a lot of paint to accomplish the look, and that’s fine. A lot of the details on his mold, like the arm pouches or the pockets on his legs are unpainted and a few people around the online Joe community have criticized that, but honestly, a lot of figures that used these parts didn’t have those details painted either. The green is nice, though a little light, but again, the happy accidents of this figure work to its favor. The original Grunt was painted in a dark green while Short Fuze was wearing a lighter green uniform. As it so happens, the 25th Anniversary Short Fuze was done in dark green so popping his head on Duke will make him look closer to the original look and giving that body this Duke’s head will put him more in line with Grunt.

Despite having spent the bulk of this Field Report talking about my grand plans for him (that I finally took care of right after finishing writing him up since it finally inspired me to make the simple change), I really do like this figure. It’s a nice use of the Original 13 mold, however, I still don’t understand why the decision was made to make this figure another version of Duke. Really, even without my plans, this would make a great stand-in for Grunt. I suppose Hasbro or Dollar General wanted some degree of name recognition and making him into a Duke ties him into Retaliation. However, the nice thing about G.I. Joe is that if you don’t want to use a character in the way the
designers intended, you can feel free to make up your own back story. It’s a nice addition to the ranks of my G.I. Joe display shelf, even with its flaws.