Gung Ho (2004)
At what point do you think action features in a toy go too far? While some toy lines over the years made action features standard fare (Masters of the Universe comes to mind) others like GI Joe (until the 1990s) generally hadn’t. The floodgates opened during that most noxiously neon of decades, and the Joe team was suddenly sporting missile launchers, water squirters, and even Play-Doh.
The GI Joe line revisited action features several times during the 2000s relaunch. Valor vs. Venom introduced Action Attack, a detour into automated swinging arms and such. A fan uproar followed, and (related to complaints or not) figures with the extra action features were abandoned in fairly short order. The characters who were the initial recipients of the gimmicks were even retrofitted to the usual o-ring style.
GH came with a “knife slashing action” activated by a button on his back. The activating tab wasn’t as intrusive as Duke’s unfortunately placed button, but the feature did result in the loss of ball joints at the hips.
On the positive side, he’s got a working holster and a removable hat.
And now we know why any figure who came with that vest had said vest missing a third of the back.
I still have that horrid Kamakura. I still can’t believe I bought that thing.
I hate it when Hasbro tries to incorperate gimmicks and features into figures that dont need them. Look at all the bad star wars figures ruined by gimmicks. There is a Luke Skywalker from 2002 that winds up looking like the Hunchback as he has aneedless “chopping” feature
Arrgh!
On the upside: the sculpt is pretty good and the shoulders aren’t overly bulbous. Barring Extreme, GIJoe was able to escape too much deformation and retain decent proportions.
Aside from that action feature, though, it is a pretty good design for Gung-Ho. He’s missing the open shirt and tattoo, but he actually looks a lot like Gung-Ho did at one point in the Marvel Comics series.
I somehow broke this figure at the waist, he’s in pieces somewhere. So, I’m not a fan.