By Past Nastification One day, very soon, Rob is going to scold me. “Those aren’t action figures! They’re dolls!” he’ll exclaim as he tries to make me understand that Sweet Street figures have no place on a GI Joe action figure review site. “I already tolerated the review of those Tina Fey and Amy Pohler figures!” And he’d be right.
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By KansasBrawler Copperhead and I go way back, though strangely, my love of the Water Moccasin is fairly recent. That’s because the Copperhead I knew back in the day was KansasBrother’s Python Patrol version. I thought he was really cool but had I known he was first released with an equally cool vehicle, I would have thought he was even
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By Past Nastification When GI Joe relaunched as “A Real American Hero” in 1982 and into 1983, there seemed to be two cardinal artistic rules about good guys and bad guys within the toy structure: 1. Good guys didn’t hide their faces (except for Snake-Eyes, of course). Figures like Tripwire and Snow Job, with only exposed partial faces, were frustrating.
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By KansasBrawler Sometimes when you want a certain character when you’re a kid, you wind up buying some pretty subpar figures. By the time 1993 rolled around, KansasBrother had had his version of Snake-Eyes for a while and I kind of wanted my own version. While at the Toys ‘R’ Us near my grandparents’ in the south suburbs of Chicago,
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By KansasBrawler Generally speaking, I don’t have strong memories of most of the trips to toy departments when I came home with Joes. However, I do remember the origins of ones that I got as presents for Christmas. In my household, we sort of had two Christmases. My father was a pastor (he’s now since retired) which meant traveling to
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By Past Nastification Released as “Mercenary Wraith”, this figure is based on a character pulled from the GI Joe comic book while under the direction of Devil’s Due. If I remember correctly, the character was created by Brandon Jerwa, not Josh Blaylock. This might explain why despite the over-the-top super villain costume, the character was handled with more finesse. Although
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By KansasBrawler It may be hard to beat the look of the vintage Alley Viper, but man did Hasbro come close with the Resolute Alley Viper Cobra set. I don’t recall seeing Alley Vipers in the Resolute cartoon. However, it’s also been a really long time since I’ve watched it, so I may just have missed them when I first
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By KansasBrawler I haven’t mentioned how I decide when to review a certain figure, but it’s actually important to talk about it here so bear with me on this little tangent. I refuse to review a figure until I’ve had it in my collection for at least a month. It’s primarily to allow the “NEWNESS!” effect to wear off. I’m
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By Past Nastification Do you remember being a kid and playing with your toys? If your playtime created storylines akin to movies, the Joes and Cobras were the stars. Thankfully, there were ample “supporting players” to round out the cast. Sgt. Rock/The Bad Guys, Adventure People, Tonka Play People, A-Team/The Bad Guys*, and CHIPs. And even a handful of human
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By KansasBrawler After Psyche-Out and Repeater arrived in the first FSS 3.0 shipment, the GIJCC took a while to release more characters I really wanted. I liked a lot of the other figures in that subscription series (otherwise I wouldn’t have bought in), but I was really looking forward to Big Ben and Crimson Guard Immortal, so of course, those
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