The Power of (International) Packaging: Funskool Snake Eyes
Funskool often gets laughs based on its later offerings of domestic GI Joe figures, but earlier along in their history they were less crazy, and even made some interesting color variants. Snake Eyes came in two flavors, black with silver highlights, and blue.
The card art is inspired by the domestic ’82-83 version, and even though it’s comparatively crude when compared to the original, I like the overall bold presentation. That explosion is cheesy genius.
The card art is nice, but not as interesting as the repaints. Hasbro kept a tight control on early Funskool and tried to keep the figures relatively close to the American versions so they could reuse American advertising, cartoons and books. That’s why most of the coolest variants are harder to find: they were produced in smaller numbers.
The blue Snake Eyes is only common in the U.S. because Cotsworld imported tons of them and sold them for a princely $15 per figure in the mid 1990’s.
”Only the American versions of Snake Eyes,are very popular from Hasbro,from the 1980’s/1990’s.”
It’s always made me wonder why so many Funskool artworks are rough copies of the originals. If everything were licensed (not bootlegged), why wouldn’t Hasbro supply some cardart? And I never knew Snake Eyes was supposed to be “secret service”.
I guess they wanted to bootleg themselves? I love it!