By KansasBrawler Part of what I loved about the Joe line as a kid was the wide range of specialties that characters had. Sure, there was some overlap between guys like Grunt and Footloose (though the original Grunt was before my time), but generally speaking, there weren’t too many duplicated specialists. When it came to specialties, one of the more
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Quick Kick gets some grief for his look, particularly when folks take his specialty out of context, or more often, when discussing his first appearance in the Sunbow cartoon. What good is a shoeless and shirtless martial artist in a military setting, they might ask. It’s also easy to point out the oddness of his being so attired in the
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If there’s been one (make that two) figures Joe ‘toon and comic fans have yearned for over the years, it’s Tomax and Xamot in their Extensive Enterprises business suits. I should have prefaced that by saying adult Joe fans, since I certainly didn’t give a whit about having any business-suited action figures during my childhood Joe years. It’s only with
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The Viper has a storied history of releases during the new sculpt era. One would think such an iconic Cobra trooper would have been a slam-dunk success, a license to print money where army builders were concerned. Not so, thanks to weird mold choices and color schemes. Blue gave way to greens, browns and greys, and the 1986 BAT legs
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The Steel Brigade made a surprise return to the Joe mythos at the tail end of the new sculpt era. It was a welcome sight for me, as I’ve always liked both the SB concept as well as the unique helmet design. Though the familiar design made an appearance (and was removable!) as part of 2004’s Anti-Venom squad, we got
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By KansasBrawler There are very few figures I’d consider missing from my childhood collection. However, the one glaring omission was the Crimson Guard. I thought that they looked so cool when I first saw them on a cardback but I never saw one at a store. Not having the Crimson Guard as a kid means I’m kind of that the
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The hits keep coming with the Red Lasers Army custom figures. Last year’s mix of army builders and named characters piqued my interest as soon as I saw them. The early ARAH era parts speak to me in a way that takes me right back to 1983. There’s something about the slimmer, less detailed builds of the early Joes that
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I’ve long thought I could tie GI Joe and Visionaries together in a way that goes beyond the figures’ construction style. Now I don’t have to try to make up some sort of half-baked No-Prize explanation connecting the world of Prysmos to the larger Sunbow Cartoonic Universe. That’s my original term, by the way–feel free to use it. Hasbro is
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One day, I’m going to have a big ole GI Joe themed party. Most likely for my birthday, or possibly the birthday of this blog. Ten years sounds good, if (Lord willing) it and I am still around. At said future party, I imagine that I will most certainly acknowledge all eras of GI Joe, from the original military-accurate 1960s
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I’m a catalog nut, and particularly enjoy diorama setups from the golden age ads of the 1980s. I pored over the Sears, Wards and JC Penney catalogs enough to call them up from memory. As such, I’ve been on the lookout for ads that I haven’t seen before. UK department store Argos is of course unknown to me, but I
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