By KansasBrawler Every now and then, the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club really surprises me and 2014’s membership figure was a perfect example of that. Cross Country is somebody I’ve always kind of liked but since he was so closely affiliated with his vehicle, it didn’t surprise me that Hasbro never made a modern version of him. However, that didn’t preclude
Read more
By KansasBrawler I’ve mentioned before that I’m not huge on international Joe variants. For some reason, they never really appealed to me. As such, I wasn’t expecting a lot from Calvin “Jammer” Mondale. I thought he’d be an interesting diversion, but at his core, he’s not the much different than the classic Stalker figure. I wasn’t mad or disappointed at
Read more
By Past Nastification They can’t all be winners. Before the Iron Grenadiers existed, Destro’s organizational presence was MARS. The only MARS/pre-IG character figure to gain action figure status was the 1984 Scrap Iron, somewhat erroneously presented as a Cobra figure. With an amazing no-frills dark blue uniform and red padding, the figure didn’t look like an employee of Destro. It
Read more
By Past Nastification There are figures that Hasbro absolutely got right. This modern era Zap is one of them. The first year or so of the modern era figure had a few issues, such as arms with a limited range of motion at the elbows or peculiar sculpting. By the time Zap was released, Hasbro had these kinks ironed out
Read more
By KansasBrawler Ace is kind of a tough figure for me. I agree with Rob that pilot figures are often the most difficult to use when they’re not with their signature ride. Since large vehicles weren’t initially on the docket for the 25th Anniversary line, that meant Ace came in a comic pack alongside Wild Weasel. Weirdly, I don’t think
Read more
By KansasBrawler After the incredibly weak sauce that was FSS 2.0 Red Pads Grand Slam, the mystery figure that was a repaint of something that was already released in FSS 2.0, the GIJCC had a lot to make up for. Fans were absolutely livid about his inclusion, especially after how great the mystery thirteenth figure was in the first Figure
Read more
By KansasBrawler Everything the GIJCC did during 2016 pointed to the fact that they were sure they weren’t going to be in business next year. People had been asking for a Sky Patrol con set for years and the membership figure, Pythona, was a similarly constantly-requested figure. If they weren’t going to be back, they did a great job of
Read more
By Past Nastification With this figure, Hasbro winked at us and said it was “Skyduster”, but we all know it’s Starduster and will be referred that way in this review. The re-naming is just Hasbro’s way of getting out the figures while avoiding any legal headaches, so it doesn’t irk me. Fair enough. Aside from the clever use of the
Read more
By KansasBrawler Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to Major Bludd. I vaguely remember him from the cartoon and KansasBrother had the Sonic Fighters version, but he really didn’t capture my attention until I started reading the original Marvel run in tradepaper reprints when I was in high school. That was my first real exposure to Major
Read more
By Past Nastification I usually despise head-to-toe repaints (httr). Thankfully, this new sculpt figure has the arms of Barrel Roll added to the… everything else of the 2005 Rollbar, narrowly escaping the head-to-toe label. But even though I know it’s not an httr, on some level the addition of the different arms just isn’t enough to convince me it’s not.
Read more