By KansasBrawler The Joe brand can only survive for so long on nostalgia. Sometimes, you need to inject some fresh blood into the line or take characters in a new direction. I think that’s part of why I liked Rise of Cobra so much. Yes, it wasn’t my Joes up there on the screen, but aside from Duke, I did
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By KansasBrawler Pursuit of Cobra Dusty was a figure that really surprised me. For whatever reason, in my area of Kansas, he never caught on like I thought he would. Though he wasn’t as epic of a pegwarmer as Arctic Threat Destro, he was still pretty likely to be on the pegs right beside him for a while. I thought
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By KansasBrawler Sometimes, Hasbro makes controversial decisions when it comes to deciding what characters get figures and what characters don’t. Those that don’t like the figure believe that the “bad” character in question took the mythical slot of someone “more deserving.” There were a couple of figures like that in the 25th Anniversary line and Wraith is probably the biggest
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By KansasBrawler Wave Three of the Retaliation figures, while a juggernaut of a wave, unfortunately suffered from the fact that the other two waves of Retaliation figures didn’t sell that well in stores. I have literally never seen a Wave 3 Retaliation figure out in the wild. Heck, I barely saw anything from Wave 4 either. I’m glad I’ve finally
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By KansasBrawler Kids can be funny sometimes. I don’t mean in the lame Kids Say the Darndest Things way, but it’s interesting to watch how your opinion of a toy changes after seeing a kid’s eyes light up while they’re playing with it. I was talking with a couple of Hasbro design team folks near the “free play” area they’d
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By KansasBrawler Retaliation really fleshed out the concept of a G.I. Joe team. While I like the idea of a Joe team being nothing but named operatives, a military group can’t realistically work like that. I’m all for nameless, faceless Joe troopers. While they had those in Rise of Cobra as well, they didn’t fit in with their named counterparts.
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By KansasBrawler The 25th Anniversary comic packs did some pretty great things with a limited parts library. Considering how small Hasbro’s plans for the 25th Anniversary line originally were, they fleshed out the line with some quickly assembled comic packs. Unfortunately, not all those figures were winners and Breaker is unfortunately one of those early 25th Anniversary figures with so
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By KansasBrawler This figure is a rather unusual addition to my collection. I’ve never been that big on international variants or really much of what the Collectors’ Club does beyond the con set until recently. Both of these categories of figures have, in my mind, things that are cool, but usually just too expensive for me to track down on
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By KansasBrawler I’ve mentioned before how much I love it when new characters are added to the Joe line. I enjoy getting to meet a new character for the first time and learn his or her story far more than I like getting new interpretations on characters I already know. Sometimes new versions of old characters are necessary, but my
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By KansasBrawler It’s once again KansasBrawler confession time. Hi, I’m KansasBrawler, and I love the 90s era Joe figures. I love everything about them. The sculpts are really solid and I think had they not been saddled with crazy color schemes and underdetailed paint work, they’d be a lot more loved than they are. Hasbro learned that lesson when they
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