"Oh God, not more GI Joe pictures!"

Chat about stuff other than Transformers.
Cliffjumper
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"Oh God, not more GI Joe pictures!"

Post by Cliffjumper »

So yeh, here's more pictures for you to tolerate.

Firstly, here's the fruits of a month's collecting:

Action Force (i.e. anyone I really like who appeared in the Marvel Weekly and had a half-plausible rewritten bio): -

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G. I. Joe: -

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Cobra: -

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Vehicles That'd Fit In The Lightbox: -

HISS: -

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RAM: -

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Flight Pod: -

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Also got something from Revenge of Cobra - the Steel Crusher, which is about the only thing from the whole line which doesn't look like it's from some shitty xXx sequel: -

Image Image
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Wildrider
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Post by Wildrider »

Wildrider likes this.

I'm coveting your Joes, Flint looks really awesome! I have a box full of old Joes and some TFs in the garage, no doubt fighitng a losing battle against spiders, danp and the occaisional renegade toad.

All my joes used to have a broken crothc though, i don't remember purpusely castrating them, my favourite toy of them all was probably Timber, was it Snake Eyes's wolf? Not sure about the lore behind why he has a wolf.

Snake Eyes was always very much the Wolverine of the Joe universe, in the comics i read I always liked how his face was portrayed as ravaged and his gentle pseudo romance with Scarlett.

I remember one story set in the 'nam, doesn't Snake Eyes get a phoshorous grenade in the face? It was during a hot day in the delta, we were on a long range patrol. My mind is foggy but I think Breaker was in the flashback and some other joes. One had a 'Thumper' grenade launcher, damn I'm having a rambling flashback!

Nice collection though, Beach Head remains awesome!
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Yeh, Quick-Kick's got the crotch thing, albeit in a fairly minor way. Like several of the older ones I bought him before I'd properly sampled the 25th anniversary ones, so he's probably going to get retired at some point (especiall as Quick-Kick's the one you really need to hold a pose or two).

Snake-Eyes is very much the Wolverine - great when I was a bit younger, bit fed up with him after having recently read the full run of the US comic and having him crammed down my throat. My memories if said run are blurring quite a bit, but I seem to remember just about everything happened to Snake-Eyes' face - IIRC he took some sort of weapon in the fizzog while on patrol in 'Nam (said patrol, by some quantum coincidence, also included Storm Shadow and Stalker-the-American-one...), and then the evac helicopter got hit and burning fuel hit him... in the face, obviously. I seem to remember it got reconstructed with plastic surgery at some point, only for him to get immediately captured by Cobra and have something poured on his face again - you'd think they'd cut his hands and feet off first, really.

I always kinda liked Beach Head from brief appearances in the Action Force comic, and for being the best thing in the movie, but having the little figure of him with its' tiny crossbow and badass scowl has kicked that into overdrive. Same thing happened with Firefly, who I adore - for some reason any masked figure is halfway there for me.

The strange thing is my collection is actually getting quite close to getting where I want it - I'm after Falcon, Jinx, Footloose, Covergirl, Frostbite, Lifeline, Cross Country, Mercer, Xamot & Tomax and then I think it's building up the Cobra red/blueshirts, upgrading to 25th anniversary figs and rounding up vehicles and bases... From about the 1980s film onwards the figures are pretty terrible.
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Wildrider
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Post by Wildrider »

Cliffjumper wrote: - for some reason any masked figure is halfway there for me.
.
Aha I agree with you, i rmemebr getting a new wave of them as a kid and there wa sone guy who was essentially a SWAT guy in blue fatigues with a blue ski mask on as well, if memory serves he came with a silenced UZI and a knife that would slide into his backpack. Gah I forget his name.

Also had a guy called Sci-Fi who I vaguely remember him sniping someone with a laser rifle though a wall in a comic. Not as cool as Roadblock swanning round with a 50,cal, but freaking awesome for a nipper. Sci-Fi would have looked wicked army built actually in his green robo-cop/Tron get up.

I always liked Lifeline, I know you're after him, I do have him somewhere, loved him after seeing him in a comic, these were probably all in TF comics second string stories at the back. where he basically harnessed the power of Akiido to use everyones negative force back at them via defensive moves, More ninja posturing, but damn for a medic he looked like he had aviator shades on.

Cool ness.

Ah yes Stalker not breaker, Stalker was the one that wore those Falkland era jumpers with the trademark elbow patches and shoulder patches, whatever use they were.

Damn god help us if we ever get in a pub together, G.I.Joe reminsicing could last all night!
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Shockwave? Yeh, he's got a cool 25th anniversary figure too. The chap I just saw who I kinda want is Action Man - not particularly great version, but Christ that's a cool reference. The only other later character I'm half interested in is Big Ben, just to recreate the awful Cor blimey, welcome to Judi Dench's Fish 'n' Chips dialogue Larry Hama gave him in the US comic.

Cheers for the offer of Lifeline, but I shooould have one on the way (won auctions don't count until they get here, law of tempting fate!). Love the way the comics and cartoon made a big fuss of him being a pacifist, yet he comes with a handgun... There's something about that funky red suit, though. Much more interesting than Doc, a bloke in fatigues with the least imaginative codename ever.

I kinda like US Stalker, but the pre-Hasbro UK Stalker was much cooler, and has nabbed the codename :o
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Jesus, what did I start with that first thread?

Was the Joe line getting a Shockwave part of some sort of elaborate name exchange for Crankcase?
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Post by Halfshell »

I loved my Joe Shockwave. Though part of me was slightly thrown by names being transferred cross-property, due to the comics occasionally sharing a universe.

I used to use him in my TF fights, pretending it was the Decepticon masquerading as a human.

I have pre-Hasbro Stalker's head currently sat on my desk, having found it in a bag of toy parts that I went through during the week. At least, I think that's what it is. The domino sleepmask in your pic looks like it sticks out more. Huh.

I didn't realise there was an actual Heavy Duty that they stole the name to give to New Roadblock. Why is Havok hiding at the back of your Joe picture with a red flak jacket on?

Didn't know the generic Cobra soldiers were actually sold as "The Enemy". That's a bit discriminatory, isn't it? I mean were kids expected to puppet Cobra Commander going "right, Enemy, it's time to attack something!"? Wacky.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Halfshell wrote: I have pre-Hasbro Stalker's head currently sat on my desk, having found it in a bag of toy parts that I went through during the week. At least, I think that's what it is. The domino sleepmask in your pic looks like it sticks out more. Huh.
If I'm remembering what Cliffy said in the other thread correctly that's actually a more recent Snake Eyes toy he's just decided to call Stalker as he already has the original for Snake Eyes duty. So the toy named Snake Eyes in the pictures was used as the Stalker toy whilst the one called Stalker has only ever been Snake Eyes.

The Joe Stalker seems to be played by Billy Dee Williams in the comic.

I don't think I've ever heard of Shockwave until this thread, was he actually in any of the stories that made their way into the Transformers comic?
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Post by Halfshell »

inflatable dalek wrote:that's actually a more recent Snake Eyes toy he's just decided to call Stalker
Cliffy wrote:I kinda like US Stalker, but the pre-Hasbro UK Stalker was much cooler, and has nabbed the codename
http://www.bloodforthebaron.com/toys/00 ... index.html
^^ Pre Hasbro Stalker.

And looking at it in profile, that is what I've got here. Well, its head as a trophy, anyway. I might get a pike.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Ah yes, according to this post of the FULL FORCE thread:
http://tfarchive.com/community/showpost ... stcount=68

That's actually 25th Anniversary Snake Eyes impersonating Action Force Stalker [Unless cliffy changed his mind since then]. The description of Stalker on the Blood For The Baron site actually sounds more like Movie Snake Eyes, not very chatty because he chooses to be rather than because of comedy injuries.

Why the hell did they do a Doctor Mindbender with a shirt on? Don't they get the ripped manly chest is the main appeal of the character?
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Halfshell wrote:I loved my Joe Shockwave. Though part of me was slightly thrown by names being transferred cross-property, due to the comics occasionally sharing a universe.
Still just as confusing, as newer ones also use "Shockblast"... Generally GI Joe doesn't seem to have suffered trademark-wise as Transformers - Mainframe seems to be about the only halfway big name change, though some of the early ones with simpler names have been modified a little (it's "Sgt. Breaker" now, a/o, so they generally sound less silly too). I guess it's because a lot of the characters have been in near-constant production.

I think the character was very late to the comic - the TF backup reprints were lagging quite some way behind the US stuff at the time. The British toyline was a year behind anyway because of the complicated 'handover' with Palitoy (who, IIRC, released most of the first couple of years of G. I. Joe heavily redecoed and renamed - which is where Quarrel, Stalker, Jammer, the Red Laser, Blades etc. come in), then released a bunch of them unchanged, then lost the licence - it looks like Hasbro UK decided to just start with a clean sweep and not really use many of the moulds Palitoy had already issued.
The domino sleepmask in your pic looks like it sticks out more. Huh.
Yeh, the new version is essentially a new mould, making the Stalker thing a bit tenuous outside of my mind - it basically comes down to do I want to spend £10-15 on a proper AF Stalker with loose arms, no accessories and relatively poor articulation, or less than that on a brand new one with articulation and weapons... I may at some point dab on the grey details. But then I might not - my other Snake-Eyes being dark grey and having detailing of his own means they don't look particularly alike (no more than, say, Flint and Tunnel Rat anyway).

Blood for the Baron is just an amazing site - whether you care for Action Force or not, you can't argue with the drive and depth of the thing. No sign of TPBs? **** it, we'll do them ourselves. Wow.
I didn't realise there was an actual Heavy Duty that they stole the name to give to New Roadblock. Why is Havok hiding at the back of your Joe picture with a red flak jacket on?
Yeh, I was surprised when he cropped up in the film, actually - my only guess is they wanted to save Roadblock for the sequel instead of a fairly crappy functional role (I'm guessing that's the reason the fairly forgettable Cover Girl got in the film too - there weren't going to be any wars started if they gave her a role which basically amounts to being a prop and then killed her off... that and it was a good reason to cast some dumb model who can't act), because he does seem to be basically the same character. Him and Havok-in-a-red-flak-jacket are job lot wins I don't have the numbers to replace yet, they and Recondo Who Doesn't Look Like Recondo tend to die fairly often.
Didn't know the generic Cobra soldiers were actually sold as "The Enemy". That's a bit discriminatory, isn't it? I mean were kids expected to puppet Cobra Commander going "right, Enemy, it's time to attack something!"? Wacky.
IIRC in the official Marvel profile book Cobra Commander's name is actually Enemy Commander too, though that might've been so they could have his rank/speciality as Cobra Commander on the next line. It's quite cool for the trooper, who has "Cobra - The Enemy" on his little stand.
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Post by Halfshell »

Cliffjumper wrote:Blood for the Baron is just an amazing site - whether you care for Action Force or not, you can't argue with the drive and depth of the thing. No sign of TPBs? **** it, we'll do them ourselves. Wow.
At some point I do need to sit down and actually read through the entire history of the line, as I'm not quite sure where my Stalker came from, as is the case with a a few bits of the stuff I had. Most of it I bought from a toy store in Limassol that I loved going to... they just had racks of the figures inside the door. But then I've got stuff like a TeleViper and the Jeep Thing that I think were a hand-down lot from a friend's brother or something. And then there's Stalker, which is just random. Also some really cheap quality figures that are probably knock-offs that have similar neck engineering (simple one plane rotation as opposed to ball-joint), but who knows... maybe they were legit. I've got the remnants of a grey boat that isn't the right plastic for it to be AF, and also a spare head with a turban and a grimace. Same neck socket as Stalker. Constantly snapping rubber made me quite adept at completely dismantling figures and repairing them with some elastic bands, and often just cobbling them together into "new" characters... I remember being quite annoyed that Stalker didn't have the same engineering.

The hip joints, on the other hand, when they snapped I was ****ed and had to decide which toy would get sacrificed for the greater good.
Yeh, I was surprised when he cropped up in the film, actually - my only guess is they wanted to save Roadblock for the sequel instead of a fairly crappy functional role
See, I thought that Heavy Duty was Roadblock, but renamed for trademark reasons. Of course I could be wrong. I'd defer to your knowledge on that subject... I just see big black army guy and think Roadblock, and TF has conditioned me to just accept when names are different.

I seem to recall Cover Girl's role in the film being quite hyped... possibly just by the actress. All the usual stuff, y'know. "Challenging role... character's motivation... really got into her backstory... blah blah". Then she's in like two scenes, either giving somebody a clipboard or getting kebabed. Models, eh.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

AFAIK there's nothing really stopping them from using Roadblock - figures are coming out quite regularly, and I'm not sure what else would stop them beyond trademark reasons - toys seem to be much more tightly regulated than film characters when it comes to this sort of thing. Really the character might've been a bit of a better fit for Duke's mate, albeit with some big changes (well, or not, considering they didn't seem to give a toss whether their versions of characters had anything whatsoever to do with the originals). I would, though, have thought exactly the same thing had I not got that Heavy Duty figure before seeing the film, and I bet a few people came out of it going "Why is Roadblock British?".

The film character weirdly reminded me more of Mother's Milk from The Boys, but there we go.


Looking at Action Force a bit, it seems it's got more than a little in common with Robo Machine, in that there's a clear bit where they were doing their own thing, and a clear bit where they're basically just putting American stuff in new boxes, and a hell of a muddle in the middle. On top of what Palitoy were doing, I'll bet there were all sorts of half-arsed licensing deals with other markets, and stock got shipped all over the place (as a further parallel, when Gobots started bombing in America, unsold stock was shipped to Europe - where Robo Machine was still doing pretty well - and sold completely unchanged, US cards and all - toyshops used to be a lot less organised and samey, there seemed to be a lot less rules stopping that sort of thing, and the UK especially was a bit of a dumping ground); then there's bootlegs and copycat lines...

Most of the Palitoy Action Force stuff had much less articulation than GI Joe stuff - arms were either straight or bent at the elbow, and necks only tended to move if the character was wearing something "open collar". IIRC the arms were a little softer as well. There's a serious fandom for the thing - watching on ebay UK, it's not uncommon for a basic SAS or Red Shadow figure to fetch more than pretty much any GI Joe.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Halfshell wrote:
I seem to recall Cover Girl's role in the film being quite hyped... possibly just by the actress. All the usual stuff, y'know. "Challenging role... character's motivation... really got into her backstory... blah blah". Then she's in like two scenes, either giving somebody a clipboard or getting kebabed. Models, eh.
Yeah, during the Brosnan era the third and fourth Bond girls down the credits used to do the same. The one he improves his Dutch tongue on at the start of Tomorrow Never Dies was all over the press in the lead up to the films release despite only having three lines. Though if I were dating Bryan Adams I'd look for solace where I could as well.

I'd assumed Heavy Duty=Roadblock as well. Mainly because Halfshell told me so though.
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Post by Halfshell »

Cliffjumper wrote:considering they didn't seem to give a toss whether their versions of characters had anything whatsoever to do with the originals [...] I bet a few people came out of it going "Why is Roadblock British?".
I doubt Roadblock's and Breaker's nationalities were really high up the list. Probably quite a way below "why is the Baroness Duke's ex, why is her brother Cobra Commander, why did she have to be mind-controlled rather than actually being evil, why did they waste Dr Mindbender like that, why did they give Cobra Commander an origin" and a dozen other insane things like that.

... I actually kinda want to watch it again right now, just because of how utterly senseless and shit it is. Especially the "AND NOW I AM COBRA COMMANDER AND YOUR FACE IS METAL ah we're in prison" ending.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

I'm not so tempted, TBH - the '87 film fills the quota of "terrible film about GI Joe that railroads all the best characters" for me, and at least has Beach Head.

I honestly thought Cobra Commander was meant to be Dr. Mindbender for most of the scenes he was in - I just guessed I'd missed him being named. I mean, huge chunks of it just don't really make any sense - Duke and Ripcord have their funky codenames when they're just soldiers. If any of you ever join the army, I want you to try that - when you're out with your platoon getting shot by Iraqi dissidents, turn around and tell them your name isn't Private Jones, it's War Gunner. Then Hawk introduces himself with his real name... but Duke who's never heard of GI Joe knows his codename. Uh?
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Post by Halfshell »

Cliffjumper wrote:I honestly thought Cobra Commander was meant to be Dr. Mindbender for most of the scenes he was in
So did I. Apparently the guy in the bunker whose experiments he saw (that turned him evil) was meant to be Mindbender.
Duke and Ripcord have their funky codenames when they're just soldiers. [...] Then Hawk introduces himself with his real name... but Duke who's never heard of GI Joe knows his codename. Uh?
Yep. Pretty much the exact same thing I picked at at the time. Huge swathes of it just don't add up at all. I think that's kinda why I liked it. Even though I shouldn't have. At all. For any reason.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

I found Cobra Commander the most baffling thing in the film, TBH. Okay, GI Joe, I can see why someone who takes themselves too seriously would completely change them to the extent that you wonder what the ****ing point is, but Cobra Commander? He's a bastard in a mask who wants to take over the world via terrorism. What exactly needed reworking there?

Mind, the revelation that the Baroness, being a 'hot' Hollywood actress, couldn't just be an evil, greedy bitch wasn't good either - of course, she had to simply be confused. I did like the way they colour-coded her hair so we could tell when she was evil and when she was good, though, that would have been really handy if I was six.
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Post by Halfshell »

I was fully expecting it to turn out that Destro was secretly working for some shady behind the scenes nameless kingpin figure, which is all CC needs to be. Discovering that the crazy Doktor is in fact an evil genius who's manipulating everything so he can rule the world with nanobots and get a new mask... just trying far too hard.

But yeah, we couldn't just have "she thought Duke killed her brother, dabbled in the underworld to try and get her own back, found out she really really liked it so is now evil." No, they had to do that... then thrown in that she's actually being mind-controlled so everybody can get a happy ending. I half hoped that they'd have the balls to properly swerve it and reveal that she was only pretending to be mind-controlled to con Duke, and that she actually is free range evil. But noooo.

And where it really jumps the shark is that those two insane rewritten character histories are the same ****ing plot strand. The crazy evil Doctor IS her brother! So naturally she has to go off and be with her Real American Hero boyfriend, rather than sticking with the man whose presumed death led to it all. I mean Jesus Christ on a Harley.

Then again, insanely contrived interweaving backstories aren't exactly new. What was it? Cobra Commander blamed Snake Eyes for the death of his brother, so hired Firefly to kill him, Firefly in turn hired Zartan who accidentally killed Storm Shadow's uncle instead (because he was teaching Snake Eyes how to mimic peoples heartrates at the exact same moment Zartan used an arrow that hones in on peoples heartrates)?
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Yeh, that sorta goes back to the Wolverine thing, doesn't it? Everyone's interested in Snake-Eyes' origin. But you can't do flashbacks to Snake-Eyes kicking around with Jim and Eddie, he's got to be a childhood rival of Storm Shadow, in the same platoon as Stalker and so on, like the way it turns out Wolverine had flashback adventures with pretty much everyone in the Marvel Universe over the age of 18, they just didn't mention it until after he joined the X-Men...

Funny thing about Destro - I thought the pre-credits chap was laughably bad. After about two minutes of Cakebastard shouting "Hiya Leigh! Hiya pal!" and "Soapy Soutar, git in here and wash ma balls!" I drastically revised this evaluation and now think they cast them the wrong way round. But yeh, seeing as they basically doomed us to his gurning spastickery as main villain, it was weird to have another one shovelled on top in such a bizarre figure - a few shots of a masked man on the other end of a video line, that sort of thing, would have been much more effective.

And yeh, I was totally braced for a switchback from the Baroness, which would have been a great thing for the character, both in terms of acknowledging the original (in the comics especially they tend not to shy away from her being a real piece of work) and in making her a character in her own right other than Duke's Squeeze and Cobra Commander's Sister. Whereas the overall impression as filmed is that she's basically incapable of thinking or acting on her own.

The ending in general views like it was written to set up a bundle of sequels, then someone saw a rough cut and saw that was simply never going to happen and then rewrote the conclusion in five minutes flat so as not to look quite that stupid.

The worst thing is it's pretty much killed any hope of getting a half-decent film out of GI Joe now it's been moored in high-tech jizzery-twattery just when war films that weren't pious lectures on the obvious seemed to be on the front foot.
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