By KansasBrawler Part of what made me love the Kre-O line so much was that it referenced just about every facet of the Joe brand’s history. We got some great callbacks to the Adventure Team years, we got Bulletman, and of course we got a lot of A Real American Hero Joes. However, for me, what was even better is
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I can’t believe I missed so many arctic Joes in my time away from the toys in the late 80s. The regular troops, vehicles and drivers were all beefed up. Blizzard stands out as a favorite. Blizzard is chock full of accessories, including skis, ice shoes, two weapons, a backpack and helmet. This alone would be enough to draw one’s
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Yes folks, the first Hasbro GI Joe comic was released in 1964 to coincide with the new toys. What makes it Hasbro specific? Just look at that figure in the title; he looks similar in pose to the package art. Gi Joe ads can often be found advertised in DC comics of the time, and the cover also calls out
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Imagine my surprise when coming back to GI Joe collecting in 1991 and discovering that a member of the Oktober Guard had been released as a GI Joe figure. Red Star, though not one of the original members I remembered from the Marvel comic in the 1980s, nonetheless represented an element of the GI Joe mythos that I never though
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The Night Raven was such an impressive toy, it really didn’t need an amazing piece of box art to help sell it. The clean painting is even more striking. Here’s hoping Hasbro sees fit to supporting the release of great toy art like this. It’s fantastic to see the fans take the initiative when it comes to this sort of
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If there’s one thing you can’t accuse the later Funskool releases of, it’s drabness. The colors ran pretty wild and wooly near the end of their time with the GI Joe license. Of course, I’m not complaining, because I have a streak in me that prefers polychromatic playthings. Wild Weasel is I think famous in collectors’ minds because of both
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By KansasBrawler Ninja Force is a pretty controversial part of Joe history. To help offset the losses in market share that the Joe brand was suffering due to the rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a brand Kirk Bozigian said Hasbro passed on back in the day), Hasbro decided to focus on the ninja thing a bit more and
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I couldn’t be a proper geek without commemorating the 50th anniversary of Star Trek today. 50 years–wow. It seems like just yesterday I was playing Interplay’s 25th anniversary PC game on the family’s Packard Bell 386SX. Anyway, how can you pay homage to Trek and stay (tangentially) on-topic with GI Joe? Easy–just add zombies. In 2011, you couldn’t swing a
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As we’ve often covered on this blog, GI Joe has not been without its imitators over the years. While it’s easy to see such things as me-too cash grabs by competing toy manufacturers, I am impressed when the imitations carve out their own niche. I am particularly fond of the subjects that get weird. Such was the case of Big
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My most vivid memory of the Stinger goes back to a friend’s birthday party back in the summer of 1984. At the time, I had amassed a few early figures and some of the first and second series vehicles, including the original VAMP. My friend made out like a bandit for this birthday; the VAMP Mark II and Stinger were
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