May | 2019 | The Viper Pit

1989 Slaughter’s Marauders Spirit

I’ve talked about the Slaughter’s Marauders at least once before when I posted about Slaughter’s Marauders Low-Light, but perhaps an even more interesting figure to look at is Spirit. Both as a character and a repaint, I have some thoughts on him, and like the rest of the Slaughter’s Marauders, he’s a good bit of quirky fun.

V1 Spirit is a toy I like, and think is iconic, but I do have issues with it. His costume is pretty chintzy, his colors are decent, but if not somewhat bright, and the figure discolors to an ugly shade if you look at it wrong. Nothing major, but a few of these problems are solved by his inclusion in Slaughter’s Marauders. While he has the same palette as the rest of his sub-team, the green shades feel well suited to Spirit, and it solves the problems I mentioned, which is something his contemporaries in Tiger Force and Python Patrol rarely did.

Of course, the figure still has plenty of it’s own issues. Like the fact that the plastic quality is the same shoddy Brazilian plastic used for all of the Slaughter’s Marauders figures. More so than the others I had a really hard time tracking down an example of this guy that wasn’t broken, and had to combine a few to get a decent example. Also terrible: He has no eyebrows! I’m not really sure what to think about that. It feels like a missing paint application, but then again, maybe he just changed his look like Duke in the Tiger Force?

Spirit’s accessories are similar to the V1‘s, with a few differences. Most obviously, all of his parts are in black now, which makes some of the details a bit harder to see, but at the same time acts as a nice color alternative to the originals. His belt/skirt features a brown drape instead of red, and is nice for being slightly more muted. I’m not sure if there’s any significant changes to the gun’s sculpt or to Freedom, but as A-man told me with Low-Light, his gun was changed so maybe the same happened here.

I have a hard time picking a favorite Spirit figure, since I feel like there’s problems with all of them. The Slaughter’s Marauders colors on this one provide me with a reasonably colored version of Spirit, that doesn’t yellow easy or look terribly out of place among a larger Joe roster. Of course, this comes at the cost of his eyebrows and plastic quality, and for that reason, I can never use him without feeling uneasy.

You have to be a pretty hardcore collector to want to bother with Slaughter’s Marauders, honestly. A mint, complete SM Spirit will run around $30, and is not too easy to find, either. Broken figures with a few parts will still run between $15 to $20, which with most other Joe items, would seem absurd. My personal strategy with these has been to target them in lots and buying multiples of cheap junkers to slowly piece together a perfect figure. More often than not, an SM figure will at least have one break on it somewhere, and when a figure nets me extra spare arms and crotches I have less to fear about using them in photos too.

Slaughters Marauders Spirit Hasbro Gi Joe 1989 ARAH V2

1989 Slaughter’s Marauders Spirit Links:

2012 30th Anniversary “Basic Assortment” Cobra Trooper

Ah, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. The prophecy which foretold the apocalyptic demise of the once unstoppable American icon, GI JOE. Truly a tumultuous year for Hasbro with the titanic failure of their Battleship film, leading to a one-year delay of the second GI Joe film, only about a month before it was set for theaters and after the toys had already been sent to retail. The results of this sealed the fate for the brand for the better part of the 2010‘s, and should the Snake Eyes movie flop, possibly forever.

I’ve rarely spoken of Modern Era sculpts on this blog, despite that I do still collect them and a number of the new figures and characters are quite good. I don’t figure my readers here have much interests in them, and in truth many of them leave me strained for a commentary of substance. The Basic Assortment Cobra Trooper, however, is a fascinating figure in several ways, partly for the nightmarish picture it suggests of Hasbro’s corporate culture.

As the story goes, the GI Joe design team was tasked with making an assortment of cheaper, low-budget GI Joe figures for sale at low-end stores and pharmacies, namely Dollar General. It’s in line with infrequent releases Hasbro had made for those stores to that point, like the Valor vs Venom single-cards and later assortments of o-ring repacks like we saw in 2008. Like those, these were intended to be straight repacks of recent ME sculpts with reduced paint applications and accessories. Only, the memo the designers got was so vague, they assumed they were to create brand-new figures, with only the names of the characters to go off of.

It was one time that a horrible miscommunication gave the collecting community something to really go nuts over, and the figures were a hit at retail. But what it really shows me is just how terrible the communications are at Hasbro, and I’m left wondering how many of their dumbfounding mistakes through the 2000’s may have been a result of such incidents. Around this time, I remember reading on Glassdoor.com a bunch of bad reviews of the company, namely centering around similar stories of supervisors and bosses with a seemingly deep lack of communications skills…

With that said, the figure is really interesting too, beyond his backstory. Knowing the Hasbro designers were left to their own devices to create a figure that was a “Cobra Trooper”, I’ve often wondered what the inspiration behind this black-clad Cobra might have been. As he was released in 2012, I’d find it greatly amusing if the figure was based on the then recent Black Major Cobra Troopers. Although, given the web-gear, officer insignia and AK-47, it’s somewhat more likely that the figure may have been based off of the Sideshow Collectible’s Cobra Sniper who looks somewhat more similar.

The Pursuit of Cobra Cobra Trooper sculpt was a pretty good modernization of the classic Cobra Soldier design. There’s some issues one might associate with any modern-style GI Joe figures, but overall the quality of the sculpt and articulation sufficed for my needs. But with that out of the way, one discrepancy between ARAH and Modern that’s left me somewhat jaded is the presence of interesting repaints. With the classic construction, there’s a lot of oddball stuff to go and check out or find interesting, new uses for. However, with modern figures, Hasbro’s focus was far more on lazy, half-assed “updates”, leaving little room for repaints like this Trooper, who graces my collection as something fun and new.

For accessories, you got a helmet, AK-47, web-gear, knee-pads and a stand. For a figure that came at half the price of a retail figure at the same time, it was a good amount of parts and even left me wondering why the main retail line couldn’t be more like this. If cutting away the glut of reused weapons, and trimming down the paint applications meant selling GI Joes for far fairer prices in the ever worsening economy of the early 10‘s, why didn’t they do this across the board?

This Cobra Trooper is mildly easy to come by and generally goes between $15 – $18 bucks. Can’t say a modern figure with almost no paint or parts feels worth that compared to what vintage figures you could get for that much, but if ARAH isn’t your thing, maybe so. Unlike the inferior blue repaint of this release that replaced this one in later assortments, this figure was very popular upon release and was usually the first to go when collectors began ravaging dollar stores for these figures in 2012. As a recolor of the ubiquitously loved Cobra Trooper and being based on a decent mold, I’d expect this figure’s value to mostly stay where it is.