1993 Blanka

Posted on October 31, 2019 by mwnekoman

1993 Blanka

For the most part, it’s my opinion that the Street Fighter GI Joes are one of the weaker 90‘s sub-lines. No doubt, there was some curious figures I had as a kid that saw plenty of play, but most of them had terrible sculpts or glaring flaws because of the tooling they reused (Zangief with exposed robot parts!). Blanka is one figure whom has almost always been immune to my critical outlook, however.

I’m partly biased towards Blanka because I’ll readily admit, he was my favorite Street Fighter II character as a kid and to this day the character I play as the most. So when I was a kid having a figure of my favorite character from the game meant Blanka received an ample amount of my attention. From then and up to now, I felt like one of the appeals that Blanka had was that he was a fairly ambiguous character, even in the game. So it was easy to find a place for him in a variety of roles, as either a friend or foe depending upon what I felt like.

Outside of his head, Blanka is a full repaint of 1988 Roadpig. The muscular, shirtless Roadpig body works well for Blanka and is among the better reuses of tooling for the Street Fighter GI Joe line. There’s not much that seems out of place besides maybe the arrows on his leg, and the physique is a good match for Blanka. The new head is also a pretty good sculpt, nicely sized and featuring a fierce expression that suits the character.

The version of Blanka I’m highlighting is the one that came packaged with the Beast Blaster. It has slightly more muted colors over the single carded version. The green for his skin has been replaced with blue, while the red details have been replaced with two shades of brown. It’s still a pretty eccentric figure, but these colors fit with how I like to use him more, and visually just look better to me on a subjective level.

To incorporate Blanka into my GI Joe universe, I’ve usually had two ways I liked using him. The first way that’s probably more typical, is to use him as a mutant creation by Dr. Mindbender. It’s a fun scenario that ties Blanka into Mindbender and possibly Serpentor. Alternatively, I’ve on and off contemplated him as a more mentally competent ninja character, as an adversary to the Ninja Force. I sort of got the idea when I was 13 or so after playing Samurai Warriors 2 and thinking Kotaro Fuma looked like this Blanka. I guess you could say he’s always captivated my imagination.

Beast Blaster Blankas aren’t as common as other versions of Blanka, but they show up from time to time and aren’t worth too much. Typically an auction will go around $10, and as he has no parts there’s little variation in his value. In my opinion, this is the most appealing version of Blanka, though he’s a figure that might be easier to fit into some people’s collections more than others.

Gi joe Street fighter II 2 Blanka guile chun-li Ninja Force Hasbro 1993 90's

1993 Blanka Links:

Yo Joe

(Note: There’s almost nothing on the internet about this figure! Some content about the green version, but nothing on this guy.)

2019 TMB Snow Serpents Ghost Squad (Sunbow Colors)

Posted on October 14, 2019 by mwnekoman

2019 TMB Snow Serpents Ghost Squad

So the newest wave of factory customs for 2019 is here, and it’s Snow Serpents. The V1 Snow Serpent is a classic mold and one of the highest quality sculpts from the vintage line, but finding things to do with it that are very interesting will be a challenge. So far of the early repaints, I’m pretty big into the Ghost Squad, which is a figure based on the Snow Serpent’s appearance in the cartoon.

The figure is primarily a stark white and not the off-white of the vintage figure. This is pretty nice, in the way that the white now matches with more figures that used a standard white color like the 1991 Snow Serpent or the Ice Viper. Other than that, the web-gear is painted a gray color, while the eye holes in the mask are painted black; there’s some blue for the goggles, and silver for the buckles. The paint applications and color scheme in general is pretty basic, but it conveys a Sunbow accurate Snow Serpent while maintaining enough detail to be interesting, so for that I quite like it.

I’ve yet to figure out exactly what I see these as in my collection, but the colors are interesting enough they could work for a fair bit. As they’re cast in a more standard white, they actually look more natural with most of my arctic Cobras than the V1‘s do. I’m not too big on making new sub-divisions within my standard Cobra ranks, but it is interesting that their colors match almost perfectly with the 1998 Cobra Polar Force set, so maybe the Ghost Squad is a small group of elites who worked with Firefly once. Sound good to me.

In terms of quality, the figures are overall pretty great. On mine, they pose well and the joints are acceptably tight. There’s few blemishes in the paint, and no casting irregularities I could find. All three that I bought seem to have trouble holding a snowshoe on one foot, but that’s easily rectified with some acrylic gloss in the foot hole.

gi joe snow serpent the black major 2019 factory custom bootleg hasbro vintage arah

For parts, you get the full load out of classic Snow Serpent parts including the folding stock AK47, snowshoes, backpack, mortar, and parachute. I was impressed with the quality of the parachute pack in particular, which so far feels durable and works without issue. To match the colors of the figure, all of the parts come in white, which isn’t too bad. My only problem is that the mortar doesn’t stand out very well like this, but there’s plenty of alternatives for that part alone.

These are much less available then past customs, which has some collectors reasonably frustrated. Each color scheme seems to be produced in smaller numbers and some of them are priced closer to the $20 range, unless you buy early or in lots. I figure a lot of it has to do with just how niche many of these Snow Serpent color schemes come across, so the production numbers were probably lowered with lower expected demand. In most cases I’ve not been able to justify the prices for what’s come out so far. Still, it’s an excellent figure and the quality is good, so when you see a color scheme that catches your fancy, I wouldn’t wait around.

2019 TMB Snow Serpents Links:

Python Patrol Snow Serpent at Forgotten Figures

Factory Custom News Thread at ARAH Gallery

2014 TBM Night Stalkers/Female Cobra Troopers

Posted on October 7, 2019 by mwnekoman

2014 TBM Female Cobra Troopers

I almost completely forgot about the female Cobra Troopers the Black Major made until I found them in storage lately. I have mixed opinions about these figures, but I do like them a lot overall. Interestingly though, I’ve found these are probably among, or are the least popular factory customs that have been produced, which seems worthy of some commentary.

Whenever female Cobras have been announced, I’ll admit it gets my attention. Outside of Baroness, the toys have always glanced over females in Cobra, but they’ve been there in both the cartoon and the comics. So as toys they present something unique and relatively unexplored for me to collect.

However, as I found with these and the 50th female Cobra Trooper, I just don’t have much need for generic female Cobra Troopers. There are contexts where they make sense, but it’s rare I find myself in the situation to use them like that. You might notice that most of the pictures in this post are pretty old, which is partly because I couldn’t come up with any ideas for new pics besides simple ones of them standing around. Which is a problem I have with the concept more so than this figure, but it’s the primary reason I don’t use these more often.

The figure is constructed from the upper half of the convention Cobra Night Stalker and the lower half of Baroness. Comparatively, the convention Night Stalker used legs from the Cobra Infantry Forces. This discrepancy is subtle and improves the black one in particular, not because the parts are better, but because it makes them more interesting as something different than what it’s based on. It’s a variation of the older figure, but not something that invalidates it.

The biggest issue that most had with this particular run that I have found is the quality. For the most part I found my figures to be about on par with the original TBM Cobra Troopers, with the occasional loose joint or something like that. The paint was good on all of mine and I didn’t get any with casting defects, so that’s enough for me. In certain cases it was hard for them to use their parts, but that’s an issue with the parts being mediocre more so than the figure itself.

For parts, you get a helmet, a Spas-12, and a riot shield from the POC Shock Trooper. It’s a pretty weird allotment of parts, though not bad perse. The weakest link is by far the shotgun, which seems poorly suited to the figure. It’s very large and doesn’t really look proportionate with the figure, plus she has a very hard time holding it. The riot shield is a real treat and as probably the best part from the ridiculously hard to obtain Shock Trooper, getting it in bulk was very nice. The helmet is nice, but unfortunately sits on the figure’s head only by balancing it. The best you can do to get the helmet to stay on is to use something like Blu Tack.

These haven’t appreciated much in value, which makes sense since they were very atypical and not very popular. Typically these go for $10 to $15 depending on the color scheme, and less than that for a few like the yellow ones. The truth is, if you want something different this figure is very much worth having. If you can get past that the parts are mediocre, and the quality is beneath the typical TBM customs, they’re a decent take on the idea of female Cobra Troopers.