2010 Flint (Vacation in the Shadows)
The 2010 Joecon set was an amusing and rather depressing event, which essentially only happened because The Club rick-rolled everyone with a very bad 2009 convention set. To make up for it, they pieced together one last o-ring convention set, before essentially making up some story about how all of the classic molds were destroyed, so don’t ask for them anymore. Given how crappy to Modern-styled sets were after this, I don’t think anything of value was lost by them ditching the o-rings, especially when you look at how phoned-in this convention set was. Still, there’s some things I like about it, including this weird Flint.
As the story goes, Hasbro would sometimes make requests for the convention set, and with this one, they wanted more high-profile characters featured in the set. Because of that, you ended up with a random Flint and Interrogator in a Action Force themed set. At the time (and maybe to this day) the random Flint wasn’t very popular, probably because the design has no particular inspiration as far as I know. Still, I kind of like it for that oddness, and also holding a spot as one of the last official o-ring figures we’ve gotten to date.
He’s mostly made from the body of ‘93 Duke, with the head from ‘85 Flint. Given that this Duke had almost no repaints, it was nice to see the sculpt make a return with a little more painted detail. The Flint head is one of the best vintage sculpts, so it looks good with the newer Duke body. All in all, the recipe makes for a decently satisfying repaint.
His colors are kind of… odd. Overall it’s a reasonable looking military uniform, but it doesn’t match with almost anything made before it. I appreciate this in a way, because it does mean the figure is relatively unique and stands out where you chose to show him. The flip-side of this appeal however, is that it means he really doesn’t fit in much with anything already in your collection. I don’t mind that too much though, as Joes (unlike Cobras) aren’t hurt too badly by a relative lack of cohesion.
His parts are lackluster, and seemed to just be a toss-in. Included was a forest-green backpack from ‘91 Dusty, and gray versions of ‘87 Outback’s gun, and the shotgun from one of the later 25th Anniversary Flints. The Dusty backpack was long over exposed from continual reuses during the 2000‘s, and the guns do little to excite. It’s kind of incredible how often we saw the Outback gun at this point, especially since it wasn’t a very good part to begin with.
For a while, you could get surplus Flint figures from China, sans parts. These were likely defects of some sort, but it was nice for meaning you could get a recent convention figure at a relatively cheap price (it’s what I did). Had it not been for that, I’d have probably never bothered with what otherwise comes across as a mundane repaint at convention pricing. I really miss those weird listings for cheap surplus figures.
Last time one of these Flint’s showed up on eBay, it was a NIB example and sold for $78. Sort of pointless to bring that up, as I feel this figure is obviously not worth that much, and that auction was likely just another example of the on-going market bubble. Figures like this one are getting harder to find though, and later Joecon sets were (supposedly) made in fewer numbers than earlier ones. Regardless, this figure is a novelty in all regards, and I have a difficult time understanding the satisfaction anyone would derive for paying prices like that for a figure like this.
The Viper Pit 