Monthly Archives: February 2022

1993 Gung-Ho (Mega Marines)

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1993 Gung-Ho (Mega Marines)

The Mega Marines are a vexing subgoup within what was offered in the 90‘s GI Joe line. Given the fact they were dropped faster than both DEF and certainly Sonic Fighters, I’ll go ahead and assume they probably weren’t a hit, even when they were released. Still, taken for what they are, they’re a cool little group of figures, and I’d go as far as to say this is one of my favorite Gung-Ho figures.

It took me a long time to come around on the Mega Marines, and to be frank, probably too long. For most of my time collecting I’ve had a disdain for silly things and neon colors, both of which the Mega Marines are, heavily. Beyond that, it’s basically an un-licensed crossover with Aliens, and that too, didn’t really appeal to me. They come across as being somewhere in-between Star Brigade and Battle Corps in such a way that it doesn’t really feel like they have a strong niche or identity.

Despite that, this Gung-Ho looks pretty nice. There’s a lot of fluorescent yellow on his armor, but also features some nice dark greens and blacks on the base plastic underneath. If I’m not mistaken, I believe this was Hasbro’s first usage of marbled plastic, which gives the figures a somewhat interesting look. Does anyone know why there’s a sculpted number on every Mega Marine? Gung-Ho’s number 1, while Blast-Off, Clutch and Mirage are number 2, 3, and 4 respectively. It’s sort of distracting.

Oddly, this figure comes across to me as the most combat-ready looking Gung-Ho ever made. He’s packing body armor from head to toe and looks like he could take a few hits. At the same time, he doesn’t look very much like Gung-Ho, but I really don’t mind that, since I was never a big fan of Gung-Ho anyways. The futuristic look is a little hammy, though it fits nicely with the overall esthetic that was being built in ‘93 and ‘94.

The accessories for the Mega Marines are where things got a little more interesting. Included is the same shotgun, MP5K, laser rifle and machete runner seen with several other figures (Duke, Frostbite, Stalker, Ozone, ect) cast in black. Nice parts for filling your armory. He has a unique orange helmet; it’s sorta goofy looking. You also get the standard missile-launcher, missiles and a figure stand, in addition to another gimmick part: moldable bio-armor.

Moldable bio-armor was the core gimmick introduced with the Mega Marines. Included with each figure was a tub of play-doh, and a mold that fit around the figure’s chest and included missiles. While playing, you could tear and damage the figure’s armor, and when you’re done, tear it off and cast it again later. Part of me wants to say it seems kind of cool, but I also realize this really was just a lame and inexpensive way for Hasbro to bloat the price of this assortment. It’s slightly creative, but I won’t give it a pass on that alone. Also, good luck standing a figure up with a heavy-ass mound of play-doh on his chest: that’s too much even with a figure stand!

Dealers will sell complete figures, sometimes with the play-doh, for around $35. At auction though, figures will often go for around $20, though, it’s not so often you see these in a truly complete state. With that said, I think it’s safe to say the Mega Marines are least desirable figures to have complete. There’s really no point in buying the crunchy old play-doh tub, which like wise, renders the included mold useless too. Also, while his guns are nice, they’re also terribly generic. Meaning, the only thing you really need for this guy is his helmet. Pretty astounding, since not too many GI Joes come with parts that irrelevant to the figure.

1993 Gung-Ho (Mega Marines) Links:

Half the Battle

Joe A Day

3D Joes

1993 Dr Mindbender

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1993 Dr Mindbender

Dr Mindbender amounts to Cobra’s resident mad scientist, and is one of the original crazy Cobra’s before 1987 came along and saturated the line with rejected Spider-man villains. For most of my life, I’ve preferred villains who were drab, boring and mostly devoid of personality, like Scrap Iron, but Mindbender’s different. I’ve always loved the character, and he’s been a central figure among my Cobras almost as much as Destro and Cobra Commander.

For a long time, this was my only Dr Mindbender. I say “mine” but it was another figure that was really my brother’s, I was just allowed to look at it any time I wanted, since as a kid and an adult, I never break stuff. A nice thing about Mindbender, is that he’s a distinct looking character who fills a somewhat obvious role, so even without access to his file card, it was easy to know who he was and what he did. I think there was a big focus on him too, since Cobra robots and Cobra’s monster Blanka, were a major focus of my childhood battles.

As was the trend in 1993, half of Mindbender is reused from an older figure, in this case, the ‘86 Viper. They released this mold in Brazil a few years later, where it was lost, hence why you never again got a whole Viper repaint. Putting that bit of trivia aside, it blends in alright, and the upper half of the figure’s sculpting looks fantastic. One thing I’ve never liked about V1 Dr Mindbender, is that the figure has one of those stereotypical oversized heads from his year, compared to this one, which is cool, tightly sculpted, and proportionate. Besides being slathered in nonsense-tech crap, it’s also nice that the figure looks pretty normal, and doesn’t have grenades popping out of every orifice of his body.

His colors are hideously bright, though I’ve never really minded that, even if I’ve been sensitive to it at times. In fact, I’d go as far to say these colors look pretty good, mixing that dark purple with a vibrant yellow. A few details are black, which balances things out, and the recycled Viper legs do well to tie him back to an existing Cobra uniform. The only thing that’s almost too ugly is the excessive use of yellow on his chest. You lose a lot of the sculpt’s detail in all of that.

His parts! His parts are so awful and wonderful at the same time. It’s an odd runner that as far as I know, was only shared with Lobotomaxx. Included is Dee-Jay’s gun, Voltar’s gun, ‘91 Sci-fi’s gun, ‘89 Snake Eye’s gun, an Iron Grenadier pistol, and the Hydro Viper’s knife, besides the obligatory launcher, missile and figure-stand that this blog usually doesn’t acknowledge. Six normal weapons is actually a bit extra compared to most figures from the time. Obviously, these parts aren’t very good, but I find them to be a guilty pleasure. As a kid, I generally equipped most figures with Voltar guns, though generally, most of these parts wound up getting used by a wide variety of figures. The knife especially became Armor Tech Destro’s trademark weapon, the lightning knife, which he could charge with high-voltage electricity from his fist. Also, I just like giving him Dee-Jay’s awful gun because I’m low-key tasteless.

1993 Dr Mindbender’s are very cheap, running around $9 for a fully complete figure with file card. It’s not too surprising when 1986 Mindbender’s are pretty cheap as well, though it’s still odd given the popularity of the character. If you like 90‘s neon, this is a fun version with a good sculpt. He has most of the problem’s you’ll find with any ‘93 or ‘94 figure, but he’s also the only alternative Mindbender figure, and he’s nice for that reason alone.

gi joe vintage action figure diorama battle corps hasbro cobragi joe vintage action figure diorama battle corps hasbro cobra

1993 Dr Mindbender Links:

Forgotten Figures

Joe A Day

Half the Battle

3D Joes

2011 Canceled Jurassic Park Mercenary GI Joe

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2011 Canceled Jurassic Park Mercenary GI Joe

Little secret: I actually still like 25th Anniversary style sculpts. Not more than vintage, but many of the post-’09 sculpts are nice enough, and fun to pose and fiddle around with. You don’t see them here very often though, because A: Most of those toys aren’t very interesting and B: None of my readers really want to see them all that badly. Still, I think it’s worth documenting an interesting unreleased toy, and a toy that represents another example of Hasbro using GI Joe molds to represent whatever other brand.

Sometime a little after 2010, an ample supply of mysterious, canceled Jurassic Park figures made from recent GI Joe sculpts showed up on eBay. As I recall it, it wasn’t even known for a while that some of these figures were intended for a Jurassic Park line. Most of the toys intended for this line used tooling from the GI Joe Resolute figures, with the only notable exception being a guy with Zanzibar’s head, and some soldiers using Firefly’s head. Vehicles were to be sold with these figures, which included the umpteenth AWE Striker repaints, and a newly sculpted helicopter and hummer. A handful of newly sculpted dinosaurs would’ve also accompanied these figures.

Just before Hasbro lost the Jurassic Park license, some version of this line was seemingly salvaged, with two 2013 releases, although, those were a little different than the 2011 canceled figures that appeared earlier. And notably missing was this odd tattooed guy with a Duke head. For a long time you could get these cheap, just like with the Elite Ice Viper and the old stories about various other midnight-run figures from the 2000‘s. There’s never really been a name put to this figure, as far as I know, but he’s generally identified as a mercenary, so I’ll just be referring to him as Mercenary beyond this point, for the sake on convenience.

I thought the GI Joe Resolute toys were pretty nice overall, and seemed to mark the point at which the Anniversary-era moved towards sculpts that were at least mostly functional. Sadly though, the figures were plagued with some Spy-Troops tier bad proportions, typically huge heads and tiny baby-feet. Mercenary here is made from Resolute Duke’s huge head on Resolute Roadblock’s body, which oddly enough, balances out. Pretty much everything else here is just Resolute Roadblock, including the vest and his accessories.

It’s a fairly nice looking toy, with unique colors and some highly detailed tattoos over his face and arm. He’s able to pose decently with a wide range of motion in his joints, and he’s balanced nicely too, which was a rarity for figures from this period. Truth be told, I like how he looks a bit better than either of the figures he’s made from, although that’s not to say those were bad. The only real gripe I can find is that Duke’s head is kind of ugly, but it’s an otherwise fine figure.

His accessories are… not great. He comes with most of the parts seen with Resolute Roadblock which includes a vest, LMG, ammo belt, rocket(?) and a pickax. Frankly, these are some really bizarre parts. I’m not sure how he’s supposed to use the rocket. The pick axe has a massive backpack-peg on it, and it’s sort of blunt, making it look more like a hoe. The LMG is his only nice part, and it’s dumb too. It has these square-holes in the bottom of it, almost like it’s missing something (Roadblock’s is the same, so it’s not because this is a prerelease figure.). You can thread his ammo belt all the way through the gun… Which gives it unfired rounds on both sides of the feed. At the very least he can pose decently with it, but it’s a pretty nonsensical gun.

Want to know something incredible? This figure isn’t worth all that much… Someone scored one on eBay a while back for a shocking $5, and most offers trend around $40. For a toy that’s eleven years old and was never actually released at retail, that’s surprising, especially when figures that exist in countless amounts, like Funskool Tripwire, can run an easy $100. I think it says something interesting about the on-going collecting bubble, when a figure like this really has no value, but toys that were common just a few years back are holding huge premiums (low-information buyers).

2011 Canceled Jurassic Park Mercenary Links:

Jurassic Wiki

JP Toys

 

2000 Rip It

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2000 Rip It

A lot of people take issue with the original HISS Driver, mainly for being the very first obnoxiously colored Cobra. I like that figure, and think it’s red color is there for a reason; so that way he’s especially noticeable inside his tank. Rip It, is a more standard colored Cobra, and I like him too, even if I like the standard Hiss Driver better.

As a kid, I missed out on most of the ARAHC line. I had interest, but I was also interested in a lot of other things too, and a trip to TRU was something that only happened a few times per year for me. When I did go, the only figures they had were the Chameleon and Cobra Commander set, and vehicles were pretty much off limits, so the HISS III, was never really an option for me. At the same time, I don’t recall ever seeing one, so it ended up being an oddity I never discovered until I was a teenager.

There’s a contrived new character that Rip It, is meant to represent. Someone at Hasbro clearly thought that it was more marketable to turn army-builders into unique entities, as we saw this several times during the 2000‘s. A tank commander for Cobra really isn’t a bad idea, but not one like Rip It. His bio is horribly dumb, and having him look just like a normal HISS Driver, seems like something an old video game would do, when they didn’t have the budget to make a new sprite for a boss character.

But any Cobra-loving GI Joe collector can see Rip It for what he is, and that’s a solid repaint of the HISS Driver. Were it not for this release, and his subsequent (and incredibly expensive) convention repaint, there would be no other HISS Drivers to collect. You can buy the HISS tank in almost any color imaginable, but the HISS Driver was rarely recolored, and that’s a glaring omission on Hasbro’s part. There was going to be another HISS Driver, but it was cancelled,  and after that the only other recolor was the torso for one of the ugly TRU Infantry Division figures.

It’s a solid looking color scheme they used for Rip It. He’s mostly a desaturated blue, with black details (boots, chest-pad) and some red bits too (face mask, cobra symbol, gauntlets). I like it, and despite the colors having a dull tone, he looks more visually interesting than the V1 HISS Driver. Despite being a bit different looking, his blue is close enough to Cobra blue that I think he looks great with V1 Cobra Troopers. It’s an all around solid repaint, and something I’m glad happened.

I have a solitary complaint with this figure, that really doesn’t undermine any of it’s appeals, but I’ll say it anyway: He doesn’t contrast with his tank. The bright red of the V1 HISS Driver, is meant to compliment the tank, hence the clear canopy that allows you to see it all of the time. It makes the driver noticeable, and adds more red to the look of the V1 HISS, making it look consistent with other early vehicles, like the FANG, Stinger and the STUN. Rip It, does not stand out in a V1 HISS, and he especially doesn’t stand out in his similarly blue HISS III. It’s not really a big deal, but in my view, the original was red for a reason.

Rip It’s were apart of a number of desirable figures you could get cheaply from China there for a while, from around 2009 to 2012. The paint apps on these always seemed a little more suspect than retail examples, which makes me think they might have been old factory rejects that were just laying around for years. Most of the time, they were indistinguishable, so it was a nice way to army build him there for a while.

Like a lot of toys mostly owned by collectors in the 2000‘s, Rip It’s are a lot harder to find now. They tend to run around $30, and examples sold with the HISS III go for about the same amount, or sometimes a few dollars more. I don’t think that price will hold, but sadly, it’s apparent that 22 years later, Rip It’s are a lot harder to find, and are no longer a cheap alternative to the ‘83 figure. It’s a nice enough figure to be worth a premium, but honestly, $30 is simply too much, especially when Hasbro will probably just reissue him with a HISS again, now that o-rings are back in fashion.

HISS III GI JOE vintage TBM custom trooper Rip It HISS III GI JOE vintage TBM custom trooper Rip It

2000 Rip It Links:

Forgotten Figures

Joe A Day

Half the Battle