Featured Images from ARAH Gallery (October 1st, 2021)

Posted on October 2, 2021 by mwnekoman

This week’s images from my personal forum, ARAH Gallery, are from Amazing A-man and Scarrviper. Thanks for sharing them!

Dockside Deals – Scarrviper

This image really shows how much potential is in the Headhunters, especially Gristle. It’s a treat to see such a great scene with Headhunter Stormtroopers, now that those figures have gotten so expensive. Also, I need one of those forklifts!

Still Haven’t Got the BET – A-man

Using a Captain Power vehicle as the BET from GI Joe the Movie is not only a fun idea, but also something very nostalgic feeling. Repurposing oddball toys as things I was more interested in was a staple of my playtimes growing up. It’s also nice seeing more photos of V1 Serpentor before they all disintegrate.

If you enjoy fantastic images like these, make sure to join ARAH Gallery. Also, check out some more great images that were featured on the blog last week.

1993 Gristle

Posted on September 14, 2021 by mwnekoman

1993 Gristle

I’ve spoken before of how I’m a big fan of the Headhunters, so it probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I like Gristle a lot. Overall he’s kind of a mediocre figure, but he has enough of a role, and presents enough quality that I’ve always found him to be useful. Given that I also don’t like the 1993 lineup much as a whole, he stands out to me as probably one of the best releases from that year.

The Headhunters are a small group, so they don’t have much in the way of named agents. In fact, Gristle is literally the only unique Headhunter besides Headman, who’s the group’s requisite leader. This alone makes him fairly important in my collection, and overall I’d rate him as actually being a bit more useful than Headman. Headman’s a background character, possibly more so than Cobra Commander; going out and getting directly into danger wouldn’t make much sense for him. Meanwhile, Gristle acts as the field-commander for the Headhunters, and would probably be often found in the middle of crack alleys that the Headhunters have turned into war zones.

Technically, Gristle is a Cobra, because the DEF line was canceled and his sculpt was shuffled off to the ‘93 Battle Corps line-up. I don’t think of him this way very much, as I prefer to think of the Headhunters as a separate and distinct threat from Cobra, though, one that might intermingle with them and their related organizations. Mind you, the whole War on Drugs angle of the DEF line was probably one of the most propagandistic moments for the brand, so it really wasn’t a travesty that they moved away from that. Still, I prefer having a diverse selection of bad-guys/terror groups to making Cobra any more bloated than it already was by ‘93.

Gristle has a pretty nice sculpt. While I like late-line 90‘s figures, I typically associate them with busy designs that often overcompensate on things like grenades. Gristle, for the most part, only wears a detailed bike-suit with nothing on it that looks too absurd. His head’s a little cheesy with that pony-tail, but I like it. It gives him some personality that he certainly needs. There’s also a really nicely sculpted skull-buckle on his waist, which is sharp and nicely done compared to other attempts at a similar detail.

The colors could be a weak spot on Gristle, despite the nice sculpt. I’ve personally gotten to where I care a lot less about fluorescent colors than I used to, though this particular combination of burgundy with green-yellow strikes me as being very ugly, besides being very neon. For a longtime, I really wanted to get the darker colored Joecon repaint of this figure, but I always prioritized different things over a drab repaint of a figure I already like, so I never ended up with one.

His parts are okay. Like most of his contemporaries, he comes with nothing unique, and instead a generic runner of parts also seen with the Headhunter Stormtrooper and the Star Brigade Astro Viper. That includes a Rock Viper PSG1 rifle, ‘92 Destro’s pistol, and a Shockwave knife, all rendered in a dark red color that matches the figure. As well, he also included a yellow missile launcher, missiles, and a figure stand. These are decent guns, so he’s not much worse off for including them, but generic parts always hurt the appeal of a figure, if only by a bit.

Like with many figures these days, the prices of ‘93 Gristles can be random. Still, you can occasionally get one complete for about $10, and even carded for $20 if you look for long enough. I don’t think Gristle has ever been very popular, and 1993 figures tend to be common too, so that’s likely why his price has remained low.

1993 Gristle Links:

Forgotten Figures

Half the Battle

Joe a Day

1993 Headhunter

Posted on May 5, 2020 by mwnekoman

1993 Headhunter

An odd phenomena from the end of ARAH was Hasbro’s penchant for slight repaint color variations. Not really new figures, but re-releases with small changes, like different parts and usually a swapped color on a single paint application. Most of the time these weren’t very great recolors, and that’s really the case with this Headhunter. But, it’s a gaudy drug-dealer who wears fluorescent green gloves, so I like him anyway.

I never really wanted this figure when I first got back into vintage collecting, mainly because I saw him as a downgrade to a figure I already had. Why buy fluorescent green Headhunters when you can just army-build the more reasonable looking brown ones? At least, that was what I thought, but I really like the Headhunters faction, so at a certain point I was curious enough just to try one to further expand that group in my collection.

The truth is, it’s a cool and totally reasonable repaint. Generally speaking, the figure is exactly the same as the Headhunter who came out a year prior, it just swaps the brown paint for green. It’s not really any less realistic, and in some ways it adds charm to the figure, turning the Headhunter into a bit more of a showy, gaudy cartel member.

Though, beyond changing one color, the figure really is just the same thing as the standard Headhunter. So, anything else you might think about that mold still applies here, and there’s really no reason to like this figure if you don’t already like the V1 Headhunter. In my collection, this figure is useful for adding some variety to my Headhunter ranks, which is of course acting as an accessory to the original.

The parts make this figure better than the original release, arguably. The dumbest thing about the DEF line was the light-up missile launchers that pushed the price of them up by an absurd amount. This figure has virtually the same parts, just without the light-up gimmick in the launcher. You still get the extremely cool shotgun and backpack that holsters the shotgun, which is the main draw of the figure’s parts. At a time when Hasbro’s creativity was waning, it was nice to see parts that interacted like this.

These are harder to find, and the prices are pretty badly inconsistent on them.Used to, they were very cheap figures, but now they range from $15 all the way up to $30. Amusingly, they even out price a couple of convention Headhunters, which probably exist in far fewer numbers than this figure does. I like this figure, but I’ve gotta say I really don’t understand why it now commends more money than many other rarer and more delicate Headhunter items, including Headman, the Headhunter Stormtrooper, and normal Headhunters. I guess that’s just GI Joe collecting in 2020.

Headhunters Headman Gristle Gi joe Arah hasbro vintage action figure

1993 Headhunter Links:

Yo Joe

Headhunters by Scarrviper

2002 Headman

Posted on January 14, 2018 by mwnekoman

Although nothing seems more repetitive than 80‘s and 90‘s anti-drug messages, the DEF and Headhunters were some pretty cool toys to come from the era. They’re a bit corny, but also a real world topic that’s interesting to inject into a military toy line. In the 2000‘s however, anti-drug messages in children’s shows and product largely went away and even seemed to take somewhat more of a taboo status. So when Hasbro brought Headman back in the GI Joe vs. Cobra line, he was somewhat of a departure from his prior form to say the least.

The original Headman was a sweet figure. The black pin-stripped suit was a great look for a drug dealer, among other features I found that made the figure charming.There was little to do in the way of improving the original, and sadly the ‘02 Headman could be seen as quite the down grade. Now he wears a solid orange suit that looks quite a lot like The Mask, which I’d be a little insulted to know if that was really the inspiration for this figure.

There’s nothing much to say about the figure other than that. He’s Headman, but in orange. In all fairness I think certain details of the sculpt are a little easier to see in this color than in black, but that doesn’t really justify the poor color choice here. Oddly, his hair color has been changed to black as well, a design choice I still don’t quite understand.

HEADMAN started out robbing convenience stores, then learned the ropes of high-end thievery while serving time in prison. A hardened criminal, HEADMAN doesn’t think twice about removing anyone who gets in the way of his plans. He steals anything for the right price—government secrets, weapon system specifications, and priceless art treasures. His thefts have undermined the safety of countries and satisfied greedy private art collectors at the expense of museums around the world. He has managed to escape GENERAL TOMAHAWK time and again, but the relentless G.I. JOE commander has caused him to abandon some plans, losing money. He wants to remove the threatening general from his trail, once and for all.
“I am a master of crime who can steal anything, and never get caught.”

-Headman’s Filecard

The filecard’s from this era tend to be pretty worthless, and Headman’s is no exception. Interestingly, they’ve completely overhauled his character in this one. No longer is he a drug dealer and the leader of the Headhunters, but instead a robber and expert thief. The portrayal seems especially childish and simple, and even steps on the toes of a few other Cobras who already fill similar roles (Firefly and Zartan). Again, I suppose at this point drugs were a topic they simply preferred to avoid, but they could’ve found a more appropriate role for the Headman than one as blase as this.

They also really phoned in the accessories on this figure. Instead of his highly interesting G11 riffle, he now includes the grenade launcher and knife from the V1 Range Viper, as well as the pistol from ‘91 Dusty (the one they would eventually include with different figures more than twenty times.). What gets me about these accessories isn’t that they’re horribly generic, but that absolutely no thought was put into them for the character. A big, noisy grenade launcher for a guy who’s supposed to be a thief now?

Despite all of this, I like using this figure every now and then just because no one else really does that much. I’m also a big Headhunters fan, so he has appeal to me for that alone. But this isn’t a good figure and his value sixteen years later reflects that. Complete figures can be had for around $5, but if you look around, the sealed set with General Hawk (Tomahawk) can be had for almost as much.