Wow, just got my first PoC figure, Low Light... I wasn't really going to get much from the line as most of the characters are ones I already have in 25th Anniversary form, but this guy might just have changed my mind. The figure looks like the original Low-Light, but without the comedy oversized head and with extra joints.
But the best bit is the kit - sniper rifle with removable silencer, scope, stock and a case! A little box of open bullets! A little radio! A little spy scope! A little mobile phone! A moveable pair of goggles that fit snugly on his head in either position! A BACKPACK THAT OPENS UP AND FITS MOST OF THE BITS IN!!!!
I mean, God's balls. Okay, so his jacket means he can't get the scope to his eye, but aside from that... I'm seriously tempted to round up the rest of the range just for the accessories... Plus the modernised Spirit really does look good.
Okay, first new Joes I really want for a while (apart from Dial-Tone, who's stupidly expensive...) have arrived - Lifeline and Airtight. I've completely lost track of what the line's called, so I'm just going to call it the 25th Anniversary line seeing as that's blatantly what these two are meant to go with.
General notes: They've actually somehow managed to get extra joints on these guys - the wrists don't just rotate now, they pivot up and down. If you see any of this current wave anywhere cheap it's worth picking one up just for the technical marvel of the basic mould. Also, Hasbro seem to have belatedly realised they can stick whatever trademark-dodging name they like on the packaging (officially these guys are 'Edwin "Lifeline" Steen' and 'Kurt "Airtight" Schnurr') and only bung the character's actual codename on the black plinths. Too late to win the battle against ProTech, but still, they got there in the end.
Lifeline: Absolutely spot-on with his red/white rescue uniform, with all the original puches and stuff - though now his knife and pistol are removable, and he's got a sort of hypodermic pistol in is breast pouch as well. Presumably as a concession to sell the thing to kids, he also comes with a pretty mean-looking assault rifle. And his first aid kit is so darling, with a litle oxygen tube & mask, plus a saline drip and a pair of debrilators.
He comes with a moderately pathetic stretcher too, sadly seemingly instead of the original's big boxy backpack, but I guess the nippers have got to have a medic with a stretcher without trawling ebay for Doc.
Airtight: Even better. I feared the worse when I belatedly read the word "Renegades", and feared it would be some twatty Cartoon Network Samurai Jack piece of shit. However, judging by the package art if Airtight has been sucked into that terrible slice of bad jokes and racial stereotypes (Tunnel Rat rikey flied lice!) at least he got to look good. And the figure looks even better - it IS Airtight '85.
The only slight, slight fault is he doesn't have the tubes connecting his backpack to his helmet, but that's it. He even has the same rubber tube connecting his chemical-type rifle to the backpack; it might even be exactly the same rifle. And in a major, major, major squee moment for me he has exactly the same shotgun I give my old one for when he and Barbecue need to stop ****ing around with fires and chemicals and just hand out some mother-banging gunishment (i.e. all the time). And he also comes with an alternate oxygen tube backpack and a handheld detector of some kid.
I've pre-ordered Zandar and Mercer too. In the balance with Law & Order - while it looks like Isenberg and his gang of twats haven't given him a pair of maracas and a poncho or an overbite or anything retarded, his colours are pretty sensible compared to the red tee/blue flak jacket combo.
After that, I just need decent versions of the Oktober Guard, Footloose, Frostbite, Interrogator, Cover Girl (they do ****ing Sparta but not Cover Girl? C'mon!) and a version of Dial-Tone that doesn't cost a hundred quid and I'll be happy. I'm half-hoping we get a workable variant of Jinx from Retaliation (plus, of course, Bruce Willis), but I do kind-of like the way she's a midget.
I just hope Hasbro fork out enough for his likeness. I'm actually quite psyched about Retaliation - it looks like it should be the stupid romp the first one wasn't. I mean, The Rock wandering around with what looks very much like an air-cooled Browning; Flint and Jaye; actual Cobra (and Cobra banners over the White House!); zero Wayans, Cakebastard and Baroness...
It looks like they actually wanted to make a GI Joe movie this time rather than a generic action film which needed Hasbro backing to get funded and was rewritten to vaguely include GI Joe. While it won't be onscreen, the implication of the trailer is that the shite versions of Ripcord, Scarlett and Breaker all die like bitches, and I'm cool with that. Very cool.
I probably don't have much to add to this thread and will probably be laughed at, but I liked the big silly G.I. Joe film. The slightly in the future setting worked for me and explained a lot of the gadgetry that the toyline seems to have (I know nothing of G I Joe before I am flamed, having only owned the Rattler, Dragonfly Copter and a Snow Serpent as a child). Just a shame about the Eiffel Tower thing which some humourless exec clearly took from Team America. I think that made me laugh more than it did in TA.
Anyway, I picked up some of the tie-in ROC figures (they were looking sad and unloved on clearance at TRU) aside from the stupid kid frinedly missile launchers (unnecessary and soon to meet the all consuming bin), they are all really cool. I got Snake Eyes (don't like the mouth - whats that all about?), An Elite Viper - pretty cool although he looks like he has a baking tray stuck to his chest, Agent Helix (nice figure but crap guns) and bestest of all Paris Pursuit Baroness which is a gorgeous figure with a great sculpt. I also got some dude on a maroon buggy thing whose name escapes me, but he is also a good little figure. I also like the beautiful painted character art. Its awesome. Hasbro should do a book of this stuff, its glorious!
I hated the film for myriad reasons I won't go into.
The figures were excellent in their own right, but for me were rendered largely irrelevant by Hasbro's 25th Anniversary line, which is basically Classics done properly (though obviously it's an easier proposition for GI Joe); the original guys in original gear redone with the same level of articulation and features as the movie toys. So while the Movie Baroness is pretty good, she doesn't have much on the updated 'classic' version (well, one of them anyway - another advantage the Joe line has is characters are cheap and easy to redesign and update, meaning there have been multiple updates of many - whereas with Transformers you're only really going to get one shot at an updated Perceptor, and now they've screwed it up you're stuck with it).
I quite like Helix's strange guns. She's very Sidney Bristow with her crazy weaponry, fetish suit and highlights.
And yeh, they gave Snake Eyes a mouth because in the film he's not speaking just to be a dick, rather than because he's deformed and mute (which was the original comic's explanation; IIRC in the cartoon it was just that he was mute and they didn't delve much further).
The Retro vehicles with updated weapons and paint jobs was (while not original by any stretch) still cool to see. Having owned them in various forms in my youth I wasn't overly driven to purchase them. Granted the Snowmobile and the mole pod were new additions, and the Snowmobile was vastly more retro/normal looking G.I.JOE vehicle then the mole pod was.
The mole pod... troop builders would enjoy them, like a horde of trouble bubbles. But the vehicle itself is pretty Which is why they added the chrome me thinks. I grabbed it for the Crocmaster repaint when it was on clearance. I can't explain my fondness for Crocmaster, maybe because he's a bit more "super-natural" then your average JOE/COBRA trooper.
New movie looks appealing, but BRUCE WILLIS is !
Get "The most interesting man in the world" from Dos Equis commercial and give him "KUNG FU GRIP"
Skyquake87 wrote:I probably don't have much to add to this thread and will probably be laughed at, but I liked the big silly G.I. Joe film.
You are not alone. To be honest, the fact they're promoting the sequel based on it having tow "Big" action movie names in it suggests Paramount isn't really convinced the Joe name isn't enough to sell it. If the final film doesn't boil down to "Oh no! Almost all of GI Joe has been killed except the Rock and some hot woman. The Rock and Bruce Willis team up and shoot lots of things whilst quiping before bitch slapping theblokefromtheBondfilm and raising the Stars and Stripes over the White House. With a tokenistic Snake Syes/Storm Shadow plot to try and convince fans this isn't just Die Hard 5 by any other name" I'll be surprised.
The problem is Joe's pretty big in the States, but not really anywhere else (and TBH probably suffers negatively due to the way a lot of other countries just aren't that crazy about America of late), which means any big budget film's going to have some pretty strange choices made in order to appeal to as many people as possible. Last time we had the hilarious attempts to make the cast multi-national (though really only the Americans did much) and to tick as many generic action shite boxes as possible (the moronic, badly realised suit chase). Big-budget film just isn't the medium for the thing because they have to come up with such crazy reasons to avoid it being a war film.
This one it's a couple of established big hitters - much better than Dude, That Shit Is Whack guy and the painful experience of watching Chris Eccleston's accent changing with the volume of his voice.
As for the plot, yes, it looks incredibly predictable, but then the first one wasn't The Usual Suspects or anything, was it? Most of the 'twists' came from colossal stupidity like Cobra Commander and Destro getting a big sequel-hunting exit, then captured eight seconds later. It had a lead female villain with colour-coded hair.
The first one was a moronic film - some people like it for that, some people hate it for that, but to claim it's anything other than one of the stupidest major studio films ever made is wrong.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not pretending the first one is something it wasn't, I just think anyone who isn't expecting the sequel to be just more of the same but with slightly more famous leads is going to be disapointed. Especially as the big problem with the original I think we can all agree on-a certain low budget feeling- is likely to be much worse with name saleries eating up more of the cash.
I dunno, early signs are that this one has a plot rather than a random grab-bag of set-pieces which couldn't be shoe-horned into any of the Mummy films. It's also a good sign to me that both Rock and Willis can do silly tough-guy quips - therefore we're likely to have characters who make jokes from time to time rather than designated comic relief characters like the first film's Ripcord and Breaker (and it's a shame the first film salted the Earth for both of those guys, plus Destro and Scarlett).
The trailer suggests the tone is a bit more even, and with luck it'll learn some consistency - you can piece the plot together from the trailer, whereas the trailer for the first one looked like it was some crazy fan mash-up thing. Early days, of course, but I doubt Hasbro gave the franchise a rest only to do something in the same vein as the underperforming first film (most notably presumably having some hand in hiring two seasoned action film names).
Argh-cakes. Finally got fed up with my grille-face Snake-Eyes being grey, picked up the DVD set version from a seller I was getting a couple of other figures from anyway. He turns up, he's blue. Looks like it's another slice of the retard pie Takara served up for the MP Grimlock repaint - oh, the black parts were rendered blue either for visual clarity or technical limitations, let's do it in blue in plastic. Muppets.
Plus side is I got Mercer and Sci-Fi in the same package, so am mildly placated. Especially as I thought I'd only pre-ordered Mercer. He's very nicely done - love the way he's just straight-up got a Viper gun. Very cool; am now getting very tempted by Taurus and Red Dog, though neither of them look much like who they're meant to be (Red Dog is puzzlingly different; even allowing for the kit-makeup nature of multi-pack figures they could've got the shirt right). Annoyingly he's not got his tiny knife, but I'm really not sure if it wasn't there or if it's fallen out when I opened him. An hour scrabbling on the floor with a Maglite beckons...
And Sci-Fi is, well, Sci-Fi. He's a lot less nuclear waste than the original, but he's still just Flash in a really silly suit.
Zanya - if you haven't been Blaylocked you won't have heard of her; basically when DD picked up the licence again they decided Zarana might have been a bit too old to still dress like a hooker, so they invented a nu-metal daughter for Zartan to provide some T&A. She disappeared soon afterwards when everyone said they'd still do Zarana anyway. Zanya has a picture of her dad's cowl on her lovingly sculpted tits, which is brilliant. They've still not done Cover Girl.
Thrasher - looks a hell of a lot like Zanzibar, what with his pony tail, eye-patch, goatee, cutlass... Hey, wait a minute! Thankfully for my excellent supplier he's awesome enough to get duffed up by Shipwreck and gets to stay on the strength while I buy an actual Thrasher. The bastards.
Taurus - not bad; costume's good, head looks like a really pasty Panthro (no, seriously). No big sword, though, or circus batons I do like the knife sheath that attaches to the back of his belt, mind.
Red Dog - strange. Looks nothing like either the first figure (good; the original, with its' ape-like brow, was bordering on racism) or the film appearance... I like the way he looks, gigantic Fijian brawler using the Bazooka body. I just can't work out why they flipped the colours on his shirt. Comes with a rugby ball, though.
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Which is why they added the chrome me thinks. I grabbed it for the Crocmaster repaint when it was on clearance. I can't explain my fondness for Crocmaster, maybe because he's a bit more "super-natural" then your average JOE/COBRA trooper. 
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I do like the knife sheath that attaches to the back of his belt, mind.