He’s the Joe who stomps the snakes and then hits the Pit to bake some cakes. He’s Roadblock, everybody’s favorite badass, .50-caliber-toting Joe that occasionally rhymed for some strange reason. At least, cartoon Roadblock rhymed. Comic book Roadblock was a bit more dignified in his speech pattern.
It’s hard to say “one of my favorite Joes” when I have strong feelings about quite a lot of them. It’s essentially a situation where “the one I’m currently thinking about” ends up being one of my favorite. But Roadblock is one of my favorites. I think it was the gun. His gun, an M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun, is huge. I’ve always been a fan of the large, almost comedically exaggerated guns that actually exist in real life yet look so great in various media. Who among us wasn’t awed when Blain pulled out that minigun in Predator? The ’80s were all about big guns and testosterone, and G.I. Joe immortalized both in plastic nonstop.
Roadblock managed to accrue a decent amount of screen time in the Joe cartoon, and got a lot of pageplay in the comic. In his first appearance in the Joe comic, he appeared at a funeral to take down a Cobra Rattler. Why was he bringing a .50 caliber machine gun to a funeral? I think the better question is “why wouldn’t he?” That was the issue where both Roadblock and Duke debuted, and while everybody was impressed with Roadblock’s gigantic gun, he was quick to point out Duke was the bigger badass of the two.
That’s Roadblock: humble to a fault.
In the animated G.I. Joe: the Movie, which I love without a trace of irony, Roadblock was blinded by spores by Cobra-La and ended up carting around a rapidly dehumanized Cobra Commander, who sibilantly hissed “wassss a mannnnn” over and over. If that’s not the portrait of heroism I don’t know what is.
Roadblock’s first figure debuted in the 1984 lineup, and then he received a change of wardrobe in 1986. I never bought his second figure, because it felt wrong “replacing” the first figure. It was such an iconic look to me that I couldn’t bring myself to care about an updated version. I had played with that first figure for two years. For me, he was defined by that camouflaged tank-top. I thought it looked better. I thought it looked badassier. It was Roadblock to me, in a way that couldn’t be replaced. In hindsight, it was probably a stupid line in the sand, because I bought the new costumes for other characters, and while I still lean towards his original camo-shirt look, I have no qualms with his second figure at all.
He would get a Tiger Force update to his original uniform, but I skipped that one too. I did have a couple of the Tiger Force figures — mostly Tiger Force versions of figures I missed on their first release, like Lifeline and Dusty — so I regret never putting the full team together. Plenty of Roadblocks were made in the ’90s and later, but I was out of Joes in the same way they were out of ideas by then.
As someone who was always drawn to the stronger guys on the team, Roadblock appealed to me on that level as well. He always managed to get trapped, alone, surrounded by a small army of Cobra troops, and could punch and bash his way out of danger. His figure wasn’t demonstrably larger than any other figure in the line, certainly not in the way that his comic and cartoon appearances would make it seem, but in my head the figure I was playing with managed to be a little taller, a little broader, a little stronger-looking. Hell, I was convinced for a while that if I bent his arm I could see his bicep flex.
Maybe in hindsight we should have had the house checked for radon …
Weird side-note time. Roadblock, like a lot of other Joes, came with a helmet. I think I may have put his helmet on him once, when I first got the figure, just to see what he looked like with it on. After that though, much like in the cartoon and the comic, I never bothered putting it on again. Roadblock with a helmet might look a little safer, but it never looked “right.”
Or as Roadblock might put it “I’d rather be dead than cover up my head.”
Wait … that’s not a healthy message to be sending at all …
