It didn’t take long for G.I. Joe to get a full fledged cowboy in its ranks. Wild Bill made his debut in 1983, piloting the Dragonfly helicopter while outshooting every hombre that crossed his path.
Before I get into Wild Bill, let’s take a brief minute to appreciate how cool the Dragonfly helicopter was. It was a flying, rampaging engine of destruction with machine guns and missiles and this overall look of complete and total militaristic badassery. It didn’t hurt that a year later both Blue Thunder and Airwolf would hit tv screens and ramp up the cool factor of helicopters exponentially.
Plus you could make the rotors rotate without swatting at them like a troglodytic rotorswatter. Push a button and they seemed to spin on their own. Just don’t hit yourself in the face with them when they were spinning at full boogie. Not that I ever did anything so stupid. And certainly not twice.
But back to Wild Bill. Wild Bill was duded up in military western regalia meaning he wore a lot of green like his comrades-in-arms, but he also had a vest and cowboy boots. This was a guy who dreamed of Deadwood and Tombstone and was probably a little disappoined when he woke up in barracks and not in a splintery hotel surrounded by whores. However, having an actual shower probably offsets it.
The Dragonfly was, if I remember correctly, the second vehicle I got after the HISS tank, so it played perfectly with those helicopter vs tank battles that make playtime so much fun. For a while, Wild Bill didn’t get much outside-the-copter playtime because he was far too busy piloting the thing. I loved the Dragonfly so much I had to get Airborne not too long after getting it because he was the co-pilot in the box art and it felt wrong having one without the other. The marketing department was not made up of dummies, you know.
After a while, Wild Bill started getting more actual figure playtime say if the bad guys shot down the Dragonfly or whatever. He came with no weapons of his own, but he had a set of six-shooters permanently molded to his leg, so those became his imaginay primary weapons. The butts were reversed due to the long hours he would have spent seated and flying, so Wild Bill relied on the Cavalry draw for his shootouts. I remember when he first showed up in the comic and had his “moment of badassery” when a Cobra trooper thought he got to the draw first and Wild Bill was all “that’ll be the day” and sent the Cobras to that snakefarm in the sky or ground or whatever.
He would show up a handful of other times and have a decent enough presence in the comic, but that shootout cemented everything you need to know about Wild Bill: he will out-John Wayne your ass faster than you can say “grits.” Which is a strange thing to say, so save it for special occasions.
Demeanor-wise, Wild Bill was much the same in the cartoon. He always seemed like he was five seconds away from a yee-haw, and then he would yee-haw, and you wonder if this is exactly the kind of sounds he makes when he’s making sweet love to a woman, or as Bill calls it, “giving her the cowpoke.” Wild Bill yee-haws her, and then he takes off his hat, swats her on the behind and tells her to make him some grits.
I would like to believe he says “you’ve got great grits” at some point during all of this, but that’s a little too personal.
Cartoon Wild Bill was far more flamboyant than his comic and action figure counterpart, opting for a color scheme of blue and yellow instead of the far more drab green color scheme. Cartoon Wild Bill was an iconoclast that didn’t want either the military or western conventions to dictate what he wore. He was also absolutely shittastic at stealth missions due to occasional outbursts of Yee-hawing. The Joes learned this after sending him on his initial stealth mission where a poorly timed Yee-haw led to the death of Firing Pin. If you’re saying “I don’t remember a Joe named Firing Pin” that’s because of Wild Bill. RIP Firing Pin, yee-hawed to death in the prime of his life.
