Big guns, big explosions, cool catchphrases and a cool vehicle. The preceding was a list of things that, when you were a wee little kid in the ’80s, television was all about. Whether it was Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Street Hawk or Knight Rider, the screens were overflowing with action-packed hour-long shows. But none of them did it like the A-Team. And that was why it wasn’t called B-Team.
The A-team ran for 5 seasons, but they were all the same season, and they were pretty much all the same show, so it was essentially 98 episodes of the same show. And for a small moment in time, it was glorious. It was one of the only shows I was guaranteed to see the gun my latest G.I. Joe came with used. Machine guns, bazookas, stuff blowing up constantly, great theme song…yeah, you get the point. It’s been called a live-action cartoon, and that’s pretty much exactly right. But you know what it has never had ? That’s right; official, super-articulated, quality action figures of the original guys.
The A-team consisted of four members: John “Hannibal” Smith, Bosco Albert “B.A” Baracus, Templeton “Faceman” Peck and H.M. “Howling’ Mad” Murdock. The A-team fought pretty much everybody, everywhere. Four characters, and a gaping hole in the action figure world.
Now, that’s not to say it hasn’t had action figures in the past. Galoob did the best they could do, pumping out the team in both five inch and 3 ¾ inch scale. I actually have a set of the Joe-scaled ones, and they’re esentially G.I. Joe figures without the swivel arm feature, so there was a limitation. Plus, they weren’t exactly dressed the way they were on screen. But imagination caulked up the limitations and they were fun for a while, being just the right size to go head to head with Joes and Cobras.
But that was then.
I think it was NECA’s Clubber Lang figure that first made me realize that not having an updated A-Team collection was a tragedy. I’ve still got plans to customize my own B.A. figure, but I can tend to be lazy and an official set of the four guys would save me a ton of trouble. I haven’t seen an episode since it aired, and I’m pretty sure I lost interest before the entire 5 seasons ended, but none of that matters, because think of how many awesome guns this set could come with. Each figure could come in a box and the empty space in the box could be filled with weapons of all kinds. And if they sold well, maybe we could get an in-scale A-Team van.
I know, right?
NECA would be ideal to do a set of figures like this, but maybe they didn’t have to be the only team to take a whack at them. Maybe Hasbro could try. Marvel Legends A-Team figures for SDCC!
Ok, there’s probably one or two things wrong with that idea, least of which everyone would kill me if that were to come true. Maybe we should stick to NECA. By the way, I am the proud owner of all three issues of that series. And no, it wasn’t a limited series, it was just cancelled, with absolutely no warning. I have no idea why. It sits in my box of cancelled Marvel series with Questprobe.
Man, I have a lot of comics.
Anyway…
If the toys were put out with the quality of NECA’s latest offerings, I’d finally get to realize that dream I’ve had since I wrote this very sentence of teaming up Rambo, Dutch and the A-team to fight Predator Alien ’89 Batman and such. B.A. Versus B…A…tman? Is there anything in the world that could be more awesome? I’m sure if you give it some time you may think of something…like Sexy Samurai Nuns from Hell or something. But that’s too complicated. Better to keep it simple, and there is nothing more simple than the A-Team. If someone wants to make fully articulated modern figures of those four guys, they could be the Greatest Toys Never made.
