Hasbro’s G.I. Joe team was no dummy back in the ’80s. They quickly figured out kids loved ninjas, so they decided that the best course of action was to start chucking kung-fu dudes at kids like a hyperactive ninja at a shuriken convention. While this initially meant refreshing the two most popular ninja — Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow — multiple times, eventually they decided that there weren’t quite enough ninja to go around. While the comic was busy creating entire clans of ninja with Red Ninjas and the various Storm Shadow-related ninjas, like Soft Master Hard Master Blind Master Sneezy Master Dopey Master and Grumpy Master, the toy line took a while to catch up. We got a female ninja with Jinx, but we still weren’t getting the torrential downpour of ninja that a handful of years would bring. That all changed with the debut of the Ninja Force.
Ninja Force was the point when the marketing guys working on the Joe line collectively threw up their hands and decided to forgo all subtlety. Instead of sprinkling in a ninja here and a ninja there, they made an entire sub-team bursting at the seams with ninja. They created good ninja, bad ninja, ninja vehicles — for a small window of time, stuff got nuts in the Joe-land. I don’t know about any of you, but I wouldn’t know where to go to meet a ninja, much less recruit one for a covert military organization. I guess that’s why the Joes were the Joes, though. They not only managed to score one or two, but they got enough to put together a team.
Unfortunately, the introduction of so many ninja into the G.I. Joe universe managed to be too much of a good thing, and the ninjaplosion quickly ate itself in a fiery ball of pajamas and those little footie things that separate the big toe from the rest of the little piggies. But they must have been selling like cracked-out whores at a whore convention at the time because I was unable to procure a single ninja for myself, and I was a damn freak about ninja. I actually wanted to be one, except without all the dedicated training and crane kicks. Basically, I wanted to get hit by a bolt of lightning and suddenly be a ninja. Apparently that was too much to ask for, so that was a waste of a damn birthday wish.
I ran across the G.I. Joe team’s brand new fetish for ninja in the Marvel comic, when Storm Shadow gathered together the first wave of Ninja — Dojo, Nunchuck, and the incomprehensibly named “T’Jbang” — to go ninja some stuff. I dropped the comic and ran to the store immediately to buy these guys, but unfortunately as it was a 45-minute drive to the nearest toy store and I was on foot, I passed out long before I could get there, which meant some other kid bought my ninja toys. I vowed to hunt that kid down one day, and use all the ninja skills I learned reading about ninja and watching those ninja movies to kick him right in the shin.
In a way it’s probably a good thing that I never ended up with any of the members of the Ninja Force because this was when they started incorporating action features into the line. Yeah, the Joes were one of the only toy lines where I didn’t have to worry about any of that crap. Stupid ninja with your ninja moves. I blame Vanilla Ice.
Of course, there were bad-guy ninja to go along with the good-guy ninja because Cobra Commander was not about to let the Joe team have all the fun. If I was depressed about never finding the good ninja, then I was frickin’ pixilated that I could never find the bad guy ninja. Even their names were better: Slice and Dice. Yeah, like a pun or something. They looked cooler, and even better, neither of them were named “T’Jbang,” so that made them must-haves. Bah. Time heals all wounds, though.
The following year delivered even more ninja to the Joe team because those fliers really paid off. Banzai, Bushido, and T’Gin-Zu (who just joined to make T’Jbang feel better about his name) were the newest ninja to ninja force their way into the line. While that happened, Slice went from red and black to orange and black because he heard that nothing was scarier than a pumpkin that knew kung-fu. Admittedly, year two of the Ninja Force experiment didn’t quite hit the heights of the first.
So now we come to the point of all of this. IF a 6-inch Joe line is made, you know what that line needs?
Ninja box set.
Ninja box set, fool.
Imagine a sexy 6-figure assortment of these guys. Dojo, Nunchuk, T’Jbang, and Ninja Force-era Storm Shadow along with Slice and Dice. Ninja will never go out of style, and box sets are action-figure crack if done well. There’s nothing quite like the kick in the teeth of opening a fresh box of ninja and sniffing that extraordinarily unique ninja funk, is there? I thought not. Calgon, take me away!