Working holster.
Sometimes you don’t need a lot of reasons to dig a character. Sometimes it can just be something as simple as the fact that he has a working holster. In a toyline that historically had a lot of sculpted-on sidearms, Chuckles having a real, working holster that his pistol could fit in and he could look good doing it just did it for me. It was 1987 and that’s all I needed.
Chuckles was half military and half Magnum PI’s wardrobe, and that was also cool. The Joes weren’t sticklers about how their members dressed, so Chuckles, the premier undercover agent, dressed in a blue shirt with big flowers on it, because he felt like it. Also, his name was Chuckles. That made him seem like a happy-go-lucky type of guy, until you realize he’s got a gun, so he’s probably chuckling while he’s busting a cap in your ass. I liked that he was probably a little unhinged. I guess all the Joes were a little unhinged in their own special way, but Chuckles was probably the guy that found himself surrounded by Cobra troopers and then started talking about how this situation reminded him of when he was dating this cute little Tijuana barmaid and all seven of her brothers showed up to kick his ass. You know the type; she’s got long black hair hair that just crests the top of her ass, eyes like day-old honey, she smells faintly of lilacs and she nibbles the tip of her pinky when she’s concentrating and oh shit he just pulled out a gun and now I’m dead it sucks to be Cobra.
Most of the time when I was playing with my Joes it was just a nonstop bloodbath, but Chuckles and his single holstered pistol ended up having a bit more depth. He’d be the one to get himself into a jam and have to smart his way out of it. Oh, that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill a lot of the bad guys, but Chuckles had adventures that were a lot more sedate that EXPLOSIONS AND GUNS AND BOOMBOOM that usually occurred on the living room carpet. Chuckles could sweet talk the Baroness before using her as a human shield to get out of harm’s way. He played dirty. He had to. Undercover work was dirty.
Chuckles showed up a few times in the comic. His first appearance was drawn by a dude that would go on to have quite a bit of notoriety in comics: Todd Mcfarlane. He was drawn as a pretty big dude in that issue, which didn’t seem to fit with the card art, where he seemed normal-sized. The figure itself was obviously a standard size as well.
He showed up as a new recruit in the animated G.I. Joe: the Movie alongside Jinx, Falcon, Law and Order, Tunnel Rat and Big Lob. He didn’t say much in the cartoon. I can’t remember if he had any lines at all. He was drawn pretty beefy there too, and he single-handedly chucked a missile at a tank over a decent distance, so maybe he was intended on being burly. Of those new recruits Falcon got the bulk of the attention, with the rest kind of filling in the background.
That movie takes so much crap for some reason, but I love every insane minute of it. It’s like the cartoon dropped acid and filmed itself.
By far the best Chuckles story is a more recent one under the IDW banner, collected as Cobra– The Last Laugh. It’s a pretty hardcore story detailing the lengths Chuckles will go to while undercover, ad the toll it takes on his psyche. It’s fairly self-contained so it can be read without reading much of the rest of the IDW material at the time.
1987 was a transitional year, with some behind the scenes shifts in figure design and concepts, but somehow they managed to keep the consistency of the previous years. Chuckles looks like he would fit right in to any year in that odd, mismatched way that all the Joes locked together. Add to that the bizarrely rewarding novelty of a working holster and you’ve got a character that really stands out.