@docsilence Awesome. I'm going in April, but not getting down to Cork. Mostly Northern Ireland, but Dublin and Galway at least.

But yeah, I wonder if the Irish thing on her filecard was a nod to the Action Force version, or if the GI Joe one came first.

The only ones I'm midly interested in are retro CG and retro Flint.

I had Darklon as a kid, and liked him, but I'm not feeling the look in 6" scale.

Don't need any of the others, and definitely not a potentially 9 - 19 inch robot armor.

@ru1977 I never made it up to Northern Ireland despite living there a long while. I'm jealous. Not a day goes by I don't regret moving home. (I imagine getting and storing Classified would have been more difficult if I weren't back in the States though.) 

And of course I liked Lady Jaye and Flint better than Scarlett and Duke as a kid. She's from Cork and he's an English major. (I like that new Flint enough I'm stressing out about getting a good one the same way I stressed out about getting a good, non-stuck joints version of retro Scarlett.) 

@docsilence And I don't think a day goes by that at least I, but I wouldn't be surprised if my wife also, don't wish we'd moved over there. For various reasons.

I never liked Duke. I really can't explain why except when I was a kid, I always had some kinda bias against the "all-american" types. I wasn't a fan of Cyclops so much, and really disliked Captain America as well. Sorry if that's blasphemy. Flint I did like, probably because of the beret heh. And it's funny since my big memory of him from the comics is when Lady Jaye decked him. Scarlett I did like, even though I really disliked her figure. She was one of the first toys I had where I wondered why it wasn't like in the media (the Millennium Falcon was another). And Lady Jaye I always kinda equated with Ripley, after 1986 heh. So those two ladies were always featured players in my battles.

I think I'm going to put Breaker's Bubble Gum head on the Ram Breaker body and keep the non-bubbled head on the cartoon color Breaker. And I'll probably end up getting another Stalker to replace Breaker's Grunt-reuse chest piece with Stalker's more O13 accurate one.

I really hope this is the last we see of this particular chest piece, because they keep using it to put the real names of members of a TOP SECRET SPECIAL FORCES GROUP front and center on their torso.

@ru1977 heheh I felt the same way about Duke specifically and “all American” guys in general. Always gave me the “ick”. I’m definitely not a John Wayne guy. 

These reveals have really gotten me excited. Weirdly I keep getting drawn back to Darklon and his super-creepy Mario Bava Black Sunday alt-head and the giant Claymore. Just fun wild stuff.

@aceofknaves in my house, the dreadnoks mockingly called him Puke, which of course caught on. Even some of the Joes may have uttered it here and there.

And yeah, I was into that Darklon head even before you mentioned Mario Bava. I think for Slice, I may use the alternate head, but with Darklon I may have to get another body to use both heads. And that character's file name obviously has to be Mario Bava.

@ru1977 I was always really neutral on Duke - like literally every other character was more interesting. Didn't hate him, just didn't spark the imagination the way the others did. Really across every medium, too. (Like I didn't love angry/hothead Beachhead in the cartoons, but the file card, that was a guy who fascinated me because it specifies he doesn't get angry... he WAITS.) I actually felt the same way about Cap until I started reading writers who wrote him as questioning his place in the world and what it meant to represent something he didn't believe in. Which is a concept I'd love to see more of with Joes, too. When being a hero means more than just being a uniform. I do get why Duke was front and center, though, even though I feel like comics-wise Stalker could've been the lead (given that Snake Eyes, while THE BEST, doesn't lend himself to kids' cartoons very well since he can't deliver rousing dialogue.) 

(BTW, currently on the shelf--retro Duke and Captain America are sitting in the VAMP talking about politics. I stuck Cap in there on a whim and it makes me laugh every time I look at it.) 

Anyway - I love that they're including the bubble gum with Breaker but I probably won't ever use it - I really like neutral heads on my figures for display. Same thing happened with Jubilee - including the bubble gum is a phenomenal design choice but she's on the shelf in her neutral face and Breaker will likely end up the same. 

Yeah, I never saw Duke as the action hero guy, more of the guy who's running things out in the field, and you listen to him cuz you know he knows his shit. But he's kinds bland. He still thinks of taco's as "ethnic food" and only listens to Conway Twitty.

was Duke not written to be kinda hate-able  in the comics by Hama?

as the first sgt. he’d be the guy around which the other members form kind of a

“hatred bond”

kinda like a high school football team bonding closer to each other when the coach is a huge prick.

Zandar is down to $26 on Amazon which seems like the "new" Hasbro Amazon retail price

amazon.com/dp/B0D952XB8N?

highly recommended love this figure, gonna be hard to top him for my Joe of the year 2025

Heh, I should have specified that it’s *Sunbow* Duke I particularly disliked: his other incarnations (barring live-action, but that’s Channing Tatum’s fault for being a human woodblock) I’ve been mostly neutral on, I’ve dug many of his action figures (even if I ended up having him get captured all the time and need Snake-Eyes to rescue him while giving him a withering stare), and I actually like his character on GI Joe: Renegades, where he gradually develops from an annoying macho-bro to a more mature leader (and also realized that he had to stop creeping on Scarlett because she was with Snake-Eyes and not into him, as it should be).

And I eventually learned to LOVE Captain America once I got on his *actual* vibe of being a thoughtful, principled anti-fascist instead of some ‘Murica poster-boy.

Very much agreed that the Joes are more interesting through that lens, as well. More than a uniform: yes.

@aceofknaves Well, I should also say I came to appreciate and enjoy Cap once I picked up on that as well. I only knew about him from Secret Wars until much later, and that's my fault.

I barely remember Duke from the Marvel comics... he must have been there but I can't recall him doing anything. maybe I blocked that out because of how much I detested him, heh. And I don't think there was a whole lot that I appreciated about the live action movies. The cliff battle in the second one, of course, but otherwise I dunno.

Duke's first appearance in the comic was him firing a 1911 at a Rattler along with Roadblock, who was firing a .50 caliber. It went down in a ball of flames. Eyewitnesses claim that Roadblock missed completely, but every shot Duke made was dead on.

According to Duke.

@ru1977 I had a hard time telling Duke and Hawk apart those first few issues he was in, they looked damn near identical.