Well it's been 18 months since I last posted an actual GI Joe custom, so I figured why not.
The story behind these is that back in the day my two best friends, my step-brother, and I used to do war gaming with GI Joes out at some wooded property that one of my friend's family owned.
At the time we started we were pretty much out of Joes for a couple years, and none of us really paid attention to the DIC cartoon, except my younger step-brother, so many of the newer characters were kind of blank slates for us. They just didn't have the same 'character' attached to them as the Joes from the Sunbow cartoon that we grew up watching.
This made it pretty easy to pick figures we liked, to modify and make in to our representations of ourselves, for the war gaming.
My step brother liked Shockwave. He liked the blue outfit well enough, but when he saw the Night Force version he liked it a lot more. Since he had only seen it once, he couldn't really remember the exact color scheme, so he decided to just wing it. It didn't turn out exactly like the Night Force version, but it looked pretty good. He went with olive BDU's and hat with black vest and mask.
One of my friends always liked Falcon. So he used an unaltered Falcon figure.
My other friend really liked the Red Star figure when he saw it. He wasn't so crazy about the weird hand Gatling gun thing, so he ditched it, and called the figure good.
I started with a Night Force SpearHead figure, but there were things I didn't particularly care for. I swapped his legs with Night Force Muskrat's and gave him an old Airborne helmet, with the goggles painted red, and a boom mic added.
For a few years now I've been wanting to put a small team together with our war gaming characters, but there was always so much stuff coming out, that I just never got around to it. With the pretty big slow down of product lately, I finally got around to it.
-For the Shockwave I used a Double Clutch figure that came with the Vamp Mk2 with the head, holsters, and pistols from a Wal-Mart Shockblast figure, the vest and belt from a comic pack Firefly, a BDU cap from Marauder Inc., and an original gun (think this version came with a Lamprey of some sort).
Since the club later released Shockwave in this paint scheme, as Shockblast v1, this could also work as a modern version of that figure.
-Falcon is mostly unmodified with a Marauder Inc. pouch and 21st Century Toys Vietnam flashlight added to his left thigh, and an original shotgun.
-Red Star is the legs, head, hat, and web gear from the comic pack Red Star with his over-sized holster swapped out for a smaller Falcon holster, the torso and arms of Kwinn, the AK-47 and added red dot sight are from Marauder Inc., and he has an original Red Star backpack modified to fit modern figures. A couple of the main reasons I went with the Kwinn torso was first the color is closer to Red Star's original tan, and also that it showed an undershirt. One of our favorite things with the original Red Star figure was the blue and white striped Russian Naval / VDV shirt they gave him under his BDU's. So I really wanted to add that back to the figure.
-For SpearHead I went with the body of a Python Officer, since it is the same torso that is on the GIJCC SpearHead figures, and fits under his vest. I went with the arms from a black Dollar General Cobra soldier, since again they were the same as the ones the GIJCC used, and used the legs from the Dollar General Cobra soldier since they are the same legs used on the convention exclusive Night Force Muskrat. I kept the head, hands, feet, vest, backpack and belt from the convention exclusive Night Force SpearHead. His helmet is a vintage accessory pack Airborne helmet. I actually still have the very same v1 Airborne helmet I used back then, but the accessory pack version matches up to the convention figure's teal much better.
His rifle is a Hasbro SCAR with a Marauder Inc. ACOG added, and a Marauder Inc. 1911 with silencer in the holster.
Enough with the blah blah, here are the figures, hope you enjoy them!
Thanks for looking!
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