J_Man wrote:
It was probably just one of those things where the team that did the Toys R Us exclusive back in the late 90s just didn't pay attention. They may or may not have been fans, but they just did the stuff as a job. It looked close enough or whatever so they went with it. That or at the time the tooling was damaged and they didn't want to put any more money in than they had to.
Now the team there I can say for sure are fans of the product. Those who meet them at the convention will see that. With the extra budget and people paying more attention to details, they probably corrected the arms this time around.
Not to drag this into off-topic zone but I got to come in on this statement, Joe.
The 90s guys were SUPER hardcore ARAH fans and they were both giddy with excitement to do the TRU sets and blown away that they had ZERO time to get them together.
See, back then, Kenner in Ohio ran G.I.Joe entirely, but the TRU exclusive Joes were actually put together by a team in Hasbro's Rhode Island offices. But due to their deadline, missing tools and figure molds and issues in China they were horribly disappointed at how the figures and vehicles came out.
These guys had like 90 some odd days to put this all together and get it shipped out to China, with almost NO quality controls in place. China made a lot of judgement calls on how to kit the tooling together and a lot of that 82/83 figure tooling used the same parts for different figures, substitutions were put in place. It was those Joe guys of 2000-2005 who were lazy sods who didn't bother to fix Snake Eyes' waist or Snow Job's arms out of just carelessness.