That's a great update to Wild Bill. He's a character that I've always liked. I never had him or the Dragonfly as a kid so he's always been one of my "want" figures.

Now I need to go search how much Dragonfly are going for, I know it'll be far too much...

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The further I get into what I'm calling "Wave 2" of my G.I. Joe Retro project, the more I'm realizing that a lot of the 25th releases have the same problems when you atand them next to a Retro figure. Many are just a skooch too short and almost all of them have some combination of too-small heads, hands and/or feet.

Cutter definitely had the tiny head thing going. So I sculpted some hair onto a Boss Fight figure and painted the skin to match the 25th Cutter arms and chest. His height and foot size were fine, but his original hands annoyed the heck out of me. I swapped in some Retaliation Roadblock hands to upsize and add articulation. The baseball cap is from Marauder.

Spirit was a figure that I thought the 25th line phoned in. Head was small and malformed and sat way too low. Legs were short. Feet were small. So I repainted and swapped in a later Spirit head (Pursuit of Cobra, I think), gave him a functioning knife sheath (Marauder) and completely redid his lower half with parts feom three different Rise of Cobra figures (this increased his height and gave him more practical pants/footwear). Gun and dart clips came from a Slaughter's Marauders (modern) Spirit, backpack was from the 25th version as, I believe, was Freedom.

To show how they stack up, here they are in a recon mission briefing with Retro Stalker and 50th(?) Gung Ho, which was one of Hasbro's better pre-Retro factory figures, imho.

Got pretty busy for a minute there and haven't been able to post, but finding a cheap Retro Roadblock over the weekend inspired me:

The factory release wasn't terrible. In fact probably my favorite modern Roadblock so far. But I can't stand the lack of ankle articulation on those legs (ruined two otherwise fun Road-Rock movie figures), so I fixed that here. Also not a huge fan of the big bulky vest they've put on Roadblock since Resolute. I like seeing just how big and chiseled this guy is, so I custom-built a less bulky harness and gave him the appropriate ammo backpack as well as his classic heavy MG.

Here's a shot of him running throgh the jungle with Retro Stalker and a lightly modified Recondo (gave him new arms/hands, rolled up sleeves, a functioning holster and new feet that raised his height just a skooch):

Very nice.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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recondo is perfect. i like rb a lot, but the high webgear looks a little off with his bare waist . there are tactical chest rigs or waistcoats that ride high like that. maybe a belt with some smaller pouches or holster on his hip would work visually. unless you have his waist empty to sit in a tank or something.

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I think that belt idea is exactly what he needs.

I'm going to see what I can pull together.

Thanks!

Closing in on the end of my wave 2 Retro "What If?" project and hitting a character I really dug when he first came out:

Both of my grandfathers were military doctors, so when tbe Joes got a "Doc" of their own I was geekily stoked. My 85 Doc was part of almost every mission. So I was a little put out by how awkwardly proportioned the 25th release was.

Replacing his head (one of the smallest in the line) with a Marauder noggin was a no-brainer, but doing so actually made him taller than the standard Retro buck (his lower legs are unusually long). So I swapped in some Indiana Jones feet to shave some height and gave him Marauder forearms to match the new head. Helmet was also a Marauder upgrade. Most of the accessories were 25th Doc's but I think that med-case was from a Tiger Force Lifeline.

Here's a shot of him with upgraded Mutt (new feet for added height, new right forearm/hand for better proportions and a functional knife sheath on his vest), tending to a predictably injured Tripwire (unmasked head swap):

The last of my "Wave 2" Retro Joe reinforcements is also the first whose design isn't closely patterned on his first-release figure:

I vividly remember saving allowance money and doing yard work around the neighborhood to be able to afford a Skystriker. And the jet was easily the cooleat thing I'd owned to that point (possibly ever). But the pilot didn't grab me the way the other Joes released by then had. Maybe it was that his flight suit looked too futuristic (in an early 80s way) or that white seemed like a weird color to wear into battle, but I usually used an X-Wing pilot in the jet. So it's probably appropriate that I built my Retro-style Ace around an X-wing helmet (with a removable mask cut from a Joe flight helmet). The rest of the figure is really inspired by Ace's early cartoon look - shades of gray, mostly but with a little red piping as a nod to that first figure design. The body was a relatively recent (retaliation?) flight suit figure and the head (pictured below) was from Retaliation Flint (because toon Ace had darker hair than the v1 figure):

Here's a shot showing some of the back details as Ace gets dressed down by my Flint custom (built on a Sgt. Stone base with head and forearms from a Flint in Cobra disguise figure and given better wrist articulation) for buzzing the Joe tower while Wild Bill wonders if it's going to rain:

ace and flint both look great!

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Checking on this thread and you seem to be rebuilding the Joe line one guy at a time! Great work!

Thanks, 2Dark.

I suppose that Flint deserves a solo pic:

And one with the alternate head I gave him for when he's feeling all gentlemany:


Cody, Im definitely not revisiting every character in the line. Just trying to finish what Retro started by updating the proportions and aesthetics of mostly 82-86 characters (most of the ones I really cared about as a kid) so they can work/play well with those (imho perfect) Retro Grunt, Stalker, Roadblock and Cobra (Commander, Trooper, Officer) figures.

I've got some more Cobras I'm updating to peak Retro standards as part of "Wave 2" of this project (which I'm calling "Reinfocements"). Then I'll move on to "Wave 3" ("Special Missions"), which will feature some characters I've already covered in this thread (as well as some I haven't yet) outfitted for specific environmental conditions.

That's as far as I've mapped things out. It feels good to be excited about customizing Joes again and I'm glad you're digging the project so far!

Adding some of my Retro-fitted bad guys as we get closer to the end of Wave 2.

First up is a character who intrigued me as a kid:

To my young, comic-book immersed mind, Zartan was a game changer for the Joe line. Up until then, just about everything we'd seen in toy form had seemed pretty real-world practical (if perhaps a little near-futuristic), but this dude had SUPERPOWERS! By the time I actually got the figure,y older brother had made me watch John Carpenter's "The Thing" on HBO, so I spent more than a few hours on many nights essentially re-enacting that move with Zartan as the shapeshifting alien. He wore out so fast I had to replace him twice.

To make his second 25th figure (the most visually faithful to his original look) Retro-ready, I replaced the feet with some slightly taller Viper boots, his lower arms with some from a 25th Flint as Cobra figure and gave him wrist articulated hands (from the same kind of base body I used for Ace) with repainted gauntlets from an MU Captain America. Then it was just repainting select elements.

Here's a shot of him playing the blame game with his fellow Cobra contractors after a botched operation resulted in reduced compensation:

Storm Shadow is a factory v49 and Firefly is a head-swapped v26 from the same year (when Hasbro was consistently getting body height/proportions right). I have no idea where that Scrap Iron came from (because I can't find it online) but it isn't a custom (except for the wrist articulated hands I gave it). Maybe it was an eBay bootleg? It's pretty much a recolored 25th Airborne with a 25th Scrap Iron head.

Here's another shot of Zartan passing the blame (but no actual bucks) down to his usual subcontractors, the Dreadnoks (all of whom have had hand upgrades):

zartans gloves/hands look great! i thought they were from fortnite.

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This is a great set. I love that it calls out the 25A figures, which I remember everyone gushing about at the time. But they did have their flaws!!

I had a professor once who said that the better a human population has it, the more annoyed they are by relatively little things. I think the 25th line made some amazing leaps forward in articulation and accessory functionality. Some of that came at the cost of aesthetics but, as a customizer, I was usually able to address what bothered me. And I really hadn't seen anything better in that scale, so I was content to always be customizing something on a figure.

The funny/ironic thing is that the modern line kept evolving. Each wave got a little better (for the most part) in terms of consistency of proportions and "realism" (or faithfulness to the spirit of the characters they were trying to recapture). There were ups and downs but those last Retro figures felt like the ultimate evolution of new form/functionality with classic character interpretation.

Conversely, when Joe first came out in the 80s, it was the best of all worlds for the time. Cutting edge articulation with amazingly relatable, simply designed characters. When swivel arms and neck balls entered the mix, it was the apex of functionality. But the characters started feeling more two-dimensional and the visual designs less inspired soon after that (at least for me). Any "evolutions" of the line (Ninja Force, Star Brigade, Street Fighter, Sgt. Savage) just seemed to move it further away from what I had loved about it.

Anyway, a couple more Retro-fitted Cobras today:

25th Tomax and Xamot were pretty cool looking figures when first released, but standing next to almost any figure released post 2010 the hallmark issues of early 25th Joes (small heads, small hands/feet, short legs) are glaring. I addressed all of those here with a couple Marauder heads (one of which I resculpted to look more like a mirror image of the other, which I then gave a scar), new hands (I think the came from Rise of Cobra Duke), 25th Iron Grenadier feet (the best for adding a touch of height if you don't need laced footwear) and some paint for the really pale original skin tone. I also made the leg holsters/sheaths functional.

Then I gave them my dream Crimson Twin accessories - alternate business-suited bodies:

These were hooded Cobra Commander (the one that came with the podium) torsos/arms with Sabretooth (from Wolverine:Origins) waist/legs. Shiny shoes came off Star Wars figures. Brief cases from 25th Destro.