How about we just shake them like broken vending machines until good ideas start coming out?

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I think that it's a little naive to assume that these are all just mock-ups given the push they've been making with regard to the pics marketing-wise, and with regard to how soon the street date is. I have a hard time believing Hasbro doesn't have some of the final product on hand, and the timing of the release of these pics makes me think these are it...

Just my own uneducated 2 cents still...

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Anyone who took the Hasbro tour at the Rhode Island con should remember the sculpts we saw. All the joints were already in them at the wax sculpt stage. Long before any painted protos. Vehicle drivers aside, we're still ahead of ARAH in terms of articulation. If they cut anymore than this, I'm going to have a hard time staying with things, but for now I'm willing to give them a bit of leeway. I just hope that Retaliation, both the movies and the toys, connect with new people. The fanbase is dwindling (cue someone saying it's dwindling because they cut artic or raised prices . . . and that's not the reason, because it hasn't happened yet) and Joe needs to re-establish itself. I hope this is what does it.


I do find it very surprising that the figures really don't look like their big screen counterparts at all design wise. Yeah Snake-Eyes and Roadblock are very close, but the rest? Not so much. Interesting decision.

The worst thing about this is the vehicle drivers. Making them with reduced articulation AND making them preposed to boot is just shameful. They've NEVER done that before in the line's entire history. And I wouldn't be nearly so annoyed about it if those figures weren't so cool looking. Most of the vehicle drivers have better and more realistic designs than the actual action figures. What the hell?

One thing I was wondering about on my drive home from work after seeing the new pics, has there been any word on a deluxe subline? I mean, the Marvel movie lines have all had them and they've all featured the really big doofy gimmicky weapons and figures with less articulation. Now if you look here, you'll notice that all of the regular figures with reduced articulation (Roadblock, Duke, CC) also all happen to come with really big missile firing weapons. So, maybe, just maybe these inaccurate, brightly colored and spring loaded weapon laden figures are part of the deluxe subset?

Probably not.

Things I that I like that I'm seeing in these new pics: The Joe Trooper has FULL articulation including the hinged wrists. I also like that he's got a proper head under his helmet (and I see many a Soap custom made from that head) plus at least three rifles and several pistols. Zartan has extra "disguised" heads. I really liked that aspect of the POC and ROC Zartans and I'm glad to see it continued here. Especially since I was planning to use Zartan as an update Night Creeper, those alt heads save me a lot of trouble. The Cobra Trooper is growing on me. I still can't tell if he has ankle joints though. The pic of him with the parachute make it look like he does, but the original pic makes it look like he doesn't. Still, he'll make a pretty sweet Cobra airborne trooper.

Sooo they are reducing articulation to cut costs?
Well then I will also cut my costs. No Retaliation figures without the normal 25th Anniv. articulation for me. Thank you for saving me money Hasbro.
Those Red Ninjas are going to be hard to find.

Well, looks like I'm skipping vehicles this time around, except maybe for the bikes, the drivers look articulated.


I still don't understand why anyone at Hasbro thought this was a good idea. Maybe, MAYBE, if it was just the same character/look as a single carded figure like the Marvel toylines did.... but this is giving us brick drivers without any alternatives, and at that level of dumb they might as well have just made the vehicles driverless.

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I don't think they're mockups. I think the vehicles are going to come with lesser articulated figures, just like Ironman did, just like Spiderman does. I think Hasbro's looking at this as a business point of view. RoC figures were clogging the shelves, only a handful of them were "hits" and stood out and people went bonkers for. Heck, you can still go to some Walmarts or Toys R Us and see stragglers here and there. I think they're making a decision that'll help cut costs and still be able to bring out vehicles w/ a driver. If they didn't, and only brought out the vehicle, then we'd have 400 internet posts about "WHY DiD YOU NOT GIVE US OUR VEHICLE DRIVERS??!?!?!?", as it stand, looks like they wanted to make sure little Johnny will still have a good guy to put in his jeep to fight the bad guy in his tank.

As with the other figures, they're hand painted prototypes. Look at all the other toy fair pics going back to the Spy Troops, probably even before that years. They're always hand painted, have weird almost MU hip joints, no leg screws, some even have pin holes in the shoulders/elbows(remember when we first saw those?, OH NOES, THEY'RE PUTTING PIN HOLES IN OUR FIGURES). And people wonder why companies don't like to release pics till they're ready to be released.

I'd be willing to bet pretty good money that what we're seeing here is what we're getting, lock-posed vehicle drivers included. That's totally consistent with what's been Hasbro's movie-line vehicle strategy in recent years. In fact, I'd be very surprised if the cycle drivers had articulation that matched the carded figures.

But that really doesn't bug me. In recent years I'd been buying vehicles mostly for the drivers anyway. That saves me that expense.

What's kind of got me saying "What the?!?" is the decision to make Jinx an SDCC exclusive. They must miss the hate e-mails they've gotten the last two years.

All I know for certain is that I'll be pre-securing a standard Jinx at the lowest preorder price I can find (I'm guessing that will be in the low-to-mid $40 range), and I'm happy to pay that price for someone else to have to deal with the headache of actually getting the figure.

Maybe Hasbro's trying to help the Club drive up subscriptions for their Jinx?

Look on the bright side, with static drivers, it will be the end of the crooks who replace them with Corps figures and whatnot.
Maybe the next Subscriptions figures will be articulated versions of the various Retaliation drivers. O_O

As frustrating as it is, we can't expect the SDCC exclusive figures to be lame boring repaints of figures that are available at retail. They want something that will make people want to wait in line to get it.

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Does that trooper have an effen mohawk?

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I think it's more of that buzzcut/mohawk thing like the Rangers in Black Hawk Down wore.

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Looking closely at the high resolution pics, it seems like we're getting about four fully articulated (including FLIPPY HANDS!!) figures in the first wave (or whatever you want to call this) of single packs:
GI Joe Trooper
Red Ninja
Snake Eyes
Storm Shadow

All of those look pretty decent. The rest appear to be missing elements of the 25th Anniversary:
Zartan - no evidence of ankle articulation, single knee joint
Cobra Commander - single knee joint, no ankle articulation
Roadblock - single knee joint, no ankle articulation
Duke - single knee joint, no ankles
Cobra Trooper - single knee, possibly ankle

The only one of these that really disappoints me is Zartan, since he looks like a cool figure. I'll pass on the rest, but will probably get Zartan and grumble about it.

We're also set to get fully articulated figures in the three packs. In fact, the only figure that's missing articulation is Roadblock. The beachhead-looking dude reuses Snake Eyes 54 and the Kamakura-looking dude looks like a mix of temple guard snake eyes and the nice Renegades Storm Shadow mold.

So outside of Zartan and the Cobra Trooper, I think we're probably safe in assuming there will be a fully-articulated Duke, Cobra Commander and Roadblock down the line. If not, well. That's too bad, but it's far from the biggest loss.

The vehicle drivers are shameful, though. Preposed? Bizarre.

After seeing the clearer pictures, I'm even more excited about some of this stuff. It's disappointing to see the lessened articulation on some of the figures; it's still theoretically possible that these are some kind of mock-ups that will be changed, but very unlikely. Luckily for me, most of the figures that I'm really looking forward to seem to have full articulation.

The vehicle drivers are a different story: it's weird to see Joes with Comic Action Heroes-level articulation in 2012, and even more of a shame because some of the figures have really cool designs. However, the coolness of a lot of the other stuff outweighs those concerns. And it's great to see that this round of movie figures is much more visually dynamic than the previous attempt: that should help a bit in terms of attracting non-collectors/fans to the line (the PoC stuff was phenomenal, but never got the marketing push that it would have needed to make an impact, sales-wise; this movie line will definitely get that push).

It's good to see a whole bunch of vehicles, too. I really like the covered VAMP and the Ghost Hawk II, and I'll probably pick up a few of the others once I see them up close.

What's the deal with everything having the Arashikage logo on it, though? I get that they went really ninja-heavy here, but the jeep? The AWE Striker? Fixable problem, but just odd.

May 28th can't get here soon enough for me.

Actually, these are supposed to start hitting next month. Which means I forsee a lot of 30th at discounters someday. . .

Yes. I think we'll have another great Joe christmas. Ross, TJ Maxx, etc., will likely load up on the 30th/POC figures that never went to standard retail in order to have joe product for Christmas.