Toy Fair 2010: GI-JOE

With Valentine's Day and all, I nearly forgot about ToyFair which is a huge convention where toy companies show off their latest offerings to various distributors.

One of the things that I was interested in hearing about was Hasbro's Military Action Figure Line called: GI-JOE.

My thoughts about this news and about certian changes (big and small) have been made since JoeCon (a GI-JOE Convention) after the jump.

One of the biggest changes that has been made is that all references to Rise of Cobra, the GI-JOE movie that came out last year, have been removed.

They've made a completely new design for the packaging that is reminiscent of the classic line with a bit of a modern twist and the RoC GI-JOE "Eagle Logo" has also been removed and has been replaced with a more classic looking GI-JOE logo.

I actually like the new packaging because it reminds my of how the packaging looked during the 90's when I first started collecting GI-Joe figures when I was young. I liked the Rise of Cobra packaging too, but I don't mind the change except like others have said on various GI-JOE fansites: It doesn't look like the new packaging will  let you put the figure back in easily like the RoC packaging did for those who like to display and play with their figures in and out of the packaging. Even though I didn't mind Roc's "Eagle Logo", I'm glad they changed it back to the more familiar GI-JOE logo.
I rememder when images of the new packaging first surfaced and how many believed it to be fake.

Another change that has been made is that all  the actors' likenesses have been removed from the figures.

 As you might notice, both figures above are nearly identical except for one thing. Their heads.

Now this isn't a change I necessarily mind (especially with characters like Duke who had a bunch of figures with the same head)and I actually like, but one inparticularly does bother me however: Zartan

The Zartan on the right is the Roc version and the left in the new version.
The newly retooled head on the new one looks too generic to me, I really liked how the head looked on the Roc because it had a lot of character. But I like the rest of the new figure because the coloring is very much like the original (which I don't have yet), unlike the Roc version which looked like a homage to Cobra's Bird Man: Raptor.

It also seems that they've change the display stands back to the 25th Anniversary style whcih I believe is a nice change since I wasn't too crazy about the stand they made for the RoC line.

Another thing that bothers me about the change is that some of the figures that weren't changed won't be released it would seem.

(From Left to Right: Jungle Assault Cobra Commander, Jungle Assault Shadow Tracker,and Desert Battle Ripcord)

The above are a few of figures that I really liked and I was looking forward to their release, but it seems for now that they won't be coming anytime soon. But since these are nearly new figures with little reused parts, we might see different figures using their parts in the future.

One of the few figures I'm looking forward to has undergone very little to no changes.

Above is the Jungle-Viper

It looks like Hasbro made this figure as a homage to Night-Viper.

I can't wait to get my hands on this bad boy.

One of the of the figures that's undergone the most changes is

Storm Shadow

On the right was the original Jungle Assault Storm Shadow that was to be released this year and on the left is the Desert Battle Storm Shadow that will be released instead. I was looking forward to the Jungle Assault version,but I think the Desert Battle Version is pretty cool and has that "Prince of Persia" vibe going on even though is doesn't uses a lot of new parts unlike the other one which mainly used new parts.

There's a lot more I could talk about, like the rest of the Figures,Vehicles,etc...

But, I think I'll just say that I'm really excited and happy about the direction Hasbro is taking the GI-JOE brand and I hope to see more cool stuff from them in the future.

Hope you all enjoyed reading.

Pictures are from Various GI-Joe and Action Figure related websites like: General Joes , The Terror Drome , Joe Customs , SmallJoes , and etc...