I love GI Joburg. I am glad to have met Paul, Rob, and Stephen at the last JoeCon. (congrats on your first foray into RL Army-building Stephen!). I thought I'd make a blog entry piggy backing onto the main course of their latest podcast entry on Youtube, as well as other places, which answers the question of whom each of them would choose as their go-to figure in various environments.
I guess I won't spoil what their choices were. I listened and considered each category for myself and came up with my own answers to the question of "which character would be your go-to in the following environments: desert, arctic, urban, jungle, and aquatic."
Okay, small spoilers. Rob chose Scoop for one environment, Paul relied heavily on his childhood favorites and Stephen applied his choices very judiciously. Good picks all of them, and many I would not have thought of. Here are my choices, though I will play a little differently and land one for the good guys and one for the bad.
Desert (GI Joe) - Dusty
Desert (Cobra) - Cobra Trooper
This will be a topic I will expand upon in another post, but I didn't exactly have a bonanza of figures when I was young. I did play with what I had and daydreamed often about the world of GI Joe, much of it during school hours when I should have been paying attention to something else. My approach to these choices will be a mix between adult reasoning and childhood nostalgia, often for figures I wanted to have.
I never had Dusty, but I remember his character fondly from the silly cowboy tune he sang in Pyramid of Darkness. I know he's the most conventional choice here for desert operations, but he's my favorite and I'm sticking to him.
I had considered giving Road Pig my choice after looking through YoJoe.com for a good match. Road Pig brings a certain, desert Mad Max vibe to him but to be honest, I don't know much about him. The blue-shirt Trooper is ubiquitous to Cobra's worldwide operations, so why not the desert?
Next is the arctic:
Arctic (GI Joe) - Frostbite
Arctic (Cobra) - Snow Serpent
I picked Frostbite because he's a figure I have, someone my brother had as a child, and I guess I see the value of having a mechanically oriented character who is also a weapons expert. The Snow Serpent is just so definitive as an arctic fighter with those accessories and almost snow-alien appearance.
Urban (GI Joe) - Snake Eyes
Urban (Cobra) - Baroness.
Snake Eyes either in his commando or ninja renditions is my favorite figure in an urban setting. Among tall buildings and dingy alleys, there is always a nocturnal element to your larger cities and old Snake Eyes jumping rooftops sound like him in his own element.
Baroness as someone who comes from money and status would be a city-dweller at heart. Large cities are your seats of power and wealth, it only makes sense that this would be her domain. Why did I chose her? Don't really know. She seems more cosmopolitan than Destro, who's more of a guy who enjoys the evil secret base-in-a-remote-castle scene.
Jungle (GI Joe) - Duke
Jungle (Cobra) - Cobra Viper
Maybe either of these aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think "jungle", but I like Duke and the Viper is one of my favorite of Cobra's many soldiers. I think this works as both characters are fairly well adapted to most scenarios.
Aquatic (GI Joe) - Cutter.
Aquatic (Cobra) - Copperhead
Both are vehicle drivers new in the 1984 line and both are pilots of what I would regard as their own "counterpart" vehicles. Maybe both aren't real, true "deep sea" experts, what with Copperhead being a swamp-dweller, but I consider him to be more flexible than that.
Anyway, those are my personal choices. Unfortunately, like I've said before, I don't have all that much vintage material. Among my choices, I only have a Cobra Viper and Frostbite. Thanks for reading, and thank you GI JoBurg for having this discussion...
