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What is the Gun That Cobra Uses in the Sunbow Cartoon?
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07-16-2018, 12:05 PM
Playful
US military family
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Posts: 2,214
This thread reminds me of the ancient question, “which came first: the chicken or the egg?” Aristotle claimed that the chicken and the egg both had always existed and went infinitely back in time. Maybe the same applies to G.I. Joe and the accessories.
Since the toy line’s creation in the 1960’s, the accessories have been created by artists using real world weapons. Norman Jaques and Sam Speers borrowed the real items and vehicles from the Providence National Guard Armory to create an accurate scale for these items to the action figure they were creating.
When Bob Prupis relaunched G.I. Joe in the 1980’s, artists/designers such as Ron Rudat and other did a lot of research, like going to the Natick Army Labs in Natick, Massachusetts. They also purchased magazines of worldwide arms manufacturers to become knowledgeable of the latest and greatest in arms of that time. They started to design figures based on this research, and also using his own knowledge of military history. Regarding the accessories, he said they took bits and pieces from real weapons and made their own, but they couldn't put too much detail into those either.
G.I. Joe became more collector focused in the 2000’s, with far more detailed accessories more closely resembling their real world counterparts than they had previously done since the 1960’s-70’s.
Because the South Korean Sunbow animators didn’t use the Eastern Bloc weapons which Hasbro had created, they used more generic laser weapon small arms for the Cobra Troopers as seen in a few frames in this thread.
It wasn’t until 2008 that Hasbro went back and made a highly detailed toy accessory as a stand-in for the infamous laser submachine gun used by Cobra in the past 1980’s Sunbow episodes. The 2008 Flint (v.13) action figure was released on a nostalgic card back which had on the front upper right corner an advertisement stating “From the G.I. Joe cartoon series”. Hasbro had fully intended this scoped U.S. M3A1 submachine gun to become the new stand-in for the laser submachine gun of past animated episodes.
Inversely, Ron Rudat developed the XMLR-3A rifle appearance based on photographs of historic weapons he admired from his father’s period of service in the Marines. This toy item was used by the Sunbow animators frequently as the G.I. Joe laser rifle for nearly all good guy forces for a couple years’ worth of cartoon episodes.
So in answering the original poster’s question, the Cobra weapon went from animated fantasy to a reality weapon sculpt, while the G.I. Joe weapon went from weapon sculpt based on reality to and often-used animated fantasy drawing.
“Chicken or the egg?”
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