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06-30-2013, 01:02 PM | #18881 |
I.O. SpecOps
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Looks like I confused a statement by the Baroness in Special Missions #1. For some reason, I keep picturing a comic panel with OG specialties in text blocks. Looks like filecard has the only unit designation for Stormavik.
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06-30-2013, 03:06 PM | #18882 |
EQ-Viper
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Quote:
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06-30-2013, 04:32 PM | #18883 |
EQ-Viper
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Also, for you filecard obsessives out there, I was trying to figure out when Larry Hama transitioned from writing the ARAH filecards and when the filecards started being written in-house by Hasbro.
As far as I can tell, basing it mostly on the timeline Bellomo suggested in the 2nd edition of his identification and price guide, this began happening with the 1990 figures. What happened was, Hasbro's advertising/packaging department began writing its own filecards, and Hama's role was changed to an advisory capacity: The pre-publication filecards were passed on to Hama for editing and/or approval (although obviously, whether or not Hasbro would abide by those edits would be up to their discretion). The post-1989 change in filecard-writing responsibilities also explains to some degree why from 1990 onwards, a large proportion of new characters that were introduced were named after Hasbro and/or Griffin-Bacal executives and employees (The file names and birthplaces of many of the new characters introduced in Eco-Warriors and Ninja Force were based on that of Hasbro and Sunbow/Griffin-Bacal execs/employees, for example*). It was probably the advertising/packaging guys having fun with the filecards and inserting themselves and/or their bosses into the "continuity." This also happened during Hama's tenure as the primary filecard writer, of course, but it really became a wide-ranging trend and lacked any subtlety or consistent internal logic after 1989. (When Hama named 1983's Torpedo after Marvel Comics artist Steve Leialoha for instance, he only used Leialoha's surname, and gave the character a biographical background that supported the fact that Torpedo had a native Hawaiian surname; and when he wanted to pay homage to Hasbro advertising exec Jay Bacal's wife, he changed the code-name of the female Joe slated for release in 1985 from "Lady Shea" to "Lady Jaye.") Note that Hasbro had written in-house filecards before 1990, such as the filecard for Claymore (1987), which Hama described in a message sent to Oliverbox (which he posted something like 1500 pages ago) as "... I am pretty sure I did not write the file card on Claymore. It reads like a parody of my stuff. I would never have written a line like 'his reputation as a soldier is known far and wide.' It looks like somebody just paraphrased a bunch of key phrases from previous file cards. This may have been right after the first time I got 'fired.' They thought they could save money by having the file cards written in house. If a Joe sounds too superlative or perfect, odds are good I didn't write the card." Hama's explanation clears up a lot of the oddness with the post-1989 filecards, and why so many of them don't read "right" (a lot of them really do read more like ad-copy than character sketches) or even contradict the established ARAH filecard canon: Guys like Tracker and Bullet-Proof seem to be "too good to be true" and there was also Major Altitude's filecard, which suggested that the Joe team was some sort of publicly known, almost celebrity-like military entity that had been in existence for a long time prior to the early 1980s**. * here's a list of the Eco-Warriors and Ninja Force characters with names and/or birthplaces based on that of Hasbro/Griffin-Bacal employees for those curious: Cesspool - file name based on that of Vincent D'Alleva (Hasbro vice-president for marketing, 1989–1999) Clean Sweep - file name based on that of Daniel Price (Hasbro Project Director and senior designer, 1989–1991) Ozone - file name based on that of David Kunitz (Hasbro Project Manager, 1985–1995) Bushido - file name based on that of Lloyd Goldfine (Sunbow Productions/Griffin-Bacal producer/writer, 1992–1996) Dojo - I haven't been able to find any firm evidence online of a "Michael Russo" working for Hasbro or Griffin-Bacal during the ARAH era, but a "Lisa Russo" worked as Hasbro's HR manager from 1996-2007. A relation? Nunchuk - I haven't been able to find any firm evidence online of a "Ralph Badducci" working for Hasbro or Griffin-Bacal during the ARAH era, but the Badducci surname turns up twice in the post-1989 filecards—Static-Line's file name is listed as "Wallace Badducci"—so there's probably an employee link somewhere. While I haven't been able to definitvely link the other Ninja Force characters to their real-world Hasbro/Griffin-Bacal employee counterparts, I think it's fairly telling that the birthplaces of all the Ninja Force characters are either in Rhode Island or New York (Hasbro is headquartered in Rhode Island, Griffin-Bacal is based in New York). ** - It's worth noting that the file names for both Tracker (file name: Christopher Groen) and Major Altitude (file name: Robert Owens) were also based on Hasbro employees: The former was named after Kurt Groen (Hasbro senior designer, 1989–1998) and the latter was named after Robert Owens (Hasbro senior designer, 1986–2000). BTW, if you want to see Kurt Groen's early designs for Blocker, a sketch can be seen here. Last edited by zuludelta; 06-30-2013 at 05:34 PM.. Reason: added links and other stuff |
06-30-2013, 05:45 PM | #18884 |
I.O. SpecOps
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Quote:
Also, for you filecard obsessives out there, I was trying to figure out when Larry Hama transitioned from writing the ARAH filecards and when the filecards started being written in-house by Hasbro.
As far as I can tell, basing it mostly on the timeline Bellomo suggested in the 2nd edition of his identification and price guide, this began happening with the 1990 figures. What happened was, Hasbro's advertising/packaging department began writing its own filecards, and Hama's role was changed to an advisory capacity: The pre-publication filecards were passed on to Hama for editing and/or approval (although obviously, whether or not Hasbro would abide by those edits would be up to their discretion). Note that Hasbro had written in-house filecards before 1990, such as the filecard for Claymore (1987), which Hama described in a message sent to Oliverbox (which he posted something like 1500 pages ago) as "... I am pretty sure I did not write the file card on Claymore. It reads like a parody of my stuff. I would never have written a line like 'his reputation as a soldier is known far and wide.' It looks like somebody just paraphrased a bunch of key phrases from previous file cards. This may have been right after the first time I got 'fired.' They thought they could save money by having the file cards written in house. If a Joe sounds too superlative or perfect, odds are good I didn't write the card." Hama's explanation clears up a lot of the oddness with the post-1989 filecards, and why so many of them don't read "right" (a lot of them really do read more like ad-copy than character sketches) or even contradict the established ARAH filecard canon: Guys like Tracker and Bullet-Proof seem to be "too good to be true" and there was also Major Altitude's filecard, which suggested that the Joe team was some sort of publicly known, almost celebrity-like military entity that had been in existence for a long time prior to the early 1980s. Made me think of Brand X, the small group of CCTs that worked with Delta. They were the beginning of Air Force Special Tactics. I had never heard of them until I read No Room for Error.
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06-30-2013, 05:54 PM | #18885 |
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Hard to tell. Doc's filecard was another one of those filecards that had been extensively rewritten in-house by Hasbro before it went on the packaging—the text was changed so that Doc was no longer an enlisted corpsman (E-4) but a full-on Army physician (O-3)—so the thing about him trying to enlist directly into the Joe team out of med school is almost positively something that was added by the copy-editors/marketing guys after Hama had submitted the text for the filecard. Offhand though, based on the early comics, it seemed like Hama's original intent was for the Joes to be a covert (but not strictly clandestine) unit, what with their cover as a Fort Wadsworth motor pool unit, etc.
Last edited by zuludelta; 06-30-2013 at 10:33 PM.. |
06-30-2013, 10:57 PM | #18886 |
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Not so much a "filecard secret" as it is a "pre-filecard secret," but according to GI Joe sculptor Bill Merklein (in a six-part YouTube interview), the original concept for Mutt was that he was supposed to be a Cobra character (makes me wonder if 2009's Night Adder was a sly nod to the original Cobra Mutt concept).
Also according to Merklein, despite the rumor, his likeness wasn't the basis for the mask the 1984 Zartan came with (yes, he sculpted the figure and the mask, but it was purely a coincidence that Merklein sported a Van Dyke-style beard at the time, similar to what the mask had). |
06-30-2013, 11:05 PM | #18887 |
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Joe's "covert" nature has always kind of bothered me.
They weren't covert in Sunbow and ARAH depended on the story. There were plenty of times when Hama would write a Cobra agent looking at a dossier of Joe agents, and even times with other groups. The CIA knew about the Joes. The flight crews at McGuire AFB knew about the Joes. The thousands of people on board the Flagg knew about the Joes. Seems the only ones that didn't were the Chaplain Assistants at Wadsworth.
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07-01-2013, 12:01 AM | #18888 |
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Mercer V2 probably being one of the sloppiest filecards written in terms of consistency.
I wonder if Hama did any of the later ones at all?
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07-01-2013, 12:45 AM | #18889 |
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Quote:
And then you had really baffling ones like the filecard for Mercer v2—wrong filename ("Felix P. Stratton" was changed to "Richard Cecil," the name of a Hasbro engineer), wrong birthplace, and continuity errors (it listed him as a member of Sgt. Slaughter's Marauders instead of Sgt. Slaughter's Renegades)—and Airborne v2: changing "Frank Talltree" to "Robert Six" (the name of the chairman/CEO of Continental Airlines) and making him basically a new character—I mean, what, they couldn't spring for a new paratrooper-appropriate code name and had to recycle one from a character that was still "active" in the comics at the time? It's not as if Frank Talltree had left the team/separated from the service like Grunt or had been killed off like Crankcase, Doc, Quick-Kick, Breaker, Thunder, and the others or anything... he even appeared in January 1990's G.I. Joe #96. Of the 1990 filecards, the Sonic Fighters were definitely not written by Hama according to Bellomo's notes. The rest of the 1990 filecards were a mix of Hama-written filecards (some which, such as Pathfinder's and Salvo's, were so heavily edited/rewritten that they supposedly bear little resemblance to the original Hama text) and in-house filecards. Everything after that (1991 to 1994), I think, was an in-house filecard. Last edited by zuludelta; 07-01-2013 at 02:10 AM.. |
07-01-2013, 12:50 AM | #18890 |
G.I.Joe medic
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In terms of the Joes being a secret unit, it seems to me that there was an awareness in the ARAH comics that the team existed, but not who the members actually were or where they were located. IIRC, in #53, the issue where Cobra attacks the Pit, when the Joes storm the Ft. Wadsworth armory, someone says to the armorer, "Look Percy, we're really the GI Joes...".
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