6 INCH: ALLEY VIPERS

Mentioned previously, Hasbro's GI Joe Classified figures are often cool looking and fun to use (for photography purposes). Cataloguing all my larger scale figures and thinking about why I even have them, it's got me thinking quite a bit about the WHYs. I don't have a good reason for a lot of them. They were on sale. They were bought to help get free shipping from Amazon. Impulse buy. Gotta catch most 'em all?

When I first saw these guys, I didn't get it. Bright orange (and blue as combo) wasn't hard military to me. Or military at all. I consider these guys part of the DiC era of GI Joe; that's when a lot of things changed. (That means, they came after the movie in cartoon terms and after the Cobra War in comic book terms) They weren't the only ones I didn't understand. There were these bad guy underwater troops with one eye. A crazy dude with a visor and big rockets and talked funny. A football-playing sergeant called Captain Grid-Iron (as if Duke wasn't bad enough, in my book). The list goes on how this wasn't my GI Joe. Eventually, I was shown the light with these guys. Alley Vipers. Think an aggro SWAT-oriented class of soldiers. These guys were so bad ass, they wore bright orange to not only show they were coming, but they frankly didn't care either. Same sort of mentality of Star Wars Stormtroopers always being in white; didn't matter if they were in the desert, jungle, working at night, etc. It was supposed to be oddly fear inducing. I accepted it in the end. 

The original toy was after my time or very close to it. I found an attraction to them in 2002 when they got the gray/blue colors. Skip to the 25A-era figures and Hasbro made the lil ones look tight. By Classified, good translation of the Alley Viper. Now, I've written that big heads plagued the GI Joe line (well, probably a lot of toylines). The Alley Viper represents a helmeted dude where the head size doesn't need to be 75% increased! Let the imagination of the hi-tech helmet do it's thing. The face shield has electronics in it, right? Right? 

Honestly, I was kind of on the fence with these guys. I made my own small-scale Plague team for the NEW BREED story which took years to build. One of the members is an Alley Viper and it's how I saw them (well, I did the best I could with Marauders availability for parts). In theory, I had the design of the Alley Viper so I really didn't feel the need for the big ones. But man, they looked good just as a lot of other Classifieds did. I buckled and bought two. Two is all I kind of need because... In the Zedd Universe, this is a very special classification that doesn't have hundreds of members. It's a select few and there aren't entire squads of these. Rather, the Alley Viper accompanies a regular Cobra Trooper or Viper squad. He's a specialist in urban warfare so he basically helps out and suggests strategies and tactics. 

In terms of big scale involvement, the Alley Vipers are a specialty trooper. Used for photos. No special story about them. I just really like the look and they don't suffer from the issues I have with several of the other figures. Someday, they might get their own VS story. But I haven't thought much about them in that regard.