Like, Shipwreck is an eternal favorite, but that dude doesn't really fit on any actual functional teams for me. Chuckles is a favorite but he's never on a team, he's on his own.
I feel like regular Ship only works as a support role character. BUT, there were some later versions of Ship where he sells the specialist operator look a lot better and that can work. But honestly, my ideal spot for Ship is to hang out on the Flagg. I think Chuckles works as part of a team, but just not with the team. He's advanced recon. He's calling targets and providing intel. But I always viewed it like he was doing that for a specific operations team, not for all of G.I. Joe.
You know, they sit Breaker, Low-Light, Heavy Duty, and Outback down and are like 'okay.... so we need to deal with this situation in South America before it gets worse.' And they're like 'yeah, okay..' 'No.. wait... there's more. We need Chuckles on this.' And everyone is just rolling their eyes and putting their heads back like 'ugh, this fuckin' guy....' becuase they know he can get the job done but is also a pain in the ass.
Funny thing is once they started doing the retro line they really did start to make "I could one and done this character" versions of most of the characters I loved as a kid, so building that team would be tough. Counting the upcoming / pipeline stuff, I'm really only a half-dozen or so away from having my dream list. Including early versions of characters I either lost or never had as a kid (I never got to have a Doc so Classified Doc is one of my absolute favorites.)
I am a couple of years younger than you, which makes this so interesting. Because I'm pretty far away from anything I'd call a perfect Joe team, let alone a full list of the ones I want most. I'm a v2 Sci-Fi, v2 Low-Light, v3(?) Stalker kind of guy. I need Spearhead and Ice Cream Soldier and shit. My best-favorite version of the Joes are very late '80s into the early '90s.
Also man, thinking about how important lore is to the characters - Larry wrote everyone except the ninjas very much as ciphers. You could layer your own story onto almost every single other Joe and base it on his six or eight lines on a file card. That's some efficient characterization and perfect for a toy line where you want the kids to make up their own stories.
No denying that Hama is crazy talented and, at least in the '80s and '90s, really knew what he was doing here. There was a design philosophy that he made and stuck with and it worked so well.
Speaking on Storm Shadow - he is legitimately my favorite character in the Joe lore. Woe to me because my favorite version of him is Ninja Force and Classified did that figure so dirty that it still counts as my greatest toy-related 'worst thing to ever happen to me.' I've begged and begged for a redo- but I don't think it's going to happen at this point.
I'm trying to think of another toy line I had as a kid that even had troop builders (besides Star Wars). I guess the Foot Clan for TMNT?
Yeah, Foot Soldiers were army builders for sure. I also never had more than one of those. Putties for Power Rangers, I guess. But I don't think Putties even got action figures until a fair bit later. Theoretically, the 5" Marvel stuff had army builders as well, like Sentinels. But good luck with that.
I love baddie Storm Shadow, so he's always on the Cobra side in my set-up, even though I know thats not comic canon (for the most part).
I don't like SS as a bad guy, but I do really like some of his later bad guy costumes. Genuinely love the look of that one costume he has where the Cobra symbol covers his face. They made a great 25A figure out of that look. I just used it as a different ninja, ala Ninja Force.
I still don't even have a Snake-Eyes yet cause I'm like, holding out for the ideal version for me, and I don't even know what that is anymore. I did the metal visor slats, i know that.
I'm a big SE fan and there's several versions of SE that I want. But I don't know what my IDEAL Snake is. I used to think it was probably v3. Now I think it might actually be a properly-articulated Ninja Force SE. BUT... I have a super super soft spot for that 'knight visor.' So I don't know, either.
