I still think about the new Snake-Eyes movie and how it contrasts with the character I knew and loved as a kid. But I'm not going to say much about the movie. I liked it, but it makes me appreciate the character from my childhood more. Although I will say I was happy to see some horror elements in the movie. I loved the giant snake. Most people forget that a lot of weird shit happens in the GI Joe world. Especially that animated movie from way back when.
Snake-Eyes is a dude who no one truly knows, except maybe for Storm Shadow and Scarlett. He's always kept to himself, and up until recently I was under the impression that either he couldn't speak or he refused to speak. It turns out to be the latter, because in a recent issue of the comics (the continuation of the original by the same author), it is revealed that Snake Eyes talks to Storm Shadow, who he met during Vietnam.
They became really close, and Storm Shadow, then simply Tommy Arashikage, invited him home to learn how to be a ninja. He met a lot of bad people during that time, including Zartan and Firefly, but that's a story for another day. Snake-Eyes learned quickly and became a badass. But before that happened, he was in a horrible incident that blew his face off while he was trying to escape from the LZ where he and Stalker were taking fire.
So naturally he joined up with the Joes until his untimely death a few years ago. That's not a spoiler by this point, I don't think. There's a new guy who calls himself Snake-Eyes these days, but while they are similar, they're not the same.
That comic book up there? That was supposed to be the big reveal. All these masked characters are finally going to show their faces! But no, that didn't happen. Destro and Cobra Commander took off their iconic masks and put on different disguises. Meanwhile Snake-Eyes has a mask of his own, and it looks like he did before he got his face fried.
But they did eventually show Snake-Eyes without any mask on. See?
And that was after years of reconstructive surgery.
The point of me rambling about Snake-Eyes is that I remember when I was a kid, and I had the toys, and it was always fun to play wargames on hot summer days with water pistols. And what did I do?
Here's another thing you may have never noticed or have forgotten, but there was a brief era of time when GI Joe toys came with little paint packets that were supposed to be used for camouflage. I took the red ones, and can you guess what I did?
Yeah, I think you know what I did. I'm not one to feel nostalgic this late in life, but sometimes a little bit sneaks through the borders. I miss running around as a kid with this image painted on my arm and a water gun in my hand (along with a backup which I kept hidden in a back pocket, just in case).
I'll grant you, the ninja stuff wasn't my favorite part of the Joe franchise, but if there were rubber shuriken or throwing knives, you couldn't keep me away from that shit. And yeah, I loved TMNT and Karate Kid. What I really love, though is Cobra Kai on Netflix because those characters grew up with me, and now almost all of them have some kind of perspective on what they did back in the day.
I'll take my life now over then any day, but those were fun times.
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| Seriously. That movie had some crazy, crazy shit in it. |
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