At first Snake Eyes was just a guy with an Uzi. Then in the cartoon he got a wolf named Timber and so they reissued his figure with the wolf. Then he became a ninja!
It's interesting that he wasn't really that popular in the cartoon shows. He was in the Sunbow series from the beginning, though instead of black he was colored dark blue with peach flesh colored hands. In the miniseries The MASS Device, Snake Eyes is in a mine to get some crystals but gets irradiated in the process. Timber shows up and takes him to an old blind who fixes Snake Eyes up.
There was nothing on his file card about not talking; I'm not sure if the comics or the show came up with that first. Like every good legend, though, the legend of Snake Eyes kept getting bigger and bigger. He wasn't just some commando with a machine gun. He was a ninja whose master was killed by Storm Shadow and he took a vow of silence until he killed him! In the comics it got even more complicated where he was maybe Scarlett's brother or half-brother or some damned thing.
His popularity in the comics was such that at one point he even got top billing in the title, so it was Snake Eyes and GI JOE. That's pretty impressive!
In the live action movies he was played by Ray Park, aka Darth Maul. I always thought it was stupid they put a mouth on his costume. Why does a guy who swore a vow of silence need a mask with a mouth? I could try to go through all the variations of the character, but there have been 68 of them at least!
I still have my original Snake Eyes figure, but at the moment he's in three pieces. I have the Night Force reissue from '97 on my desk. The original was the first Joe I ever got. Snake Eyes was my first Joe and Bumblebee my first Transformer; I really lucked out there.
Thanks I think to the comics, Snake Eyes's mortal enemy became Storm Shadow, the COBRA ninja. Because what terrorist organization doesn't need a ninja? I think it was in the same Toys That Made Us episode that comics writer Larry Hama talked about that he wanted Storm Shadow as a Joe from the beginning, but he was overruled and the character was part of COBRA until about 1988, when he was remade as a Joe with some lame explanation that he joined COBRA to be a mole.
But by the time of the live action movies he was a bad guy again and Snake Eyes's sworn enemy. But then I think in the second movie they team up when they found out Zartan killed their master, which made absolutely no sense.
In the Sunbow series Storm Shadow far more often tangled with Spirit, the Native American GI JOE. I'm not sure why because Spirit wasn't even a ninja.
He was in the comic book quite a bit as an enemy of Snake Eyes and then later an ally. Like I've said previously the comics really pushed that whole ninja thing more than the cartoon shows. Which was great for the popularity of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. With the newer comics I'm not sure where Storm Shadow's loyalties lie. Him and Snake Eyes have switched sides a couple of times since the 80s.
2 comments:
I remember Breaker was my first Joe and Windcharger my first TF...at least your firsts were popular characters with screentime; I think my two firsts had a combined 10 seconds of total time between the two cartoons and that includes five seconds of simply showing Windcharger's corpse in the movie lol
i never understood the appeal of the ninjas to the point where it overshadowed everything else, the aforementioned putting Snake Eyes' name above the main title of the comic. I wonder if it was something to do with Star Wars and swords; the ninjas being essentially replacement for Jedi/Sith since by that time Star Wars had gone on just to focus on droids and ewoks.
Snake Eyes was always one of my favorites !
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