The Corps!

Poor man's G.I. Joe. Transformers had the Gobots,

The price sticker on the front of the card was R6.99 

Trips me out. 

Note I diligently crossed out the two Gobots I owned at that stage. As if I would one day own them all.

I don't.


and G.I.Joe had The Corps! No, I'm not expressing my excitement. The exclamation point is actually part of the name. They hit the scene in '86, back in the heyday of 3 3/4 inch plastic anti-terrorism. They were and still are made by the company that brought us the original and best Super Soaker - Lanard. While the Joes were always my number one toy, The Corps! had their time in the sun in my collection. I got my first Corps! figure in the late 80's, he was a black-clad ninja with a crossbow and backpack of arrows and molded blades.

Known to me only as 'Black Ninja' this guy was one cold killa...
That is the original backpack by the way. 

It was before the Joe ninja explosion and for a wobbly-toothed five-year old with an 80's hangover, ninjas were the bizness. I played the hell out of that toy for...

... a day. Then it disappeared. All that's left is the backpack.

My next two Corps! came in a two-pack card. Bought for me by my buddy and neighbor, Justin Segers for my 8th birthday. Here are the two criminals:

You know the mark of a knock-off toy is the cardback not having colour. But very impressively these guys did have dossiers. And a two pack? Can't beat that. Interestingly they were carded one on top of each other, so like a 'snip strip' of Nik Naks, you could cut it in half and perhaps give it to a pair of twins for their birthday?! Whew. Long caption

Large Sarge and Hammer. My lonely only Corps! guys. For some reason, I refused to call Hammer Hammer. I guess the compulsion to shout 'Hammer Time' when he was on the job put me off. Whatever the reason, he became remembered as Fox. When I was about 11 or 12, G.I. Joe dried up. The Corps! however, gained momentum. Maybe it was the absence of any real competition, but Lanard started pressing some very decent vehicles.

I longed for the 'Ambulance' and 'Troop Carrier'. Very real world, and quite obviously designed in a later era. But alas, they were the two that never appeared locally

APC's, attack helicopters, trucks, re-release of their original tank and boat from the '80s, and this beaut -

With opening doors and bonnet, and glass windscreens, it was easily superior to my VAMP.

Back then, the closest thing one could get to a Hummer, was the G.I. Joe Hammer. Well, not really. I never saw one on shelves in good ol' SA, and was never partial to its over-designed look with no windscreens. So this toy got a lotta love from me and my pals. But more importantly, it came with three new recruits to give Sarge and Fox some company.

Their names are indelibly burned into my memory. They were the bad guys who gave Joe a decent run for their money. I distinctly remember being very off Cobra for a time. I wanted a believable, real-world group of terrorists and mercenaries for the Joes to fight, not a bunch of weirdos with a reptile fetish. These five hombres were the ticket.

From left to right: Large Sarge, Fox, Carlos Duarte, Boomerang Billy, Razor Ramon. All bastards.

Fox was the sniper; Large Sarge the explosives and heavy weapons guy; Boomerang Billy hailed from Down Under who came with a backpack loaded with his signature weapons; Razor Ramon (another dude I renamed, good thing too. Lanard called him 'Tony Tanner', ugh.) -he was a sadist and master of torture techniques; and finally Carlos Duarte, The Skorpion With A "K". That was his name. He was a South American warlord with ties to all things illicit from arms to drugs to slavery. For warlord with ties to the arms trade, it was most conspicuous that he had no thumbs, but Lanard never did crack robust enough plastic with their o-ring figures...

The thumbs didn't last long. But many good men and women died by those stunted hands. Bastard.

So these figures were the bane of Shockwave, Scoop and M.P. Man's life (see this article).

Then, flash forward a bit and my buddy Rob was tooling around in Tygervalley Mall and found two packs that together held pretty much every o-ring Corps! figure and included a jeep. Probably for less that R80 too. What they lack in thumb strength, they make up for in value! So either Carlos had a bevvy of reinforcements or these figures were my new protagonists. And for a short time, they were. Well, two of them. Before I had a Dragonfly and the original Wild Bill, I had to make do with the horrible blue and white Battle Corps version (Battle Corps was in fact a G.I. Joe subset. Confusing). It was not a very good figure. So a Corps! figure became the gunslinging chopper jockey on my missions. And he even came with a Native American sidekick tracker and co-pilot. And their names? Shooter Sam and Tracker Tom. Uh huh. Good for a laugh for sure.

You can't fight it. Joe had Spirit and Wild Bill, so I guess Lanard had the green light to do some Cowboy and Indian Shit.
And both of them have CORPS! printed on their uniforms. With the '!' . Seriously?!

And then G.I. Joe came back into my life under the guise of the second generation, new sculpt era. I greeted them with enthusiasm and within a year vowed to never buy them again. Not about to be left out of the new wave of action figure furora, The Corps! brought in their new wave of T-crotched badboys.

I often like to touch up figures by painting the or adding a wash or drybrush, these figures had it factory applied. The effect was marked. other figures suddenly seemed very toy like and plasticky. These guys looked grizzled, dirty and fucking hard. They immediately became the principal protagonists at gametime. There were twelve of them, so the no-brainer team name was the Dirty Dozen. Al, Rob and I split the team three ways and set about naming and imbuing the members with life.

Bear, Flash, Kurt and Kite were Al's;

Rob used Eagle-Eye, Howlin' Harry, Paddy and Viper;

And my boys were Dutch, Bronson, Porkins, and Snake.

They were soldiers of fortune, flying around the world dealing death for anyone who could meet their price. Typically their operations consisted of ambushing armed convoys, or sneaking up on fortifications and... stealing stuff. But they were a force to be reckoned with, and for a good while they held the mantle of the most played-with toys in my collection. Good times.

The Corps! have, like G.I. Joe, ditched their o-ring design, and still put out the T-crotch figures with some retooling here and there, but the bodies of the original twelve are still quite prominent. But no iteration of these figures beat the original, dirty, grizzled ones. I am grateful of the day Rob and I walked up the road to the local supermarket where all four of the original three-figure packs were available. They included tonnes of authentic weapons, including smoke and frag grenades, mortar launchers, pistols, sniper rifles, knives and an offroad bike. Each pack set us back only R20. Unreal.

The sad devolution from awesome to okay to WTF. Glad I caught the A-game before the neon palette started seeing some action