Shifters

For the bulk of my childhood, GI Joe was a toy and nothing more. The filecards offered information enough to paint a decent picture of the figure, but there were no cartoons and very few comics floating around.  So who could blame me for using the figures  a little more... creatively?

With influences like Star Wars/Trek and superhero flicks, Joes became placeholders for more fantastical characters. Tomax was a Jedi. Charbroil was The Flash. Hydro-Viper was a mutant. Balrog was a vampire hunter. Zartan was the vampire. Out of these very disparate influences a common thread of narrative emerged for me and my buddies. We even gave it a name. Shifters.

It was in the wake of The Matrix, where kung fu and bullet time was very much in vogue. I wanted to incorporate superhuman powers into our protagonists, giving us free reign to push the envelope on action sequences. All of a sudden, your character could come out on top of overwhelming odds, leap vast distances, perform all sorts of acrobatic feats and move at inhuman speeds. And if that wasn’t fun enough, he could transport himself to parallel universes.

The gimmick here all started where, at a certain point in history, Cobra became a world power. It’s dominion was that of North America and an underground resistance movement was spearheaded by the former members of the G.I. Joe team and their followers. Rob’s, Al’s and my protagonists were Cobra enforcement operatives tasked with hunting down and brining to justice those who would seek to threaten Cobra’s rule. The hunt culminates in thwarting Conrad Hauser’s attempt on the life of the supreme Cobra leader. But instead of turning him over, Hauser convinces them to fly to the site that once was Cobra Island where the decisive battle between the forces of G.I. Joe and Cobra was fought. Amid the twisted, moss-covered wreckages, they find the remains of Cobra’s final weapon – a mass-brainwashing device, capable of using satellite networks to subvert the minds of the nation. The only ones unaffected were those on Cobra Island. At the same time, deep Cobra moles in key positions coordinated their efforts along with the mass-brainwashing to install themselves as captains of industry, ministers, military leaders and even the president. On returning to the continental US, G.I. Joe find themselves labelled as traitors and outlaws.

Sound familiar? Well, they say there isn’t an original idea out there. But I was playing this out back in ’99, okay! So IDW and Paramount can ki$$ ma @$$!

Around about that time, Cobra has grown wise to this subversion of their top agents and bombs them to kingdom come. But they survive...

As a sort of impending death, knee-jerk, the three have used their latent shifter powers to escape into a kind of limbo. There they meet their handler, Tyrell, who drops a few bombshells.

They are a trio of Shifters super beings able to move through the multiverse of parallel dimensions. They are each hundreds of years old. They were tasked with hunting down reality-hopping baddies. They discovered something that made all three elect to induce amnesia within themselves. But fate brought them back together.

So they get back into the saddle, and for a brief time, this was the best time I ever had with my action figures. Possibly the best time I ever had with my two best childhood friends. The possibilities were endless. From the most conventional military settings to the most far-fetched fantasy world. There was a roster of recurring

 characters, a shadowy inter-dimensional organisation pulling the strings, journeys of personal discovery, love won... and lost. And through it all, three individuals that weren’t merely custom characters. They were our ideal protagonists, not our interpretations of another author’s work, not existing within predetermined rules and limitations. They were pieces of us, to shape as we pleased. Our influences in both character and plot could never be described as original. Far from it, we emulated any and all action/sci-fi/fantasy influences that took our fancy. I even bought a strobe light to play out a similar scene to the opening of Blade, you know, the one in the club, where blood sprays from the sprinkers? But the culmination of all these influences meant we were creating something superior – a culmination of all of them. It was a play pattern without limitation in that we could be in outer space one week, in an ancient civilisation the next and STILL maintain continuity and character development. It was unlike anything to come before, unlike anything that came after. It was a fantastical time. Possibly even a swan song for my friends and my imaginative life. Since then my pursuit of this hobby has been a lot like chasing rainbows.