>>10008261I am not denying that these features kept the line alive, but the toys were inferior to the earlier ones. I feel the same way about Power of the Force 2 with the Star Wars toys. I loved those action figures but as an adult I can recognize that these two truths do not negate each other: 1) they had to turn Star Wars into "extreme rock and roll muscle men in space" to sell the toys to kids my age because that's what we wanted our action figures to look like, and 2) the toys were terrible representations of the characters and brand and they do not appeal to me as an adult.
I had tons of fun playing with my random candy barf color GI Joes with their press-on play doh, sound boxes, and color-changing pollution damage when I was a kid, but I outgrew those and the characters and designs that stuck with me were the classic ones that I saw in the cartoons. Turning GI Joe into a gimmick line kept it on store shelves for a very long time and it's probably why the brand still exists today, but with my adult hindsight I feel like I can say with confidence hat some of the toys were better than others, and that some hold up better than others.
Hell, Sigma 6 leaned pretty hard into the sci-fi aesthetic and was in a style and scale unlike anything that came before it, but even as an adult I loved those figures and actually ended up buying a few for myself. They were big enough that the spring loaded rockets didn't look too out of place, and the electronic gimmicks had gotten small enough that they didn't have to take up absurd amounts of space like in the original 4" line. It doesn't hurt that the 25th Anniversary joes were out around the same time for the oldheads, either.
