Brian Flynn made my dreams come true. Okay — Super7, the toy company he founded in 2001 — made my dreams come true with the reveal of its brand new wave of ReAction+ G.I. Joe figures. And, embarrassingly, Mr. Flynn bore witness to my regression into childlike glee during what was meant to be a professional one-on-one interview. What was I supposed to do upon learning that Pythona and Big Lob were finally getting 3.75" action figures — not clutch my desktop monitor for dear life while struggling to maintain a steady breathing pattern?
For those of us who grew up in the late '80s, spending seemingly every Friday night begging our parents to rent G.I. Joe: The Movie — so much so that maybe your mom actually asked the cashier how much it would cost to just buy the damn VHS tape — the latest drop from Super7 is a big deal. Why? Because of the [checks yojoe.com] 13 new characters introduced in the feature, only two of them never made the leap from animation to the aisle. Those were: Big Lob, the Joe-in-training who spoke almost exclusively in sports metaphors; and Pythona, the deadly emissary from Cobra-La whose jaw-dropping one-woman raid on Cobra's Terror Drome opens the film.
Finally — after a wait of 14,038 days — Super7's fifth wave of ReAction+ figures corrects this oversight. This moment comes as part of a larger trend, a reevaluation of G.I. Joe: The Movie and it's place in the canon and in the fandom.
Upon its release in 1987, G.I. Joe: The Movie was regarded as a flop, as a drastic departure from the line's military origins. It maintained that reputation for roughly 13,400 days (stay tuned to Pop Heist, because I will be breaking down those numbers in a future piece) — and then the film's rep mutated. Over the past year and a half, the creepy denizens of Cobra-La have returned in print and in plastic — Pythona included. Golobulus tried to take over Earth in 1987 and failed. But 2025? I, for one, welcome my new snake-y overlords.
I had a chance to chat with Brian Flynn of Super7 about this moment, and this new quartet of figures (which also includes Snake Eyes and Destro in their arctic looks, from the opening act of G.I. Joe: The Movie). My gasping for air has been edited out.
Brett White: Where does Super7 start when it plans new lines of Joe figures?
Brian Flynn: Beginning in the ReAction line, the very first thing we did was like, "Okay, here's what the cartoon looked like at three and three quarter." [At the time] that was completely foreign [to Hasbro]. Their deal was, "We'll just update the original figures. That's what people want." And, well, yes and no. People do want those, but quite frankly, if you're on the collector side, you have that [3.75" figure] eight times already and you can buy it on eBay. You don't need it. So how do we do something new? Up to that point, nobody was doing anything with the old content. They weren't looking backwards. So what we really did was focus several years of ReAction — and to a degree then Ultimates!, but really in ReAction — looking backwards at all the moments in G.I. Joe fandom that hadn't been touched, whether it's Kwinn from issue #2 of the ['80s] comic or —
Or the original Baroness design.
Exactly, the original Baroness; what's happening in DIC versus Sunbow; what's happening in the comic books. Our point of view as fans is, we experienced it through all these things, so they're all on an equal playing field.
The initial waves of ReAction figures were very focused on the characters and designs from those first three mini-series, "M.A.S.S. Device" through "Pyramid of Darkness." When did Super7 decide to move forward to 1987, to G.I. Joe: The Movie?
Quite frankly, where we are with the line plan is, had we not been able to switch to O-ring, this is where we would have been in ReAction. So we were able to make a break and then jump over and go make O-rings.
For the movie, it's fascinating to me that we were able to keep the last [O-ring] wave completely secret till the day it launched. Normally people would be hacking the back end of Target and figuring it out. And it was shocking to me that no one spilled the beans on this one yet. You know now that we say that, somebody's gonna be like, "All right, well, that's a challenge. Now I'm gonna get on the next wave."
That wave included Jinx and Falcon, two characters that had pretty iconic figures in 1987 tied to the movie. You had to reinvent the wheel a little with the ReAction+ figures. I imagine when you're designing these new versions, you're probably not looking at what Hasbro did in the '80s.
Yes, deliberately avoiding what they did. You don't need me to remake what you already have. I need to give you something that you don't have, something that is going to be additive to your collection, not duplicative to your collection. We really focus on that. So if somebody's like, "Where's the all-black Snake Eyes?" It's like, "eBay is your friend."
I love how faithful this line is to the source material, which is something I've always wanted. When I was a kid, I got my Jinx figure and wrapped a tiny G.I. Joe logo decal around her thigh, because her figure didn't have that and that was how she looked in the movie. So when I saw that the new ReAction+ Jinx had that GI Joe logo around her thigh, I was like, "They get it."
And we did the different head and everything. Here's the Jinx you needed, not the jinx you got, to a degree. That's probably the most direct — but for the most part, we try to stay away from what you already have. That's why it was like, no, Cobra-La is really important for us.
And that brings us to Wave 5 of ReAction+, which includes the first ever original sculpt Pythona and Big Lob figures in the 3.75" scale. One Cobra-La character, one Joe, both prominently featured in the 1987 movie — and they never got action figures. Why do you think that was?
That would be a conversation for the people that worked there. I can try to hazard a guess. If you think about what they were doing back then, it's a year plus to get things to market. They were developing toys, I think, still fairly independent of whatever was going on in the content. And I think by the time the content came out — if you talk to old people and they talk about how movie licensing used to be, it's like, even if a movie is popular and I license it, the toy doesn't come out for another year.
The Star Wars Early Bird conundrum.
Yeah. So it may be a thing of, like, they were like, "We would have loved to have done stuff, but a year from now, is anyone going to care?" If you talk about '87, they're building stuff for '88 at that point. They're probably line planning for '89. By '89 they're getting into some goofy stuff already. They were probably like, "That was cool. We're moving on."
So when you're approaching Pythona and Big Lob — two characters that people have wanted in this scale, in this style, for almost 40 years — you don't have previous versions to compare or live up to. You're starting at the ground floor. Okay, both of them have convention exclusive figures that are incredibly rare and go for $400, which I don't count —
— And they don't look like how you want them to look.
When we were talking about this, the amount of time that we spent arguing internally about whether the rivets are silver or painted is mind boggling. And in the end, my opinion is that they have to be unpainted — even though, technically, once you get to, like, year three [of the '80s toyline], they start getting painted. That's because when you see it, and you see that rivet, it takes you back to your childhood right away. So if you can't see the rivet, if all of a sudden the rivet is painted — in Pythona's case, purple — it doesn't feel as much like a vintage figure, even though that's technically accurate. So a lot of it is really getting to the psychology of how you remember these toys and making sure they live up to that.
Pythona and Big Lob, their body molds are so different from anything the line had done up to 1987. Big Lob is a tall, skinny dude, and all G.I. Joes are kind of chunky.
Especially in the beginning, they were reusing tooling and swapping. We have the luxury at this point that we don't have to live within those limitations. So it's always that fine line between what does your brain remember it being like versus what it actually was, and we have to play that game all the time. So these figures, in a lot of ways, are better than what they were, but they can't be too detailed, because then they don't feel accurate to what they are. Because when you go back and look without the lens of nostalgia on them, you're like, "Oh, these are kind of chunky."
It's sort of like if you go back to Star Wars, those first Star Wars figures are patently atrocious, quite frankly. It's like, don't sculpt R2-D2, just stick a sticker on it. But how you remember it is different. Forty years later of toy manufacturing, everybody's expectations are much higher, whether they know it or not. So if you actually make it really accurate to the old figures, people are like, "This is shit."
So it's finding that fine line. In this case, this Big Lob is going to be taller, because he should be, and you expect that scale differential now as an adult that you would not have gotten back in the day.
The card backs are as iconic as the figure. That image that sits next to the figure, it becomes the definitive depiction of that character. What work goes into creating that art?
We work with different artists. So if you talk about the ReAction line, the entire ReAction line was painted by Jason Edmiston, who's obviously very, very well known. He's done a lot of stuff for us for the years, but the reason that he did that line was he was like, "Those card back paintings were what made me want to start painting." On the ReAction+, we have a different artist that's working on all this stuff. We do a bunch of loose sketches, and then once we kind of get there, you paint it up to look like what it needs to deliver for that fan.
And then there are the file cards, which are equally important.
It's funny — we have a copywriter that we work with on a lot of them, plus there's some internal copywriter guys that throw their hat in the ring. There's some funny stuff that happens in there. You still have to make it fun. People get so serious about this stuff that you lose the plot. And I think that's where we come in.
And I thank y'all for that. This stuff is supposed to be fun. I think G.I. Joe: The Movie was maligned for so long because it's so over-the-top and fun.
And I think the movie is being reappraised. You have enough companies now that have the license, and they're exploring all that there is. They're celebrating all the history of G.I. Joe, where Hasbro only celebrated the toy history because that was their job. Their job wasn't the TV job and their job wasn't the comic job. It just didn't come up on their radar, per se. I think that is why we really started diving into it, then the comics started diving into it. And I think as that's happened, everybody has sort of churned it all back up and said, "No, now we're going to talk about all of it rather than just the plastic."
Super7's G.I. Joe ReAction+ Wave 5 is now available. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Stay tuned to Pop Heist for more on Pythona, Cobra-La, and the resurgence of G.I. Joe: The Movie.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
