The Little Differences: Quick Kick and Serpentor G.I. JOE Custom Kitbashes

"It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same $#!t over there that we got here, but it's just – it's just there it's a little different."

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The Little Differences is back and today's entries are G.I. JOE Quick Kick and the Cobra Emperor Serpentor. Quick Kick features one very small improvement that may make some people a little nervous to do themselves, but the payoff is well worth it. Whereas, Serpentor requires a little less skill and a little more bashing.

When we finally got Quick Kick in the "Pyramid of Darkness" DVD Battle Pack, he looked just about perfect from his skin tone and muscled Bruce Lee like torso sculpt to his bare feet and accessories. But there was one "glaring" problem...his eyes. They were lidless and the pupils were so small he looked like he had just seen a ggggghost.

To remedy the situation, I used a very fine 2/0 brush, dipped just the tip in Reaper Pure Black paint, and carefully added an upper eye lid to each eye and dotted the center of each eye to create a larger pupil.

Now he'll never take his eyes off his opponent, even when he bows. (Bonus cool points if you can guess what movie I'm paraphrasing.)

Serpentor has never been a favorite of mine. Yes, Larry Hama somehow figured out how to make him cool in the comics, but that annoying "This I Command" crap the cartoon writers came up with grates on my ear drums to this day. So I almost didn't even bother with this bash but since I had all the parts, I figured, what the heck.

You'll need the helmet, staff, "bra," and "back piece" from the "Arise Serpentor Arise" DVD Battle Pack Serpentor and the body, cape, belt, sword, and shoulder snakes from the single carded version. Removing the "back piece" from the DVD figure is the trickiest part of  this bash and it took several attempts where I would let him sit in a cup of boiling water and then try to pull it free from the back hole. The glue was really strong so I eventually pulled it out enough and just cut it off with an exacto making sure to leave enough of a backpack stub so I could later glue it in place. I painted the "bra" Reaper Leaf Green which matches the other green areas on the figure very well.

He doesn't look exactly like the original vintage figure but he's a whole lot closer and much better looking than any standard released version.

Once again, I hope you see how the little things you can do to your figures can make all the difference in their appearance. Until next week this is eric@insidious1.com signing off.