Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do action figure companies. So, with my Star Wars Black Series and Marvel Legends collecting dropping off, GI JOE Classified has stepped up to fill those gaps and help Hasbro to keep sucking out all my monies. There have just been so many quality releases out of this line and they just keep coming! Today I’m checking out Classified Shipwreck, and some may be surprised to find that this is another character where I did not own the vintage RAH figure when I was a kid. Indeed, the first time I added a Shipwreck figure to my collection would have been as an adult collector with the 25th Anniversary release.

Shipwreck comes in the usual plastic free packaging, including a cardboard footlocker to stow his gear. I love these boxes and I’ve been keeping them for now, but I think eventually they will need to go. Maybe I’ll just flatten them all out and tuck them somewhere. Anyway, it’s hard for me to put a finger on why I never owned the vintage version of Shipwreck. He was a 1985 release, so he turned up on shelves just at the cusp of when I was starting to lose interest in toys, but he was so prominently featured in the Sunbow cartoon. Maybe it was because I was never a big fan of the character, and I think I used to just use Cutter as a stand in. Anyway, let’s scrape the barnacles off this box and see what we’ve got!

True to form, Shipwreck hits all the beats of the vintage figure with his blue trousers, lighter blue short sleeved shirt, and black gloves. The trousers here are textured to look more like jeans and less like a uniform, which I guess fits in line with his weird freelancer Sunbow backstory, but not so much with his official filecard. There’s some excellent detail sculpted into his tiny belt buckle, and some sharp naval tatts on his forearms, as well as the insignia on his shoulders. Like the RAH figure, you get a plunging neckline, as his shirt is unbuttoned at the top, but here you actually get to see his hairy chest which is printed on. He has a belt rig with a scabbard for his larger gun and a hook for his boarding hook. There’s also a functional holster strapped to his right leg, which was just a sculpted bit on the RAH figure.

The head sculpt looks great, giving Shipwreck the look of a rough-and-tumble seadog. The beard and mustache sport some nice detail and the paint is pretty well, with only a few bits where the brown paint comes up short of the beard sculpt. He has a strong nose and somewhat sunken cheeks and one eyebrow is raised to give him a little character. This feels more like an update to the RAH character as opposed to the Sunbow one, and I’m all for that! With Super7 doing the Sunbow stuff, I really love when Hasbro does their own thing with these guys. The hat is removable and the hair goes with it, but you get a second hair piece if you want to display him sans hat. The secondary hair looks great, but I’ll likely always display him with the hat on.

Naturally, Shipwreck comes with his parrot Polly, which has no articulation, but is a fantastic little sculpt with some vibrant green and yellow coloring and some sharp paint on his tiny face and beak. They also gave him a peg leg, which is I think is hilarious, in a kind of morbid way. It gives the little figure so much character and poses so many questions as to how and why. It also serves the practical function of allowing him to be pegged into the hole on Shipwreck’s arm. You also get a coil of rope that can be worn over Shipwreck’s shoulder and it has a peg hole if you’d prefer to perch Polly up there. This is some really clever and fun design beats on Hasbro’s part and I love it!

The holster on his leg rig stores an automatic pistol, which is nothing terribly special, but a decent little sculpt nonetheless. The RAH figure didn’t come with a sidearm like this, but there was one sculpted onto the leg, so it’s nice for the Classified version to be able to make use of it.

The anchor is a stand in for the original figure’s boarding hook, which is an interesting update and certainly adds to the naval theme. The ring that allows it to hang off the belt can also be used to attach a string if you want to complete the look. Personally, I’d like to think he just uses this thing as a melee weapon and beats the shit out of Cobras with it while whistling a jaunty maritime tune.

The other weapon lifted from the RAH figure’s inventory is the percussion pistol, which I always thought was meant to be a sawed-off shotgun. I blame the 25th Anniversary figure for that. It is indeed an old-timey design with a double barrel and a vintage style hammer mechanism. Probably not the most reliable and efficient weapon to bring into battle, but it sure is distinctive and adds more to the figure’s naval theme and I dig it a lot. There’s also a sculpted lanyard loop coming off the handle grip.

The designers definitely had some fun with this figure, and for a character that I never warmed up to, I really love this one a lot. He walks that fine line between being a fairly credible military-style figure while infusing just enough distinctive character and not being too goofy. All the accessories gel so wonderfully and he’s tons of fun to pose and play around with. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this one is another direct hit for Classified and another reason why this is my favorite line to collect right now!