So many great Classified figures have been pouring in and I’m so woefully far behind. I could probably review a different Classified figure every day for the next two weeks and still not be close to current. And with so many awesome figures waiting their turn, I decided to just randomly grab one off the stack of recent arrivals. And the winner is Quick Kick!

And we are officially back to window boxes! Now, I didn’t totally hate the enclosed boxes and the cardboard foot lockers were kind of neat. But, I will not miss having to go through those tissue baggies with a magnifying glass to make sure I’m not throwing out an accessory. Here we get everything laid out in the tray, a great look at the actual figure, and even some fantastic character art too! I’m pretty torn on Quick Kick as a character. Some of that comes from me preferring the shooty side to GI JOE as opposed to the Ninjas and Kung Fu stuff. But with Quick Kick, I was just not a big fan of how the Sunbow cartoon treated his character as a wisecracking actor obsessed with old movies and doing bad impressions. It’s especially unfortunate when you consider how interesting the figure’s File Card was regarding his mixed heritage being the inspiration for his martial arts training. It’s also worth noting that 1985 was an absolute banger year for JOE figures and Quick Kick kind of got pushed down on my want list, buried by a lot of other figures. But I got him eventually and I definitely had fun with him, giving him a very different personality than the cartoon version. So, let’s see how the Classified version turned out…

As has been the trend lately, Quick Kick sticks pretty close to the original RAH figure, which itself wasn’t too far off from what we saw on the cartoon. Quick Kick’s uniform consists entirely of a pair of black martial arts pants with some gray printing on the sides, a gray belt with some sculpted pouches, two gray wrist cuffs, and a shuriken-studded red baldric. He’s showing more skin than any JOE so far with some wonderfully sculpted muscles in the upper body and newly sculpted bare feet. The printed pattern on the gray side panels of his pants is crisp and you get a little silver paint for the belt buckle. The baldric is the biggest departure here, as both the RAH figure and the cartoon design had it running straight down from his left shoulder and into his pants. Here it runs across his chest and back and under his right arm. I think this design makes more sense, especially since it’s actually worn by the figure and not just part of the body sculpt. There’s some stitching sculpted into the sides, and I really love how the shuriken are sculpted to look like they are tucked into pockets, rather than just stuck on magically.

You get two head sculpts to choose from, the first being a neutral expression, and I really like what they did with it. There’s a lot of personality in this portrait. It leans into the cartoon likeness a bit, but still manages to be its own thing. The hair is sculpted separately from the head with his head band included as part of it. There’s a little slop between the hair strands and the white band, but you have to get in pretty close to see it.

The second head is good too, but I would have much rather had something close to the artwork on the box over this one. He’s got one eye brow arched a bit more than the other and his lips are kind of pursed like he’s about to whistle. “You know how to whistle, don’t you Quick Kick? You just put your lips together and blow.” Yeah, I’m not sure they were going for the Humphrey Bogart reference. It kind of looks like he’s out shopping for a car and the dealer just told him the price and it’s a lot more than he was hoping for. Or maybe he just hit his pinkie toe on the coffee table and he’s waiting to feel it.

The articulation in this line has been consistently great and that’s certainly the case with Quick Kick. He features the usual double hinges in the elbows and knees, swivels in the biceps and thighs, hinged pegs for the wrists, along with hinges and lateral rockers in the ankles. You get a swivel in the waist and the ab crunch hinge isn’t terribly jarring to look at despite his bare upper body. The neck is ball jointed both top and bottom and you get the lateral crunches in the shoulders, along with the regular rotating hinges, and the hips are ball jointed. He is super fun to play with and even has a very nice balance. Quick Kick comes with three sets of hands: Fists, karate chop hands, and accessory holding hands.

The RAH figure came with a black backpack that you could stick his sword through, but here it’s been recolored to red to match the baldric, and it comes with two slots for swords, because Classified Quick Kick has double the sword count! The swords are twins and have some great sculpted detail on the pommels and grips. The blades are painted silver and have slightly curved blades and narrow fullers.

He also has four loops on the back of his belt to hold two sets of nunchucks. It works well and reminds me of a Michelangelo figure from Playmates TMNT line. The chucks themselves have pommels and grips that match the swords, and I thought that was a cool little touch. The chains are plastic, and while that’s not usually ideal, the plastic is very pliable and doesn’t look like it’ll suffer from stress marks are breakage. They pose well and I’m happy with the way these turned out.

Two final accessories include a thrown shuriken effect piece and a Fudgie Bar. The first is cast in translucent blue plastic with the shuriken itself painted silver. I like what they were going for here, but I don’t think the effect works all that well. At least, to me it doesn’t really look like he’s throwing it, but your mileage may vary. The partially unwrapped Fudgie Bar is really well done and they even sculpted the little breakaway cubes that make up the candy bar. It’s interesting that Hasbro is now throwing cartoon specific accessories in with Classified, as that’s been Super7’s wheelhouse, but it’s fun that they did.

Yes, Quick Kick was pretty far down my list of anticipated figures, but I think it’s a credit to how great the line is that I was always going to buy him anyway. And I am sure glad he did, because he turned out great. The minor changes made to his design work really well and the fact that he has places to store both sets of weapons is a big plus in my book. And he’s already got his buddy Bazooka here, plus Hasbro just dropped a preorder for Alpine, so he’s going to be in great company on my shelf!