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Bet this guy would drive your aunt nuts opening any wrapped gifts.
Ripper lives for two things: destruction and money. A lifelong criminal fueled by greed, with offenses dating back to nursery school, he's cracked open as many bank vaults as he has GI Joe tanks. He prides himself on using his years of stolen loot to fund and operate legitimate investment businesses.
What a cool detail! It totally explains why his stats are Mercenary 2, Bladed Weapons 3, Siegecraft 1, and Black Market Deals 2 - it's just a shame it only ever existed on Hasbro's old website before they shut it down. The marketing copy for him now is only a trimmed down version of his original 1985 filecard: "There are devils in Tasmania and Ripper is probably the meanest of them all. He is a professional criminal motivated by greed and a malignant dislike for the niceties of civilization - except for motorcycles and grape soda."
Ripper's head was sculpted by Fred Aczon, who did beautiful work. It's got the same features you expect from the character - mohawk, beard, glasses - but things are pushed further to look even better. Instead of being perfectly flat on top, the mohawk flows like real hair (and comes down lower in the back), and his beard is fuller and bushier. He's got a terrific lop-sided snarl and crooked teeth, and his brow is even crinkled just like the original was. His glasses may be removable, but they're the same squarish style he wore back then - red lenses and all.
The body demonstrates how well clever re-use can work to create different characters. Other than the new parts, like the belt with the wallet chain, the spiked arm bands, the harness on his chest, and the
necklace, you've seen his pieces before: the legs are Rock 'n Roll and the chest and arms are Copperhead. Neat! The only drawback to that choice is that Ripper's shirt is now tucked into his pants, rather than being a hot '80s crop top, the way it used to be. Quel dommage! The necklace he's wearing at first appears to be dog tags, but look closer and notice the gaps molded in the middle of each of them: those are razor blades! And so's the earring hanging from his right lobe. Vicious! And also, a new design element. His harness has two grenades on the right side and a knife sheath on the left, just like the vintage toy, but the spikes over top of the shoulders are new.
Ripper's jeans are a very dark blue, possibly to set them apart from Buzzer's, and his shirt has a nice camouflage. Like a lot of Classified figures, he's sporting new tattoos: a Reaper with a mohawk and a dripping scythe on his right shoulder, and a devilized version of himself on his left arm: horned head on the upper arm and claws raking down on the forearm. Whereas Buzzer's removable glasses didn't really serve any purpose, if you take Ripper's off, you'll see he has a teardrop tattoo below his left eye and perhaps the year's most inexplicable paint app: his right pupil appears to be a tiny, tiny smiley face, like Charles Dance in Last Action Hero. What the what! That is not anything he's ever had before, or even a reference to something old. What an outlandish inclusion! We'd love to know what inspired that.
Articulation is the same as the rest of the figures get:
swivel/hinge ankles, swivel shins, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, hips that are a balljoint mounted on a hinge, balljointed waist, swivel/hinge wrists, double-hinged elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders, pectoral hinges, hinged and balljointed neck, and a balljointead head. His chest joint was pretty stiff to get moving, and it's at least a little bit tough to bend his right arm because there are spikes everywhere you'd normally hold it. The hinge in his right wrist goes up and down, while the one in his left goes side to side, so he has an easier time holding his weapon.
The classic Ripper just used a pretty normal Jaws of Life spreader (though really, you'd expect him to use the cutter), but that device has been given an upgrade here: rather than
relying on a backpack to provide power and hydraulics to work the thing, it's now mounted on its own self-contained engine, like he cobbled it together from a leaf blower or something. The arms on the front actually move, opening and closing in unison, and the handle in front is hinged so you can find a nice pose for him to hold the thing. His more familiar weapon was a rifle with a gigantic can-opener bayonet, so he's also got that, plus there's a wicked knife in the sheath on his chest, and pistol that's been modded with a knife blade in the barrel. Dude is really into making his guns sharp. RIP Ripper: you would have loved Squall in Final Fantasy 8.
Buzzer was mediocre - a mid-tier Classified figure to be sure. But Ripper's great, with a lot of fun new details in the sculpt as well the accessories. So now we wait for the tie-breaker, Torch, to find out whether the Dreadnoks are overall winners or not.
-- 04/26/24
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