OAFE: your #1 source for toy reviews
B u y   t h e   t o y s ,   n o t   t h e   h y p e .

what's new?
reviews
articulation
figuretoons
customs
message board
links
blog
FAQ
accessories
main
Twitter Facebook RSS      
search


shop action figures at Entertainment Earth

Zarana

GI Joe Classified Series
by yo go re

So how many people's attraction to angry punk-rock girls can be traced back to having a crush on this character as a kid?

Zarana is the sister of Zartan and wields the family's dangerous talent for deception and disguise. She works like a method actress to assume any identity to conduct missions of infiltration, sabotage, and espionage. Her very essence is a calculated play to make people underestimate her. The stories she weaves around her false identities are so intricate and her ability to lie is so effortless she can outwit any known technological method of truth detection.

I'm usually content to get my GI Joe Classified figures right off the shelf, but for Zarana, I preordered - don't want to miss Zartan's bitchy sister! And it seems like that was a pretty good choice, because while Walmart is busy restocking Croc Master, Target has jumped ahead to the cases with Falcon and apparently two characters who people want to buy. [Outback and Cover Girl. So yes. --ed.] You wanted Dusty, a Crimson Guardsman, or, heaven forbid, Zarana? Tough luck, chum! Have fun paying online prices plus shipping costs!

Zarana is wearing her 1985 best: shorty got them tattered denim jeans, the boots with the spurs... the Joe team is looking for her... While Zartan got an update to his look, Zarana goes back to the original 1980s layered shoulder armor, because why should the siblings be stylistically consistent when we've got old toys to mindlessly homage with no sense of design or effort? It is pretty cool that the left shoulder has some small spikes on top, while the right is smooth. Fred Aczon's sculpt is definitely detailed - pitted metal textures, seams on her pants, a zipper on her half-shirt, a thin chain dangling from her belt, lots of little things that wouldn't work on a smaller toy - but the design he had to work from is, at the end of the day, fundamentally the old one with some small tweaks, like putting textured armor over the top of her right shoulder, or removing the holster from the strap holding her shirt up. Very minor.

One thing that's definitely been changed is her hair, and it does exactly what we're always asking: keeps the feeling of the vintage toy intact while managing to modernize the style. Right out of the tray, she's got slightly long hair, harkening back to (but not directly imitating) the way she was animated on the cartoon. It's sort of like a Yolandi Visser cut that's started to grow out, and it looks great.

But then, just like Lady Jaye gave you a choice of her hair or her hat, Zarana has a second swappable hairdo: this one is inspired by the toy's mohawk, but is reimagined as something more akin to victory rolls up on top of her head. Yes, thank you, Lenny Panzica! This is the kid of design effort we appreciate! The hair doesn't always want to slide over her ears the way it should, but being soft PVC makes that easy to fix.

The last time we got a Zarana, it was... well, technically it was the Kre-O, but the last time we got a Zarana action figure it was the SDCC figure, which was a bit too pastel to really look nice. The Classified version is wearing dark blue jeans, with the pink tights she's wearing under them being a slightly different shade than he top - more of a dusty pink, while the shirt leans towards the lavender side. These more saturated colors make for a better toy than we got in Generation 3. Her haircuts are both an orange-salmon shade, because it wasn't until G2 that anyone decided her hair should be pink all the time. The yellow roots on the longer hair is the way her hair was highlighted in the cartoons.

Articulation is good. She's got a barbell head, balljointed neck, swivel/hinge shoulders on pectoral hinges, double-hinged elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, balljointed chest and waist, hips that are a balljoint mounted on a hinge, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, swivel boots, and swivel/hinge ankles. Her stats assign her a 3 in Mercenary, a 2 in Arrow Weapons, and 3's in Infiltration and Disguise. That last one feels like it should be higher, since she's all about acting, and giving her arrows for her Gear seems like a holdover from her brother, since he's an archer and she's never really been shown to use anything like that.

In addition to the totally mod hairstyles, Zarana gets a small blade to fit into the sheath on her right thigh, a larger, more techy blade that can be stuck into her brown backpack for storage, and an update of her venerable old "war saw" weapon: no longer is it jusst a blade on the end of a rifle stock; now it's a full rifle, with a removable clip, and the buzzsaw bit is attached underneath the way a grenade launcher or bayonet would be. It doesn't spin or anything, but it does get a silver app to make it stand out.

Zarana's design could stand to have been pushed a little further, to match Zartan's style, but I'm still glad I ordered this toy. Now we just need the line to stay alive long enough to get the forgotten sibling, Zandar. And maybe a Zanya, too.

-- 06/23/23


back what's new? reviews

 
Report an Error 

Discuss this (and everything else) on our message board, the Loafing Lounge!


shop action figures at Entertainment Earth

Entertainment Earth

that exchange rate's a bitch

© 2001 - present, OAFE. All rights reserved.
Need help? Mail Us!