Crystal Ball

And now, please rise for the most-hated GI Joe character ever. You know the process by which Joes were created: the team would determine what roles were needed, the artists would design the characters, and the designs were given to Larry Hama to create names and personalities for. Nearly 500 figures in Generation 1, and that was the process for all of them. Well, maybe all but one. According to longstanding fan-community rumor, Crystal Ball was created by Stephen "pre-teen sewer orgy" King; the story goes that King's son Owen was a huge GI Joe fan and so somehow got his dad to ask Hasbro to put "a magician" on the team, something the company was apparently willing to do for the most famous author in the world at the time. The figure went through the normal design process, and Hama wrote a filecard for him, but it went unused, so the common belief is that King wrote the new bio himself - with his payment for the job being that fellow 1987 release Sneak Peek would have Owen's name and birthplace (and face, on the card art). Crystal Ball has never had a name revealed before, but this toy is officially "Richard 'Crystal Ball' King" - honoring both his creator's real name and his most famous pseudonym. On Crystal Ball's card art, the man looked kind of like Vincent Price. He only appeared in a single comic story back then, but they made him a little meatier, with the white parts of his hair turning into Wolverine wings. Although he was shown driving the Cobra Buzz Boar in its commercial, he wasn't included in its animated segment. When IDW got the license, they reimagined him as a cross between Svengali or Rasputin and Alan Moore. The Classified version is most like the original card art, young and thin, though still with some gray in his slicked-back hair. He's sculpted with a sinister grin, half snarl judging by the wrinkles on either side of his nose, and there are streaks of dark paint coming down off his eyes that kind of make him feel reminiscent of Zartan; is that an intentional choice? Are they trying to tell us something? To draw some connection between them? Or are these curtains just blue? If you look beneath his pencil mustache, you'll see that his canine teeth seem slightly more prominent than usual, suggesting fangs. Back in the day, Crystal Ball wore a short-sleeved brown shirt with fur trim around the neck, a deep-V front, and some sort of raised golden pattern on the stomach and chest. The modern version is still in a short-sleeved tan shirt, but the neck doesn't dip as low, and the golden pattern is just paint, rather than something sculpted on. He still wears fur, but instead of being on the shirt it's now on a separate coat he's wearing (a garment that seems like a reference to the IDW version of the character). His belt buckle is an inverted triangle with a specific symbol sculpted on it: a single large eye within a cobra's hood, something that's very fitting for him. He has a few rings on the fingers of his right hand and though he's got a matched pair of bracers, his left hand is also in a glove that has some sort of black scale armor on it. He also wears two necklaces, one with the same symbol as his belt and one that's a metallic green pendant. He has some armor on his shoulders (another Zartan connection, eh?), and his long coat is padded or quilted, and has a tattered lower edge. Despite now wearing faded blue jeans instead of black pants, Crystal Ball keeps his old colorscheme: lots of dark earthtones, and a much lighter color for the fur. As is the way, he now has tattoos, geometric symbols and patterns that surely mean something to him, but are just dots and lines to us. Interestingly, his eyes are painted fully black, with copper irises, which is most definitely a nod to the IDW take on the character - after all, no other continuity has ever cared enough about him to make his eye color anything other than "black dot on white" like most characters, but IDW did. The packaging shows Crystal Ball's stats as Intelligence 2, Shield 3, PsyOps 4, and Coercion 3. In 1987, his only accessory was his "Reflected Light Pulse Modulator" - aka the hyno-shield. It was a simple black disc with a lenticular label on the front that showed an undulating, multi-colored circular pattern, nothing more. Oh-ho-ho, brother, does the new one offer something more! First of all, while the old figure just had a gun in a holster sculpted on his left leg, the new one gets an actual pistol as an accessory and a functioning holster to keep it in. The pistol's nice, sure, a revolver with a wavy pattern on the grips and a golden... snake(?) coiled around the barrel, but trust me, you're going to forget all about it as we continue with the review. And frankly, it isn't even the only one. Like, this Crystal Ball includes his own crystal ball! It's clear, and has translucent green snoke curling up around its sides from within its base. The figure even includes an alternate left hand, open to help him hold it better. And if you look inside, you'll see an open-mouthed skull contained within. So basically, the base, smoke, and skull are all a single piece, molded from translucent green plastic, and then the clear "ball" is attached to that to complete the look. Very nicely done! He does still have his shield, and it's still a black disc - a bit less simple, perhaps, with its wavy edge, but still a black disc shield. But instead of just circles that fade from one color to another, the design on the front (yes, still lenticular) shows a pair of snakes - one blue, one yellow - writhing around and through a semi-inhuman skull, with wavy energy lines (matching the shape of the shield's edge) circling it all. Frankly, it looks like something out of Visionaries. So we're already taking a step up, and that's before we even get to the cool stuff. Crystal Ball comes with several accessories molded in the same soapy green plastic as the crystal ball's base. We would later learn that this is D.I.R.E. Tech, with "DIRE" standing for Dread-Inducing Responsive Energy - in other words, some kind of scary holograms. So in addition to the lenticular sticker on the shield, we also get a 3D version of the same skull and snakes, capable of clipping into the frame of the shield as though the pattern is emerging and becoming real. See? We told you: Visionaries! He also gets a scimitar with flames pouring off it, as well as a second head. The alternate head (when this figure was revealed, it wasn't clear whether that was a head on its own, or just a mask that fit over the existing head) is some kind of monstrous Cthonic chimera. It has the eye sockets and nasal cavity of a normal skull, but the mouth area is all tentacles, and there's a bulbous octopoid sac at the back of the neck. Instead of ears, it has fins or wings (kind of like Abomination), and two large horns curl up and over the top of the skull. The eyes are solid red, in black sockets, and there is either a third eye or a matching gemstone on the forehead. This is a wild look, especially if you add on all the other DIRE Tech pieces at once. In the Raptor review, we said the update of that character was so good, it made us want to see what the team could do with a loser like Crystal Ball. Well, the answer is "quite a lot," it turns out. The '80s figure was a total dud, and the character had functionally no presense in the fiction; IDW reinvented him and actually used him in an interesting way in their stories, but that still wasn't enough to get him a toy at the time. While most of Walmart's Classified exclusives have been easy to get, coming back into stock on their website and in some cases even seeing price drops, Crystal Ball sold out fast when he was released and has only seen demand go up from there. From the most disliked toy of Generation 1 to one of the must-haves of Generation 4; Hasbro really hit on something with this release! -- 03/27/26 What weird loser do you want them to update next? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.