Know Your Dreadnoks
NaBloPoMo: Day Nine (Delayed to 16/07/09)
I’ve mentioned before my love of the Dreadnoks from the GI Joe toy range, so thought I’d just provide a simple overview of the guys and girls that make up one of the best gangs in anytown.
Zartan
The leader of the Dreadnoks and fairly out of place in that role in some regards, he always seemed more of a strategic mercenary than a gang leader, something that was pushed forward through the comic book incarnations and softly alluded to in the cartoon series. Zartan was a master of disguise and had a vast array of weapons and gadegts that would be more fitting of a top assassin or spy than a biker gang rebel. As a toy, the Zartan figure was first sold in 1984 and came with the Chameleon Swamp Skier. In fact, his original file card from the toy range covers his many abilities from martial arts to ventriloquism, and suggests training in European military acadamies – by his third incarnation his file card actually places him as French-born and names the academy he attended and corrupted. His ninja history was enlarged during his second incarnation in the toy range, during the Ninja Force promotion, where he took a more punk look.
To Zartan, it seems, the Dreadnoks are more of an asset or tool, than something he belongs to.
Buzzer, Ripper and Torch
The three original Dreadnoks and the three who will always embody what a Dreadnok is. In the cartoon they were bumbling fools in the same vein as punks have always been viewed, you could pretty much compare them to Rumble and Frenzy from Transformers or Bebop and Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and see few differences. In the comic and toy universe though, each was an individual with their own personality and backgrounds that set them apart.
Buzzer whose real name was Richard Blinken-Smythe (Dick Blinken) was an English sociology professor from Cambridge who went to Australia to study gangs and wound up riding with Ripper and Torch to become the founding members of the Dreadnoks. His original file card suggests that “years of intellectual displeasure caused repressed psychotic anger”, which in that fun way decided to manifest itself with loud motorbikes and even louder chainsaws. Sadly, the cartoon version of Buzzer decided to make him an illiterate idiot. Great hair though, blonde and ponytailed, he looked a little like Axel Rose if Axel Rose was intimidating.
Ripper, or Harry Nod, was according to the toyline and comics a professional criminal from an early age (expelled from nursery school for extorting candy) and potentially one of the most vicious of the early Dreadnoks. The one thing that always confused me as a child was his weapon of choice, which looks like a jaws of life, but which is often shown to be a cutting device or a pneumatic hammer – I could, of course, quite see it able to be a hybrid of all three though, for ripping in to objects and then forcing them apart. I tended to always think the name Ripper had more to do with the fact his assault rifle came with a very deadly bayonet affixed.
Torch, or Tom Winken, is the Dreadnok most reknowned as an actual, all-out traditional thug, with violent outbursts and utter stupidity. He is the simplest form of bully, but one who is quite adept at the use of an acetylene torch. There is actually very little to say about the pyromaniac biker, other than Torch bares an uncanny resemblance to Paul Teutal Snr from Dicovery channels’ American Chopper series.
If there was any doubt that these guys belonged together, the word plays on their names should remove that. Their first names are Tom, Dick, and Harry, and their last names are Winken, Blinken and Nod (from the Dutch Lullaby by Eugene Field).
Monkeywrench
Part of the second generation (1986 releases) of Dreadnoks, along with Thrasher and Zartan’s siblings, Zandar and Zarana. Monkeywrench, Bill Winkie (in keeping with the nursery rhyme theme, Wee Willie Winkie), was to explosives what Torch was to fire. The guy kept a grenade belt strapped across his torso and was an expert in demolitions. Monkeywrench grew up in Wales in the UK and honed his skills in London’s East End during the high time of crime, given the time frame most likely during the gangland days of the Krays and their peers. Surprisingly, given the name Monkeywrench, I might have imagined him to have been equipped with the tool and used it to shatter jaws or kneecaps, however the weapon he came equipped with in the toyline was what was described as a ‘harpoon’ with a trident tip, but which I never actually worked out as a kid. I always just gave him the random weapons scattered from other figures.
Thrasher
Thrasher was a character I really wanted, in part because he came with his own vehicle in the toyline, the Thunder Machine – I’ve mentioned the Thunder Machine, and my own equivalent, in a previous blog entry (We Still Want To Ride With The Dreadnoks). Thrasher was a spoilt rich kid and probably intended as a moral lesson, he was never shown to possess any level of smarts, even though he somehow managed to procure jet engines and fit them to his car to produce a roaring vehicle. His spoilt rich kid motif carried over to his supplied weapon of a lacrosse stick, though considering his Thunder Machine came with chainguns, the need for a stick is redundant. His later filecards placed him as from Belgium and his real name as Bruno La Crosse (La Crosse, lacrosse, get it…yeeeah). He sported what may have been both the worst and yet most awesome, with a thick, cowlicked head of hair that looked ridiculous on the toy, but with green streaks in it that would probably come across in modern interpretations like Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight.
Zandar
For reasons I’m not quite sure of, I remember Zandar as one of my favourite characters for a while. Potentially it could have been for the fact that in the early cartoon appearances he actually seemed a stoic, intelligent and yet violent type, which set him apart from the Dreadnoks, but still made him a more involved part than his brother, Zartan. I was never really a fan of his body or face paint either, and by this stage the colour changing, chameleon blending in was rather passe. Zandar also had a cool weapon, it looked like an assault rifle, but it was actually a projectile weapon for arrows, a sort of crossbow rifle or bolt thrower. I remember in the comic book he had pink hair, like Zarana, but his figure was ginger.
Zarana
Lets face it, Zarana in the cartoon and comic book was hot. The Baroness was ok, and Lady Jay wasn’t too bad, but Zarana was pretty much the hot one (until Jinx came along, at least). Despite her punk appearance in the toyline and most of her comic and cartoon appearances, her actual background puts her as a world class assassin and that her disguise go beyond Zartans in that she will add method acting skills to portray her persona. Zarana’s outfit was pure punk though, ripped jeans and a revealing shirt. Her pink hair (though again, sometimes suffering from ginger-vitis), pulled back and pony-tailed screamed lust, even to a young boy. The toy never really held up that high though, suffering similar problems as the Baroness in that Hasbro was unable to make remotely attractive females figures until 1987 with Scarlett (v5) and Sonya Blade. Zarana had an interesting weapon, which looked like a daisywheel cutting device on the end of a semi-automatic weapon stock – a weedwhacker to Buzzer’s chainsaw.
Zanzibar
Bought out in 1987, Zanzibar was a pirate who, in the comic book storyline, tried to steal gas from the Dreadnoks, though the filecard puts him as supplying the gasoline to the Dreanoks. He is actually a distrusted member of the Dreadnoks, because of his pickpocket nature. His real name is Morgan Teach, which if you know your captains is both a type of rum and Blackbeard. Zanzibar originally came out with an Air Skiff that changed frequently between being just a swamp boat to being able to fly, and he was often a loner character. I can’t recall any of my friends having Zanzibar, and I was never really in to the character myself, although I loved the skiff a lot – it seemed right for the Everglades dwelling ‘noks. The toy came with very fitting weapons for a river pirate, giving him a harpoon, hammer and pistol – he also had nylon threaded in to his head as a tuft of hair. He shares a moustache with Dr Mindbender and the eye Mindbender has a monocle over, Zanzibar has an eyepatch. Hm, I wonder.
Roadpig
A 1988 addition, and another one of my favourite Dreadnoks, Road Pig was the biggest brute of the lot. His weapon of choice was a hammer made from a cinderblock and a hefty pipe, and I can still picture the image of him heading forward on a motorbike swinging it like a polo mallet. His real name was apparently Don DeLuca, named after a Hasbro design director. The guy was just the enforcer of the ‘noks and could snap anyone like a twig.
Gnawgahyde
I hated the character, I don’t know why, but even now I’m not too keen on him. He was a poacher in the swamps with poor personal hygiene, and he never really screamed biker gang member to me like the other Dreadnoks did. His main redeeming factor was that his figure came with a machete and a brown boar, and that boar was known to do things of a similar style to those seen and written about in Hannibal.
With the exception of special releases of Dreadnok recruits – the hillbilly Dreadheads – the toyline basically came to an end of new ‘noks with 1989′s Gnawgahyde figure, although several future releases were variations of existing characters in new outfits, colours and molds. The comic books continued to create new Dreadnoks, with a lot more focusing on the criminal gangs and bikers motifs, including car thiefs, criminal mechanics and random thugs who join the sprawling network of Dreadnok local chapters over time.
The only further character I wish to mention in the recent Devil’s Due run comic, Zanya, daughter of Zartan. She’s a spunky young punk kid with dreadlocked hair and a mean streak, she’s a capable fighter despite her dimunitive size and she is a damn hottie. I mean, come on…
