Around 1994, Kurt Groen was sketching a bunch of super-heroes for possible inclusion in the G.I. Joe line.
Tag Archives: Kurt Groen
Cesspool by Groen
Cesspool started out pitched as a similarly eco-themed “Oil Baron.” I’m not sure if that was a codename (probably not) or a title, but the figure and his ilk evolved and we got Cesspool. Along the way, Cesspool dropped his earlier name, “The CEO,” and Eco-Warriors dropped its earlier monicker, “Eco-Force.” We met the Oil Baron here several years ago at A Real American Book!, in fact, another Kurt Groen drawing.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
Kurt Groen’s Cobra Zombie
Hey, all. Sorry for the delay. End of school and store events. But, hey, G.I. Joe!
Continue reading
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
1992 Duke alternate colors
Here’s Kurt Groen’s presentation art (marker over photocopy, not paint) for 1992 Duke in green, brown, and black, as opposed to the beige and red that made it to market.
What other colors might that trash can have been?
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
Battle Force 2000 Blocker sketch
Yikes, has it been a month since my apology? Here’s another: Sorry! Movie review coming soon. Honest.
Dipping my toe back in the blog pool, here’s Blocker as a just-about final design, before he was “Blocker” (one of Hasbro’s least inspired codenames), when Battle Force 2000 was still “Future Force.” Continue reading
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Eco-Warriors Pirate Oil Baron
Before Cesspool became the lead villain for Cobra’s half of the 1991 Eco-Warriors subset, Kurt Groen pitched this unnamed character, a pirate oil baron.
I’m not sure what he’s dropping, something with a Joe logo — a pouch? Spirit’s ponytail? Later, when Groen colored this, he added a backpack with an oil-shooting weapon, looking ahead to the water-squirting weapons that each Eco-Warrior came packaged with.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
Toxo-Viper v2 presentation sketch and comp
In 1986 Hasbro revised the generic Cobra Soldier, the anonymous man in a dark blue cloth uniform, as the Cobra Viper. The basic Viper is far from basic. He has knee-high books, a beefy backpack, body armor, a bigger machine gun, and a silvery face mask that resembles Cobra Commander’s. In every way the Viper is more aggressive and cooler than the 1982 Cobra Soldier. A brilliant idea that followed a year later was to use the name “Viper” as a base, and connect it to a variety of prefixes that denote specific types of Cobra troopers — Strato-Vipers are pilots, Frag-Vipers are grenade-lobbing specialists, Astro-Vipers are, um, astronauts. And on.
1988 saw a strange debut: Toxo-Viper. (Click that link for a photo in a new window.) The garish color scheme and alien-looking helmet were seemingly not a good fit for G.I. Joe, but the concept, a soldier suited for hostile environments (fuel spills, chemical weapons) was sound. And the Toxo-Viper had a counterpart on G.I. Joe, the 1985 figure Airtight. In 1991, with environmental awareness on the rise, Hasbro introduced an entire sub-line of toxic waste spreaders and fighters, the extra garish Eco-Warriors. Toxo-Viper got a redesign:
The above pencil art and marker art are by figure designer Kurt Groen. Here’s a detail, color added in marker to a photocopy of the pencil art:
The next step would have been a larger, slightly more polished marker drawing.
I’ve always found the Toxo-Viper version 2 to be oddly restrained compared to version 1. Waist-down it’s underdetailed and undersculpted, and the helmet is much less interesting, (although at least it doesn’t look like an alien). I suppose time and money were diverted to version 2’s water-shooting canon and color-change feature. I’ve never owned this figure, so I don’t have one to photograph, but here’s a picture at yojoe.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
Behind the Scenes of G.I. Joe – Cobra concept art, 1990
For every figure that made it into the line, dozens were proposed as concepts and sketches. Here’s a color marker comp (ink on a photocopy of pencil art) by Kurt Groen of an unproduced Cobra soldier — likely some kind of Viper — from spring of 1990. I’m not sure if this character made it into three dimensions, but I doubt it. Click for a slightly larger image:
Subtly refining the art and adding a touch of detail, Groen redrew this as a finished color presentation “painting,” but by the time he was involved with the brand the toy development process dictated the internal presentation paintings no longer be painted. The final art, not pictured, looks just about the same as the rough, above.
Presumably this character was initially pitched for the 1992 product line.
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Behind the scenes of G.I. Joe – Groen X-Soldier
It’s Monday or Tuesday, which means another preview of rare, lost, and never-seen art from the making of G.I. Joe 1980-2000 to whet your appetites for my book. Today’s image is a 1994 Kurt Groen pencil and marker drawing of a proposed X-Soldier.
Very little is publicly known about X-Soldiers. It’s telling that they are neither mentioned nor pictured at the encyclopedic yojoe.com. I don’t say that as a swipe against the site as I love it and have referred to it weekly for the past six years of writing my book. Just that the line, unlike many other unproduced Joes, hasn’t been widely seen or discussed. Google searches yield almost nothing.
But print offers a succinct explanation: According to G. Wayne Miller’s Toy Wars, “[Kirk] Bozigian’s biggest setback had been X-Soldiers. Shown prototypes, boys in focus groups had been disinterested. The concept needed work, and the line was unlikely to reach market before the summer of 1996, if then.” (pg 185)
A line of traditional super-heroes that would battle for and with G.I. Joe, and each figure would have had an action feature. Seven X-Soldier characters are known to exist as color marker illustrations.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
A Real American Book! 
