AMANA SIDE BY SIDE REFRIGERATOR TROUBLESHOOTING

What's worse that Duke? Why, Sgt Slaughter, of course!

Honestly, I must admit, when I first heard that they were going to make Sgt Slaughter into a GI Joe, I was excited. I did think that the idea of making real people into members of a fictional military unit was odd, but it sure made more sense to have Sgt Slaughter as a Joe than making a football player like William "Refrigerator" Perry into a Joe ( the reason I never sent away for his figure), since at least Sgt Slaughter was a military themed wrestler. And back then, I liked wrestling, even as a kid, I knew it was all fake, but it was fun, like a crazy, stupid violent soap opera. This, of course was before they hit upon the brilliant but evil formula of using all the wrestling matches you could watch on TV for free to introduce new badass characters and set up rivalries that would only ever be resolved in big, expensive Pay Per View events. Once that practice became standard I recognized it for the scam it was and stopped watching wrestling.

I even bought the "Triple T" tank to get the Sgt Slaughter figure. He showed up briefly in the GI Joe comics, just long enough to kick Zartan's butt, which was pretty cool.

Then he showed up in the cartoon......and then my perception of having him on the Joe team changed pretty abruptly!

He was voiced by the real Sgt Slaughter and boy, did his voice (which was okay in small doses in a wrestling match) start to grate on my nerves! He was supposed to sound tough, but instead he sounded like he was severely constipated! And they made him ridiculously strong, almost like he was Superman! Then he started showing up in the GI Joe toy commercials shouting at me! The Joe commercials used to be pretty enjoyable because they often featured really cool animation (better quality than the actual cartoon episodes), but now they just featured this loud, constipated guy screaming at me! Then they started having him introduce the Joe cartoons when they went into reruns, which made them almost unwatchable to me!

A few years later, while flipping through the channels I saw that Sgt Slaughter had turned into a bad guy or in wrestling parlance, a "heel" and was supporting the Iraqis during the 1rst Gulf War, making him a "traitor". It amused me to no end because I was wondering how Hasbro would explain THAT one! Little did I know that he had already ended his association with GI Joe, oh well too bad I would've liked to have seen him become a hated and reviled traitor in the eyes of the Joes!

Because of my ambivalent feelings regarding the good Sergeant, I held off from buying a toy of him to add to my current collection for quite some time, but eventually decided that my collection wouldn't feel quite complete without him. I decided to get this version of him since it's the only one with a removable hat and he looks more "soldierly" than any of the others. He also has a cool Marine Corps belt buckle. as figures go, this is a pretty cool one, he definitely has an imposing presence that many of the other figs lack.

Now I can make up new photo stories in which to torture the Sergeant for almost singlehandedly ruining GI JOe for me! MUHAHAHAHAAHAHA!

The aisles of a local supermarket - as seen from an upper balcony