Lady Jaye Photoshop Shocker!

If you know me, you know I love messing with Photoshop. This often leads to arrogant displays of "I can make it better!" attitude, the likes of which were recently seen on this very blog. Moving on...

Once upon a time when Hasbro's 25th Anniversary G.I. Joe line (celebrating the 80s Real American Hero iteration of G.I. Joe, naturally) was kicking off, there was plenty to geek out and be generally blissful about, but one particular figure just wasn't doing it for me, or most others really, and it was an important figure at that: Lady Jaye.

Yeesh. As you can see, this Lady Jaye's face sculpt depicts her as what I can only assume is the plainest of plain-Jane...grandmas. I have nothing against kind old wimmens that feed the pidgeons at the corner of the market as their granny-fros bop about ebulliently in the wind, but come on, sweet old nannies do not a Lady Jaye make. Lady Jaye should look strong, youthful, and throwing the fear of coming across as one of those freaks that faps it to toys aside: attractive.

The card art pretty much got it right:

Naturally, I decided to mess about with the actual toy in Photoshop to see what could be done to make it look more like the artwork above. Here are the results, in comparison to the original:

Do I prefer the altered version? Sure thing. Do I think Hasbro could've pulled it off? More than likely not, but I do think they could've gotten a hell of a lot closer than they did. She could have at least been a little more defined. As is, the details are just sort of vague. Sharpening up features such as the eyes, lips, and hair might've easily prevented the granny look. I know not all G.I. Joe females (or even males, these are mass-produced figures at a small scale, after all) are perfect, but even in the same line, the others certainly fared better. Just take a gander at Scarlett:

No, not entirely awe-inspiring, but still a far better effort than Geriatric Jaye.

There was a later remold of Lady Jaye based more on the original cartoon design that did pull off the appropriate look a bit better, but even so, it's not too amazing, and you had to buy a pack of several figures to get it anyway.

Maybe one day there will be a definitive Lady Jaye released that's actually up to my ridiculous standards for a figure under 4 inches, but until then, eh, I guess there's always the weirdly proportioned Spy Troops version...