RAR wrote:It might have been nice to figure out if any existing MASK outfits match the look of any of the available Gi Joe moulds - something like Vintage Matt Trakker's Rhino outfit would have been a nice follow up for the Thunderhawk outfit they'd already made
Matt Trakker hasn't worn that outfit yet, as far as I know. He didn't wear it in the Revolution Comic, for sure. (Which given it's a Revolution box set released at a Comic convention, does matter.)
As would a classic style Miles Mayhem.
Unlike the others, Miles doesn't wear body armor, only his mask, so Miles looks exactly the same as he always has (in his blue military uniform).
Anyone they had not drastically changed would have been a less controversial inclusion though (if such a thing has happened - and they didn't just randomly change everyone in M.A.S.K.)
Except for Matt Trakker being African American, everyone looks the way I remember them looking (less '80s, I guess). As far as any other changes (e.g., the absence of Scott Trakker, T-Bob, and over half the adult characters) this is set at M.A.S.K.'s creation, so the crew is small and young - the changes haven't been random, they've been in-keeping with that.
As far as Matt Trakker's race being changed, it really hasn't been relevant in the comics yet, even with his main antagonist being a patronizing old white guy. Even so, I've appreciated the change because besides being the team leader, they've been emphasizing Matt's technical and scientific acumen and passion. African American men in comics seldom get to lead a team for very long, and they're seldom depicted as shy, self-doubting science nerds, so I've appreciated the variety, even if it has been purely an aesthetic change.
If you wanted to do that then surely M.A.S.K. The Next Generation is what they need to be thinking of instead.
The series kicked off with the formation of M.A.S.K. as a program associated with GIJoe using Cybertronian tech and Ore 13. I'm sure IDW didn't want to mess with retconning *another* property into the combined universe (merging GIJoe into Transformers was a feat, I'm sure). And I doubt they wanted to build a new series as a sequel to something that hasn't been around for a very long time.
For perspective,
Star Trek (The Original Series) ended in 1969 and
Star Trek: The Next Generation began in 1987 - that was an eighteen year gap, but it was filled with syndicated airings and movies. M.A.S.K. ran from 1985 to 1988, and didn't see shelves again until 2016.
Three additional Star Trek series lived and died during M.A.S.K.'s absence. Strange choice though keep the vintage vehicles and change the people or person instead.
Most of the vehicles don't look distinctly vintage - Condor, for example, looks like a generic motorcycle, and Switchblade doesn't look like any sort of real world helicopter at all. Both are basically unchanged from their original versions. The more distinctly vintage style vehicles appear as prototypes used during R&D and training, with some of them (e.g., Trans Am Thunderhawk) sometimes visible under tarps in background shots, and some of them (e.g., Rhino) destroyed in testing. The Thunderhawk Trakker uses in the in the present looks more like a beefed up 2010s Camaro. (Venom's vehicles tend to lean more obviously vintage, though.)
Interestingly this page makes a bigger deal of the character nicknames/code names that is usually the case - though they do come up sometimes such as with 'Bruno Mad Dog Sheppard', Lester The Lizard Sludge, 'Chief' or 'Clutch'
For IDW's part, they've been sticking to the code names pretty hard as part of the tie in with GIJoe, where codenames have been part of the gimmick for decades. That said, their codenames/call-signs/handles come from their masks, which they still call by those names, so that sometimes gets weird. On the other hand, since military style radio lingo has them talking in the third person for clarity during operations anyway, it's usually not
that strange.
