Can you find Rocky Balboa?
Rocky Balboa was actually a member of G.I. Joe? Say it isn’t so? Well, it is entirely true according to Brian Cronin of CBR. Sylvester Stallone was actually in talks with Hasbro in 1986 to license his likeness and the actual character of Rocky Balboa (which Sylvester owned) to make him an action figure on the G.I. Joe team.
Evidently, it was such a “done deal” that Marvel released a second issue of G.I. Joe : Order of Battle some time in late 1986 and it included a list of current members of the G.I. Joe squad and guess who appeared? Rocky Balboa.
Rocky Balboa primary military specialty was listed as “personal combat instructor” and his secondary military specialty was “special services” on the G.I. Joe team. He was listed as being born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his grade was an E-5 (enlisted reserves). He was pictured wearing a head band with the long ends trailing to the side as if there was a breeze blowing and he has white boxing gloves on, bare-chested, with gray sweat pants on that have red, white and blue stripes at the bottom, and of course his lace up white sneakers.
The bio next to his picture basically says normally a boxing champion would serve his reserve time as being a show-piece, but Rocky, being Rocky, serves his as a secret position training G.I. Joe team in the “sweet science of pugilism”. And, of course, he doesn’t get any special pay, special privileges, or publicity for it, he just get’s the satisfaction of serving his country.
G.I. Joe
According to General Abernathy, Rocky is one of the finest fighters in the world and he wants the Joes being trained by the best. And, he wanted the Joes to see how to take a beating but be able to come back fighting.
Since the deal wasn’t totally sealed the picture of Rocky on the G.I. Joe’s squad looks really similar to Sylvester Stallone, but, wasn’t fine tuned to the image of Sly yet. This turned out to be a fine idea of the original artist who was designing the figure art because the deal did fall through.
How? Well Sly had already sold his likeness to another company (Coleco) for Rambo figures and so he couldn’t sell his likeness twice and so the G.I. Joe team lost it’s personal trainer.
This caused Marvel to have to post a retraction at the end of the next Order of Battle which said something to the effects of the Rocky Balboa character was never a member of G.I. Joe and he was incorrectly included as a member in Issue # 2.
It doesn’t stop there, however, with every super hero and beefed up army teams, you have to have an arch enemy in the comic world, right? That issue from Marvel had a page that was for “Big Boa” a member of the Cobra team and had been actually created to be Rocky Balboa’s arch enemy. Big Boa remained in the G.I. Joe universe, but Rocky did not!
