2012 Inferno BAT (The Black Major)

Another week of “just not feelin’ it”, so another random Cobra recolor. Here’s The Black Major’s Inferno BAT, a figure I like an awful lot, but never did as much with that I once dreamed possible. With that said, I think this is the most memorable BAT custom he made, partly because it’s just a lot of fun to see a figure like the BAT decked out in solid orange. Also, I think he’s the Inferno BAT, but I’m going off my often hazy memory, so that may have not been the original name.

As a part of the early waves of Black Major figures, this wave of BATs all feature some mold oddities newer renditions lack. Namely, old TBM figures were designed to be incompatible with other vintage Joes, so the backpack pegs are twice as big and the extra hands for the BAT aren’t compatible with V1 BATs. I always hated this about these older figures, as it seems like something that was done in the vein hopes of pacifying the hobby-mafia, and as that didn’t work it was later phased out. Personally though, I always hate taking a loss just to appease people that hate me having fun in the first place.

The orange color is nice and deep. It’s very close to the reddish-orange of the V1 Alley Viper, which even a lot of Hasbro figures have failed to perfectly emulate. Other than that, it’s a very simple, no-thrills kind of recolor, keeping most of the 1986 BAT’s basic paint masks and not adding anything to it. The only thing I really dislike about the deco is the silver paint, which covers the orange plastic very poorly compared to other colors like blue. I always thought it was weird he skipped over doing a crimson BAT, but I think orange ones are a lot more useful than a robot in elite ceremony colors.

For accessories, you get the standard kit of ‘86 BAT parts, just modified in ways to make them unique as mentioned before. So that includes the backpack, and four removable appendages (a flamethrower, a claw, a gun, and a hand) The BAT hands have a tendency to fit too tight or too loose in the backpack, so a few copies broke right away, while others remained just fine. Nothing a pin vice and some rods can’t fix, but who knows if I’ll ever feel like doing that.

I think I mentioned in an older post that the quality on these were okay. I mostly stand by that, but these orange BATs do remind me that the lot wasn’t great either – “mid”, to use some modern jargon. Ill-fitting pegs make the arms break easy, and of course they have some stance/tolerance issues with their o-rings. There’s enough there to be worth griping about, but then I remember how much cheaper these older bootlegs were: a whole lot of 5 BATs only ran something like $25. The world’s a much different place almost twelve years later, so you can’t make cheap toys like that any more. Still, it was so much more fun and easy to overlook fairly serious flaws just for how cheap this stuff used to be. 1 o-ring figure in 2023, from either Hasbro or anyone else, costs me as much as 5 did back in 2012.

If you’re in the market for one of these, good luck, because I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen one for sale. At the very least I don’t see many TBM BATs running high premiums, so it shouldn’t cost a lot when you find one, it’s just that you’ll have to hunt for a while. A lot of these old customs tend to disappear like that, especially as they enter crypts like my personal dwelling, where I buy a lot, but never sell. Of course, there’s a newer 23‘ BAT in Alley Viper colors with the camo, but the orange isn’t as orange and purty as my figure here, you should be jealous.