1991 Battle Wagon

Posted on January 30, 2023 by mwnekoman

1991 Battle Wagon

1991 produced some classic GI Joe figures that any frequent reader of this blog would know I like quite a bit. The vehicles from this year however, are not a thing I find myself the biggest fan of. In general, I don’t think a lot of 90‘s vehicles compare too well to the offerings from earlier in the line, even though some of them were still quite ambitious like Armor Bot, or generally fun like the Brawler. Then you have things like the Battle Wagon.

Straight to the chase, the Battle Wagon is not a vehicle I fancy myself a fan of. To me, it just looks too stupid to ever be something I could take seriously. Still, I can’t really fault it for existing, as it is very much a product of it’s time, maybe so much so that I’d even say it’s the most 90‘s-centric toy of ARAH. I mean, it’s basically a monster-truck for GI Joes with a gargantuan multi-barrel missile-launcher turret in the back. It’s completely ridiculous, but it also seems tailor made for the interests of a young boy in the 1990‘s, so it’s not without reason.

In terms of playability, it pretty much checks all the important boxes for a large GI Joe item. It supports a decent amount of figures, has firing weapons, a working tow winch, is motorized, and even has a removable battle station in the same vein as the MAGGOT. It has a lot of things you can do with it, and most of the gimmicks work well enough too, which makes it inherently better than a total dud like the Attack Cruiser. One problem with a lot of very large GI Joe toys, is that they take up a ton of space without really doing all that much, which is fortunately not the case here.

For my uses however, the Battle Wagon is much too over-the-top to ever really be useful. While the military industrial complex can justify the existence of a great many absurdities to waste my money on, in the end of the day the Battle Wagon really is just a monster-truck. For the GI Joe team, it looks far too out of place to work in my eyes as military equipment, and generally it’s really just a much worse version of the Mean Dog. It has some cool gimmicks like the hidden computer station under the turret, but what’s the point of it? To me, it really does feel like something crammed in just to give it more play features, though I suppose that’s not the worst thing.

The turret/gun station is another element that should be really cool, but just isn’t. The Mean Dog, Maggot and Thunderclap all do a similar thing, where the turret can be removed and used as an individual piece, but they don’t look so ridiculous. The individual components of those vehicles also tended to look a little better on their own, while I find the Battle Wagon looks really empty without it’s turret. At the same time, it looks really silly with it, so there’s really no helping it.

I have no childhood memories of playing with the Battle Wagon, and through all of my adulthood I’ve barely so much as touched the thing, besides one time taking it apart to rescue a handful of parts my brother lost in it as a kid. In fact, the only thing that prompted using it for some photos is that Battle Corps Cross Country’s filecard mentions he drives it, and I had one, so I used it. In that light, I’m tempted to say I’ve generally had a sense of contempt for this thing for the longest period. Despite that, I realize that it’s not an objectively bad toy, rather, it’s a good one that suffers for being too big and ridiculous looking (The opposite of the MOBAT, a toy that looks great, but is too small and does almost nothing!).

Battle Wagon’s float around $30, with the price usually getting jacked up by shipping since it is a very large vehicle. Truth is, that’s really not a lot of money for a large vehicle like this, but that probably goes to show the general disinterest in this vehicle. Crazy things like Dreadnok vehicles can be fun when they don’t take up much real estate, but this vehicle doesn’t really provide much for how much space it takes up. I respect it for being a toy that could’ve only existed in the 90‘s, but there’s countless GI Joe vehicles that do similar things in a much better way.

1991 Battle Wagon Links:

3D Joes

There’s not much out there on the Battle Wagon, so if you have some cool Battle Wagon content or photos, feel free to share ’em.

1993 Cobra Commander

Posted on January 16, 2023 by mwnekoman

1993 Cobra Commander

Cobra Commander figures are something I have a ton of, and that’s not something I mind too much either. For all I care, the Joes can be led by Duke, Falcon, Sgt. Slaughter or Captain Gridiron, but the main gist of this conflict centers around Cobra Commander, which makes him less interchangeable. Still, because I have all of these Cobra Commanders, I’ve often times contemplated them as secretly being different people, like Fred VII, though really that’s just an odd way of trying to rationalize having so many toys of essentially the same guy. Anyways, the Battle Corps one is really cool, like half of the others.

So as I’ve mentioned before, most of the Joes I played with as a kid were ones I knew from my brother’s collection of ‘89 through ‘94 figures (although, I did have my own small collection of ‘93 and ‘94 guys). With that in mind, I was more dismissive of some of the crazier redesigns back then than I am now, as I didn’t really have much passion for neon toys that didn’t resemble anything I’d see in a Sunbow rerun. This Cobra Commander was different though, as not only did he look enough like a Sunbow Cobra Commander, the black and silver made him arguably look better. To this day, he holds up as a favorite, but I have a lot of favorite Cobra Commanders, so I haven’t used him all that much despite that.

As a repaint/retool of the Talking Battle Commanders mold, it’s a sculpt that works pretty well. It’s a much more regal design than the V1 sculpt, very similar to a Crimson Guard, which adds a bit of consistency I like. He’s a noticeably bulky figure, but it works well here to give him more presence. Generally, I find it somewhat odd how Cobra Commander went through a series of more drastic redesigns before going back to essentially his first look from the Marvel comics, but again, looking familiar is something I’ve always appreciated this figure for. I think the only thing that makes him look a little off is the head sculpt: the eye-holes of his mask are a little large, which I think makes it look a bit sillier than it really should.

Cobra Commander included a tree of silver parts, featuring the Rock Viper’s PSG1 rifle, Incinerator’s flamethrower, Voltar’s machine-gun, the Toxo-Viper’s gun and the requisite stand and missiles for his red missile launcher. These parts are okay individually, but really suck for the figure. The silver plastic looks decent, so there’s some novelty value in being able to appropriate these parts off to other figures, but I have a hard time imagining anything Cobra Commander would do with them. I guess if you were to pretend the flamethrower has a small fuel tank on it, you could have him execute someone with it like a jackass. Personally, I wish he had been given one of the trees with a knife or pistol on it, since that would seem a little more appropriate to me.

As far as I know, this mold with the fully sculpted back never appeared again. Of the several times this mold was repainted in the 2000‘s, Hasbro always used the flat back from the Talking Battle Commanders version, which was unfortunate. The other iterations of this sculpt are all pretty good too, even the comic-pack figure was a little better than average compared to it’s contemporaries. Still, this one was already almost perfect, so the lot of them seem superfluous to me.

Pricing breaks down pretty simple for this version of Cobra Commander, a complete example runs around $20, and one that’s less than complete will go for about half of that. Until just a few years ago, this figure was worth about 50% less, but that’s about how it is with everything in the current market. I suppose it’s also possible that the Transformers crossover sets might’ve renewed some interest in this version, since this was the design that appeared in #139 with the Transformers crossover in the Marvel comics… I doubt that’s much of a factor though.

1993 Cobra Commander Links:

1992 Hidden Power Terminator (Kenner Terminator 2 Future Wars)

Posted on January 9, 2023 by mwnekoman

For this post, I’m changing my usual format to show the GI Joe relevant content first, as opposed to making you read to the end, while assuming that I’m converting this blog into a general category toy-nostalgia blog about brands I have low to no investment in. While I’m at it, I’ll review the figure too, since this post would be too short if I stopped at the accessories.

So the odd thing that prompted this post, is that ol’ Arnie’s gun of choice is none other than a modified version of the ‘91 Grunt gun. I discovered this really by chance, as when I found the gun in an old storage tub, I wondered what random ‘93 or ‘94 figure it went to. Instead, I discovered that the gun went to a toy from a different company, in a completely different toy line! Of course, the Kenner purchase happened mid-’91, so that’s probably why this happened.

As you can see, it’s nearly a complete clone of the sculpt, with only a few changes made. The peg holes that were present on Grunt’s gun have been filled in, but not in the same way as later Hasbro versions of the sculpt (also pictured). Of course, the lower receiver has been completely changed, so that way it has a handle that the larger Terminator figure can actually hold. Slightly in front of where a trigger should be, there’s some weird scarring and detail loss, which is present on all the copies I found on eBay as well. The sloppiness of the scarring seems to highlight the lack of effort that was put into this.

Other than that, Hidden Power Terminator is about what you’d expect from a goofy 90‘s movie tie-in. Just like the real Arnold Schwarzenegger, he has 5-points of articulation and gimmicks that might entertain for a few minutes. A few of these Terminator figures that Kenner made were kind of neat, but it’s a movie franchise I’ve found grating more often than not, so that’s about the extent of my interest in it.

It’s kind of funny to take a look outside of the Joe market at similarly old toys and see how much they’re worth. You can still get a MOSC Hidden Power Terminator for $10, which would probably be a fair price for a less than great, sealed Valor vs Venom toy at this point. Probably not a great comparison, since I really don’t think toy lines like this hold the same, enduring appeal that GI Joe does. At the same time, it’s funny to think about how a lot of niche 90‘s Joes weren’t worth that much either until just recently.

1991 Cleansweep

Posted on January 4, 2023 by mwnekoman

1991 Clean Sweep

Clean Sweep is, overall, probably my favorite figure from the entire Eco-Warriors subset. In the back of my mind, there’s always been this question as to why if he looks so much like Airtight, why wasn’t he a new Airtight? At the same time, one of his key characteristics that makes him worth remembering is that he was actually a new character, and not the second or third version of some guy from the line’s early days.

Speaking of which, I do think an area where 90‘s Joes lose out to 80‘s Joes, are the subsets. I think 80‘s figures overall are more memorable or distinct for the fact that novel specialties were represented often by one figure per year, instead of an entire carded assortment. This didn’t hurt DEF/Headhunters quite so bad, but most of Ninja Force is way more forgettable than the periodic Storm Shadow or Jinx. The same can be said for Eco-Warriors, where Clean Sweep and Ozone stand out a lot less well, just for the fact that you have Flint, Barbecue and Deep Six all doing essentially the same thing.

Getting back around to Clean Sweep, he’s a really well done figure. While I do like all of the Eco-Warriors, if I could only have one, it’d definitely be Clean Sweep. His yellow hazmat suit and it’s sculpted details come across to me as the most well-suited and appropriate looking of the lot, where as some of the others seemed like they were trying to find ways just to look different. It’s sharp and interesting without looking busy or like an X-men reject, which is something you can’t say for many of his contemporaries.

His colors are another one of his strong aspects. Sure, the green is quite a lot brighter than the traditional olive-drab, but it still looks good, and makes him cohesive with both Flint and Ozone. Having a mostly yellow suit in a nice medium tone is another thing I like, as this color really sells him as a hazmat guy, in a way that bright blue and ketchup red doesn’t do so well.

Probably the most integral accessory for Clean Sweep is his helmet. It’s weird, as unlike with the Toxo-Viper’s helmet and HEAT Viper’s missiles, Clean Sweep isn’t really ruined without it. Being a Joe, I can imagine a few play scenarios where showing his face off would be kind of fun, which is less the case with the other two. It’s also very nice that his helmet has a few bits of green on the trim and some light blue for his visor. I always appreciate painted helmets, since this really wasn’t standard for the vintage line, and I can think of plenty of contemporaries for this guy where having a painted helmet would’ve helped them a lot, like with Eco-Warriors Flint or DEF Shockwave.

Yet another thing I find to like about Clean Sweep is that all of his accessories are fairly well done, in addition to the helmet. Included is a pistol and a backpack with a control panel in neon green, his aforementioned helmet, and this huge, water-squirtin’ tank thing. I feel like Hasbro was still putting a lot more effort into the gimmick parts at this point, as opposed to the requisite and recycled launchers you more often saw in ‘93 and ‘94. I certainly don’t find this tank too captivating, but it was a nice pack-in, especially when you consider the fact that dumper vehicles like the Barracuda were available at around the same time.

Clean Sweep runs around $20 for a complete figure, sometimes a little more or less. Seems like a fair amount for what should be a very obscure character, but he looks good enough that if I ever wanted another, I wouldn’t be badly offended to pay that. Most of the Eco-Warriors come across to me as something nice for a change of pace, though Clean Sweep and Cesspool stand out as the must-haves from the lot. As the economy continues to crumble, you’ll probably see guys like this get a little cheaper in the coming months.