Monthly Archives: August 2023

1982 Rapid Fire Motorcycle (RAM)

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1982 RAM

The RAM is a very simple toy, but probably the best motorbike released in ARAH. It scales well, it has weapons, and enough detail to make it interesting. It’s also very iconic (hate that word, so overused) for how associated it is with the early Joes. Rock&Roll, Breaker, and Duke are all characters I see as being closely tied to the RAM, but it jibes well with figures that came a few years later too.

For a long while I really didn’t appreciate this year of vehicles. Partly, that’s because the 25th Anniversary line provided me with a very nice FLAK, VAMP and RAM, so with only a small collection of First 13 guys, I really didn’t see the point of going back for vehicles that for the most part seemed like downgrades. 15 years later and I still haven’t bothered with a VAMP or FLAK, but the RAM stood out as something that really needed to be with the figures it was designed for. The 25th mold is way more detailed, but big handle-bars don’t really mean much to figures that can’t dream of holding them. I think the added detail also alienates the newer mold a bit, as although it’s nice, it looks out of place with figures that are 25 years older.

The RAM is a really solid vehicle. GI Joe motorbikes tend to not be the most stellar items, from my own experience I don’t like quite of few of the others I’ve handled like the LCV Recon Sled, or the Ninja Lighting, and while I’ve never had one myself, from what I can tell the Silver Mirage is basically just a lousier version of this with copy-pasta missiles all over it. I think a major issue they run into, is that a good bike-ridding pose is somewhat difficult for articulated toys to achieve. Modern toys still struggle at this a bit, and classic o-ring joes especially struggle.

So the RAM sort of sidesteps some of this by having no handle-bars at all, figures just kind of hug it and play pretend. It’s a side-effect of being designed for toys that didn’t even have elbow pivots, but amusingly I think it works better in practice than some of the later attempts at bikes. The bike features a pair of removable saddle-bags, a kick-stand, and a removable gatling-cannon as it’s other features. It’s somewhat simple, but that’s really all it needs to be, so it excels at doing it’s job very well.

The only real flaw with the RAM is that it’s hard as fudge to find a mint one, which might be another way of saying it’s prone to damage? It has these little posts at the bottom of the bike, and I notice more often than not they’re cracked off (Semi-related: the box photos of the prototype depict these as pegs, but on the toy they’re wider.). The kickstand is also pretty fragile, and sometimes even the gun will have it’s connecting pegs snagged off. To me, it doesn’t really feel fragile, but it’s now upwards of 41-years-old, so I attribute most of this simply to time.

Which leads into pricing: Although the RAM is a very common vehicle, it’s also pretty hard to find a decent, unbroken one. $20 seems to be the average price for a good one, though something I found surprising is that plenty of ones that were broken would still hit around $20. My copy is a damaged one too, but I bought it on a whim at an estate sale years ago, mainly because it was in a vintage Matchbox case I wanted, with a handful of other small goodies for something like $5.

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1987 Psyche Out

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1987 Psyche-Out

As I looked through prospective candidates for this blog post, I came up with nothing I really felt like writing about. Really, I have several Cobras that I fancy for a rant right now, but I wrote about the Crimson Guard Immortal last week, and if I do Cobras back to back, I’ll run out of ones to write about too quickly. It would’ve been a good reason to skip posting at all, but as I skimmed through my photos looking for some Joe I have at least two pictures of to write about, I realized Psyche-Out fit the bill.

“But in that second picture, he’s just in the corner! Shouldn’t I find some other use for Psyche-Out and post about him then?” I thought to myself, but that’s the thing: I’ve owned this figure for closer to a decade now, and I’ve only thought to use him twice. I never hated Psyche-Out, not enough to verbally declare it anyways, but the figure is just downright boring. More so the character, but the toy doesn’t do much to really make his specialty seem more compelling.

For a while, I thought that maybe the colors were something I found off putting about Psyche-Out. I wound up getting the Night Force version a few years after this one, but that still didn’t help me want to use him any. Opposite to that thought, I think the colors are one of Psyche-Out’s strong points. Sure, his shirt is a pretty bright shade of green, but at least it looks nice, and it contrasts nicely with his dark grey pants and red highlights. Some of his colors match up pretty well with ‘86 Roadblock, and Cross-Country, and the bright green’s not to far off from Sci-Fi. So contrary to the assumption that the colors are bad, he actually pairs up pretty well with a few contemporaries.

Still, as an action figure his specialties are just too boring for me. Yeah, psychological warfare is real, and often involves some sinister stuff (Some of which we experience in our everyday lives!) but what does he do that’s actually fun? From the comics, all I remember was his appearance in Sierra Gordo, where he stood there with an M-16, a role where he would’ve been interchangeable with anyone else.

His accessories go along with his weirdness. You get a pistol, two clip-on dishes for his wrist, a backpack, and a handheld… uh… Radio… Paranoia… Inducer, thingy. I guess he points his radar dishes at Cobras and makes them worry if they turned the stove off before going to battle or something. The whole set-up is okay, but with all of his gear on he looks incredibly dorky; it reminds me of the things people used to make with those old AOL disks you used to get in the mail every other day. His pistol is nice, nothing special, but an option in my armory of GI Joe sidearms. Looking at it, I get the sneaking feeling that it’s based on a real pistol, but knowing how odd some of these Joe guns are, it’s probably something so obscure I’d never be able to identify it. Speaking of that pistol, I didn’t comment on his sculpt: on his chest, there’s an empty pistol holster, which I thought was a nice little reference to the part he comes with.

You can get a mint complete Psyche Out for $12 pretty often, which isn’t much considering the fact that all of his dish-equipment is made of two pieces that can come off, in addition to his head antenna. So all in all, he has nine parts that could rather easily get lost. In that way, I could see him being a much more expensive figure, but that would be if he really served any purpose. In many ways, he’s really the Joe equivalent of Raptor: A well executed figure somewhat wasted by a boring and outlandish idea.

GI Joe marvel comics Psyche-Out Roadblock Hawk Hasbro 1987 figures GI Joe marvel comics Psyche-Out Roadblock Hawk Hasbro 1987 figures

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2003 Crimson Guard Immortal

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2003 Crimson Guard Immortal

If you just went by names and themes that seem popular with collectors, it’s hard to imagine that the 2003 CAT II and it’s driver, the Crimson Guard Immortal, have spent most of their lives languishing as undesired clearance items. Personally I chalk that up to poor execution, but I don’t really have too much of a personal investment in this Crimson Guard Immortal either, and he’s without a doubt, more popular than the vehicle he came with.

A big deal in the 2000‘s was that Funskool had many of the popular vintage molds that fans wanted Hasbro to make new figures from. So about a dozen and a half of these molds were recalled by Hasbro and put to use for a handful of repaints before disappearing forever. Ultimately, I think it’s better to have a few more new toys to collect than a few more thousand Funskool figures that are off somewhere where I’ll never see them. Of course, the big disappointment was that Hasbro (and the Club) didn’t really do anything with these molds, and only used them for a short window at that.

The Crimson Guard Immortal is an interesting character. By his file card, he seems almost just like a new version of the standard Crimson Guard as opposed to a new rank in Cobra, but I suppose there’s a little fun in being able to interpret him as either one (‘91 catalog just refers to him as “Crimson Guard”, so he’s really a V2). Another interesting thing I never noticed, is that he’s apparently always been a vehicle driver with the original being “Licensed to operate: All Cobra land and air vehicles, including Hammerhead and Hurricane.”. The Spy Troops release modifies this text to “Licensed to operate: All COBRA land and air vehicles, including Cobra Cat-2”. Reducing a CGI to being a generic vehicle driver doesn’t really strike a chord with me, but at least there’s precedent for it!

This figure goes the route of the Python Guard, with the crimson he’s named for represented by a few details rather than his main color. So this Crimson Guard Immortal is mostly a dark gray with some red on his mask. I think it’s a little weird that a Crimson Guard Immortal who drives a big red Crimson Attack Tank is for some reason mostly grey, especially when black with a little more red would’ve been a nice reference to the original CAT’s colors, but it looks nice enough, so whatever. The tone of the grey coupled with his red mask makes me think of Interrogator, but I’m not sure I’d have them be related in any way (in my own fiction, of course).

This figure comes with no accessories, which makes him seem a little more bland than he already is. Of course, the original Crimson Guard Immortal’s accessories aren’t a set I find essential to the figure, despite that he has a leg peg that’s specifically designed for those parts. The wacky guns-akimbo set up was barely okay for Rock&Roll V2, but doesn’t really seem so natural for a lawyer/tank driver.

So the steadiest price I can currently discern for the 2003 Crimson Guard Immortal is around $40. This figure used to never go for half of that, but the Coof-Collectors pushed prices up above where they currently are, so $40 seems fair now. Personally, I’d much rather stock up on two or three of the ‘91 CGI, or frankly any other version of the Crimson Guard than this one. This figure isn’t bad, but he also is rather lacking in any substance to make him worth that much. Another thing, you might notice he’s made from the cursed 2000‘s plastic that spontaneously yellows for no reason, so keep that in mind too.

gi joe spy troops 2003 cobra crimson guard immortal v2 version 2 gi joe spy troops 2003 cobra crimson guard immortal v2 version 2

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2005 Major Barrage

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2005 Major Barrage

The “New Sculpt” era of Joes is not remembered by a whole lot of people. I attribute that mostly to botched marketing, which also led to them not really reaching kids all that much. It’s sad that I preface most posts on these figures like this, but the 2000‘s were a lamentable time, especially for GI Joe. Now for a shock statement: Major Barrage is the best sculpt from this era, and if 1/18 scale Joe ever comes back, they should be based on this figure’s design.

As you may or may not know, Major Barrage is not constructed like a normal figure from the time. While most New Sculpt figures roughly copy the design of the post-‘85 ARAH figures, Major Barrage experiments with construction changes more similar to the 25th Anniversary figures that would debut two years later. Notably, he has a ball-jointed head that connects at the top of the neck rather than inside the torso, swivel wrists, and his elbow-joints are on swivel-disks, the same as the 25th figures.

The thing about this is that he really hits the best of both worlds with this design, being a small figure that’s fun (and easy) to play with, while also featuring some modernizations that make him a little more pleasing aesthetically. 25th (“Modern Era”) figures looked nice once they hit their stride around Rise of Cobra, but always suffered from being gangly and fiddly, not really fun to play with. Likewise, the New Sculpt figures were more play friendly thanks to them just parroting ARAH construction, but they also adapted that construction is often weird ways. Once the 1/12 fad flies over, I hope Joe goes to being something like this, maybe just with the waist-joint used on the Marauder’s Gun Runners figures.

So the figure is really nice and well made in my opinion, easily the best from his era, but Major Barrage himself doesn’t really click with me that much. Overall, his character design is really, really boring, just being some ratty lookin’ dude in camo pants and a tanktop. He has the same energy as some low-tier vehicle driver like Wild-Card, only with the added blandness of being a tough guy nerd’s self-insert character (for clarity, I don’t know that he is, but he looks like one). He has a file card that describes how how he’s the baddest dude since Big Brawler, but honestly, I can’t really care about his character just for the fact that GI Joe hasn’t had a good piece of media since Double Trouble in 1991.

For accessories you get a vest and two, pump-action shotguns. Yeah that’s right, Major Barrage is so badass he rocks two PUMP-ACTION shotguns akimbo, doing some John Woo movie stuff! I guess this dude’s so cool he racks the slide with his teeth. A shotgun could make sense if he’s in a vehicle, since he’s supposed to be an Artillery Commander. Jokes aside, the figure makes good use of the shotguns thanks to his swivel-wrists. I just find guns akimbo to be very dated and corny now, but we like corn here, so that’s alright.

Major Barrage doesn’t show up for auction so much, but BiN’s on eBay have sold between $20 for a complete figure and $30 for a carded figure. Likely, he probably just goes for that much since the figure isn’t the easiest to find anymore, and because the DTC packaging looks pretty good for carded collectors. I don’t think this figure should cost that much, but it’s worth noting that he is probably the best figure from his era, so maybe it’s not too crazy.

Major Barrage DTC GIJOE Hasbro 2005 Valor vs Venom Spy Troops Major Barrage DTC GIJOE Hasbro 2005 Valor vs Venom Spy Troops

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