Monthly Archives: November 2023

1992 Eco Striker

Posted on by
4

1992 Eco Striker

1991 was probably the worst year of Joe vehicles ever made, though 1992 wasn’t far off, mainly for continuing a lot of the gimmicks that didn’t really work out from the year before. That includes paper gliders (Air Commandos) and the flimsy Battle Copters, but the new ideas like a Flintstones car and a helicopter that didn’t fit GI Joe figures (Desert Apache) weren’t much better. So after all of that, the year’s Eco Warriors offering of the Eco Striker comes off pretty well by comparison, even if it was the first of many AWE Striker regurgitation to be.

gi joe eco warriors eco striker 1992 vehicle ozone clean sweep

If had to chose an old vehicle to give to the Eco Warrior Joes for their subline, I’m not sure I could’ve named a better one than the AWE Striker. It fits the theme, it rolls well, it can carry four figures, light-up front lights, a nicely detailed engine, it really was a toy from Joe’s best year. Which is probably why the Eco Striker stands out as the best toy from one of Joe’s worst years. Sometimes I forget how nice the AWE Striker was just for my strong preference to the VAMP, and also the fact that they really wore out the toy’s appeal with continual recolors and retools for the next thirty years. In 1992 though, it was still pretty fresh.

The bright blue and yellow colors of the Eco Striker make it look very much like a toy, though at least it’s a very attractive looking toy. Blue and yellow are colors that compliment each other very well, and there’s also a bevy of contemporary Joes that feature a lot of yellow and look good with it. The decals also add some hazard stripes to the sides, which I really love the look of even if the yellow loses some of it’s vibrance just from the poor quality of the stickers. Like all the vehicles from it’s era, it has super cheap, paper stickers as opposed to the vinyl kind used on older vehicles. That’s fairly egregious when you consider that it’s a toy where the main gimmick involves water.

As for the big and exciting new feature that the Eco Striker brings to the table: a squirt gun, like with the Septic Tank a year prior. The squirt cannon is easily the worst feature of the Septic Tank, just for being so cumbersome and not really having enough space for a figure to man it. The design of the AWE Striker lends itself to this gimmick much more. It still looks a little too big for the vehicle, but it doesn’t really hinder it’s function that much. As an added bonus, it’s pretty easy to get a decently matching black gun to replace it, so the Eco Striker can be rendered in it’s classic glory with a normal gun. Personally, I wish there were some more newly tooled bits to change it’s look a little more like with the Septic Tank, but this one functions well as it is, so I can’t be too picky.

If you’d believe it, there’s more than one Eco Striker: A new version was released as a 2014 Joecon exclusive, rendered from the Ninja Commando 4×4. I do like that they put together an Eco Warriors set for Joecon, though many of the choices were questionable, like usual. The Ninja Commando 4×4 is a pretty horrible rendition of the AWE Striker. The design removes a ton of parts and simplifies it to an extent that the Joecon version of the Eco Striker just looks like a vintage one that’s missing half of it’s parts. I really don’t know why that exclusive exists, but it’s there.

The last complete Eco Striker sold for a whopping $61, which is a lot more than I was expecting. You really don’t see complete copies for sale all that often, and incomplete ones don’t go for a lot less. I’m not sure I think it’s really worth that, but it is a very cool vehicle, and probably the most memorable repaint of the AWE Striker. If I’m ever in the market for another one, I’ll probably just buy a cheap junker and augment it with similar parts from other AWE Strikers.

gi joe eco warriors eco striker 1992 vehicle ozone clean sweepgi joe eco warriors eco striker 1992 vehicle ozone clean sweep

1992 Eco Striker Links:

…Nothing besides Yo Joe!, so if you have some Eco Striker pics or a blog post hidden somewhere, feel free to link to it in the comments.

Funskool T.A.R.G.A.T.

Posted on by
3

Funskool T.A.R.G.A.T.

So as I mentioned before I’m a big fan of the T.A.R.G.A.T. (or as I refer to him henceforth as the TARGAT). He features fun elements from the Alley Viper (flip down visor), he’s basically an astronaut, who’s also kinda like a jet-pack paratrooper kinda thing. Stretch your imagination a bit and you have a fun Cobra/Iron Grenadier that appears out of thin air and begins attacking, and unlike the Annihilator he doesn’t look terrible. Another thing to like about the TARGAT, is that he has a few cool repaints to collect, such as this Funskool figure.

I’m not sure to say that the Funskool TARGAT’s aged like wine, but one figure it has inevitably shown it’s appeal over is the Star Brigade TARGAT, whose color scheme it’s based on. Of course, the reason for this is because the Hasbro figure suffers from GPS, meaning that sooner or later the figure will fully turn to dust, whereas the Funskool figure replaces most of the gold with a copper-colored soft plastic. At a certain point, you’ll be hard pressed to find a V2 TARGAT with intact knee-pins, so a similar alternative is very much a welcomed thing.

I miss the depth of that gold color a little bit, though in many ways the Funskool version is absolutely better than the Star Brigade release. All of the orange details were replaced with yellow ones in most of the same spots. though you lose the painted details on his biceps. Although the head’s left purple, his purple paint applications have been replaced by more of a German Grey color, which looks pretty nice for the added variety, though the purple was quite good originally. He’s also kept the black on his grenades and gold on his visor, with the later color gaining the added benefit of some extra contrast, given that now the visor isn’t painted the same color as the entire figure. For the most part, everything’s pretty similar between the two figures, but different enough to make owning them both pretty fun. Except for the Hasbro one crumbling, that’s not any fun.

It used to entertain me to assign asinine roles to every repaint or variant that came into my possession. For the TARGAT, the original ‘89 release was the basic trooper, with the ‘93 version becoming the officers. The Funskool version became something that was ambiguously a unique character and another generic, and was the TARGAT flight instructor. He’s a senior operator among the Iron Grenadiers and an expert at using the complicated TARGAT flight gear, so he’s responsible for teaching the rest of them tactics and how to use this crap. I like this idea still and mostly associate the figure with that role, but it’s also somewhat frustrating to pigeonhole a figure I have into such a relatively niche role. With that in mind, I sometimes hesitate at creating new repaint characters, at the cost of being more hedonistic with owning recolors that serve no real purpose.

funskool T.A.R.G.A.T. TARGAT GI Joe international cobra Hasbro

A major flaw of both this figure and the original Star Brigade release is the inclusion of generic 90‘s gear. I think the TARGAT works pretty well with ordinary guns, but the backpack was cool and a defining part of the figure. Included here is a Rock Viper PSG1, the Annihilator’s SMG, the V1 Iron Grenadier’s pistol and a missile-launcher (HEAT Viper, M. Bison, Night Creeper Leader and later Metal Head’s), plus missiles and a stand in eye-searing pink. There’s a lot of variants on the coloring of these, with the colors ranging from red to orange and some looking a little more florescent pink than others, though bright pink seems to be the most common color. I think PINK is probably the worst color you put Joe guns into, but as a novelty it makes him odd at the very least. Plus now you have some guns that might look nice with other pink-clad figures like Banzai- haven’t you always wanted that?

Fortunately this is still one of the more common and less popular Funskool releases, and with a little bit of patience you can get a Funskool TARGAT for around $15. If you’re a Star Brigade fan, he’s a nice alternative to Hasbro’s release, since you can still safely pose him and have a little bit of fun as opposed to sealing him in an acrylic case and waiting for gravity to finish him off. Though, it’s also reasonable to find this figure and the one it’s based on to be horribly garish, but I collect TARGATs so I’m forced to ignore such a notion.

funskool T.A.R.G.A.T. TARGAT GI Joe international cobra Hasbrofunskool T.A.R.G.A.T. TARGAT GI Joe international cobra Hasbro

Funskool T.A.R.G.A.T. Links:

The Dragon Fortress

2001 Sure Fire

Posted on by
3

2001 Sure Fire

I’m not sure what to say about Sure Fire. Objectively, I think he’s a really good toy and I like him a lot. Yet at the same time he’s connected to a member of the GI Joe deep-state as a homage to David Lane, and that’s a one-way trip to the #GroanZone nobody needs. I slept on that factoid for many a years and enjoyed the figure more before I knew though, so perhaps in favor of having fun, I’ll mostly ignore that and just talk about why Sure Fire isn’t a bad time.

The ARAHC Joes outside of the ridiculously rare Serpentor wave have always floated around as some of the most worthless figures on the aftermarket. That’s not a knock against them, just an observation. When I was a kid, I only encountered them once, and the only set I ever saw was the Cobra Commander (Battle Armor) and Chameleon set. That came a little too soon after the ‘97 Cobra Command set, so I never wound up getting any figures from this line until the late 2000‘s, when their cheapness became more interesting as a way of bolstering my smaller collection from back then. Somewhere along the way I ended up with one of these Sure Fires.

For the most part, this figure is almost a total repaint of ‘92 Shockwave, just with a new head. The new head is… fairly undesirable. It’s not in that Big Brawler territory of sheer misery, but it has that cheap and generic look that the other sculpts from the time were prone to, in a way that I can only think to describe as feeling more Chap Mei and less GI Joe. None of this is really anything that ruins the figure though, as I feel like the figure comes across the strongest as an army-builder FBI mook rather than a real GI Joe. V3 Shockwave has slightly brighter colors that make him seem more in-line with his 90‘s-neon DEF buds, but Sure Fire is in this really dull navy-blue color that makes him seem like much more of a generic by comparison.

Gotta be honest though, for me a lot of the appeal of this figure comes from my view on Shockwave. I love commandos in balaclavas, so despite being a solid figure I can never like DEF Shockwave more than V1 Shockwave. When I want to see a bunch of 90‘s contemporaries at the same time, the DEF mold comes out. Most of the time though, ‘88 Shockwave is the only Shockwave for me. This leaves a pretty cool sculpt mostly unexplored in my Joe world, so Sure Fire helps me rectify that. The character’s complete junk, but when you put that aside he can become a much needed Joe-mook who’s not a Steel Brigade. Plus, just giving him some headgear from Marauder’s goes a long way towards making him fully generic.

I feel disappointed by the fact that I can make a “how’s the figure degrading now” paragraph apart of my standard format when I’m talking about 2000‘s Joes. Interestingly, V1 Sure Fire seems to be holding up pretty well 22 years to his release, which I honestly did not expect for something that features blue plastic. The next release of the mold (and character) is fairing less well with the greens on his legs in particular turning dark on many copies. It’s sort of interesting the way that discoloring is so random on these figures now, where certain releases will seemingly all turn uniformly bad at once, but then a repaint of that figure that may only be a few months newer or older is perfectly fine.

For accessories you get ‘91 Dusty’s pistol in black, ‘87 Law’s uzi in silver, and a solid black version of Law’s helmet too. These accessories are nice, especially if you deemed Sure Fire appropriate as an army-builder. The silver uzis are distinct and look nice to pass around, and the black helmet fits nicely on a good number of classic figures too. I really don’t know why the ‘91 Dusty pistol became the weapon of choice during the 2000‘s, but it’s usable and better than some alternatives. Really, these accessories aren’t anything to write home about, but they do the job nicely and reinforce the image I have in my head about him just being a generic.

He’s a little less common than the ‘02 repaint that can be found in excess abundance, but ‘01 Sure Fire is still only worth around $10, $15 if you feel lazy and just go for a BiN. Back in the day, you could get left overs from China for $3 a piece or so, I didn’t take much advantage of that, but in hindsight I wish I had seeing how thirsty I am for o-rings now.

2001 Sure Fire Links:

Half the Battle

Joe A Day

1983 Black Major (Action Force)

Posted on by
4

1983 Black Major

Thinking about it, there’s only two things that come from Britain that I think I really like: the first being the USA, and the second being the Action Force toy line. I don’t think Action Force has the same enduring charm as GI Joe, but I think the fact that I’m even interested in a series of forty-year-old action figures from another country that I’d never heard of until I was mostly grown speaks to their quality. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for toy commandos with mostly realistic guns.

The Black Major is a pretty popular character with Joe fans, and also probably the most popular Red Shadows villain. I learned this by conducting a survey that consisted of one person, and I asked myself various questions, so now I can project whatever vague notions I have onto anyone else who’s apart of any group I associate with. Anyways, most of that popularity probably stems from his appearances in the Action Force comics, which did a good job of fleshing out his character. A lot of his popularity is also probably owed to being a figure that vaguely looks like some kind of Nazi. For a villain’s design, it’s a little on the nose, but at the same time it’s much less silly than the disco guy. The overall Red Shadows aesthetic is charming in the way that it mixes bits of Nazi Germany and a few Soviet visual cues.

The Black Major strikes me as a figure that’s full of imperfections, yet somehow by virtue of modern GI Joe’s sheer incompetence, remains the best figure ever made of the character. I don’t mind that he’s done in Kenner Star Wars style 5-POA, but given the relative popularity of the character you’d think at some point he’d have gotten his own, proper GI Joe figure. The only Black Major made after this one was the 2010 convention figure, an abominate mix of M. Bison, Thunder and Action Marine parts that resulted in a figure far too ugly to justify a few extra points of articulation.

action force black major gi joe 1983Sadly given that the Black Major himself is a repaint of the Action Force Commander (and similarly, the Z-Force Commander), he doesn’t have all that sinister of a face. Instead he just looks like any friendly ol’ Action Force commando, which I don’t think really suits the character all that well. From what I understand, Action Force didn’t really have all that much of a budget, so the short line is filled with curiously recycled sculpts. Having a villain who looks like a normal person really isn’t such a bad thing though.

For accessories, the Black Major included the Cobra Officer’s AK-47, and a code sheet that corresponds with the Cyrillic-like letters on the Red Shadows vehicles. The figure’s pose makes a pistol a bit more of an appropriate weapon, which again, is probably a side-effect of being an Action Force Commander repaint. As it is, I think he looks weird with an AK since he has to hold it with his arm extended. The code-sheet’s also pretty neat, though it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t hold your imagination very long as a kid. As a cheap toss-in though, it’s a nice bonus.

Action Force figures aren’t worth a lot despite probably being a lot more scarce than GI Joe figures. A Black Major figure complete with his AK and code-sheet runs around $30 as a BiN, but incomplete figures in good shape can be had for around $10, and it’s pretty common to get him in lots too. Judging by how common he is, I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say he’s the most popular Red Shadow, which is reasonable given that he’s probably the coolest Red Shadow too.

action force black major gi joe 1983action force black major gi joe 1983

1983 Black Major Links:

Forgotten Figures

Blood For the Baron

Joe A Day