1987 Blaster

The Battle Force 2000 was a relatively decent set of toys, although the extent of their quality ends at that. It’s such an odd sub-team of figures, mostly sold in two-packs and all with such an overbearing sci-fi motif, that they wind up among the likes of Cobra-La in terms of unpopular groups. I mildly like most of them, but they all have similar problems and are noticeably less nice than the figures released around them.

The characterization of the BF2000 is a little weak overall, and Blaster’s no exception to this. It’s a little hard to care for him too much when he’s barely utilized in the comics, and his filecard can be summed up as “hovercraft guy”. Then you have the sculpt, which is nice, but also lacks too many features that say a lot about him. Ultimately, it reduces Blaster to being more of a generic background role rather than being someone I can use prominently most of the time.

It should be said though, that Blaster is a good looking toy, and works well enough apart from his group. His sculpt is very asymmetrical and a little random looking, but I appreciate the sci-fi aesthetic they were going for with this one. He always reminds me of this corny illustration of a “future soldier” from a 1990 DoD video documenting the Advanced Combat Rifle program. Because of this, I’ve always associated Blaster as being a guy who mainly does demo-videos of suspect military designs that will never see the light of day.

One thing Blaster really has over most of his BF2000 buddies, is his color-scheme. He’s got a fairly unique deco and camo-pattern which looks very nice on the figure. There’s also a good amount of paint applications here, which make Blaster look very detailed. While I very much dislike his asymmetrical gloves and those weird ringlet things, it does look more detailed with the extra paint there, so the detail makes up for the weaker parts of the sculpt. The only real gripe I have, is that his elbows appear to be clothed, but are cast in flesh-tone, oddly.

His accessories consisted of a mask and a gun. The mask is usually long-gone with these, as was the case with the one I got in a lot years ago. It’s a very non-essential part though, and he’s rarely depicted with it. As for the gun, I’d really love to know what happened over at Hasbro when they designed the BF2000 weapons. It’s a very terrible, blocky sculpt that the figure can barely hold. Most of the BF2000 had terrible guns like this, and it’s a noticeable step down from quality featured among most of his contemporaries.

Blaster’s are common, and even when complete barely top $15. If you dig around, you can probably still get one cheaper, and he’s very common in lots. In the crazy world of modern Joe pricing, he’s pretty cheap, but that probably just underscores how ambivalent the GI Joe fandom is to this group as a whole.