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.
The Viper Pit 