The Mobile Command Center will fuck your shit up.

With the current wave of Retaliation movie toys not exactly blowing my hair back, I decided this would be the perfect time to add another large vintage item to my motor pool. Presenting the largest beige sowing-box the GI Joe line ever produced, I give to you the Jawa Sandcrawler.

Take note how that bumper almost scrapes the ground? Criticism forthcoming!

It was 1987, I imagine the already scarce Flagg playsets from two years prior were slipping into mythical status. Hasbro decided it was time for another crowd pleaser. They provided in the form of the massive Defiant Launch Complex. But what's better than one enormous rolling Joe playset in a year? Two of course! So sneaking out of the Defiant's shadow, we have the MCC.

It's a big 'un. 70cm in length, 25cm in width and a massive 40cm tall. But what the hell is a Mobile Command Center anyway?

In terms of continuity at the time of it's release, GI Joe had ditched their original PIT location on Staten Island after numerous security leaks and attacks at the hands of Cobra. Relocating to the expanse of desert in rural Utah, the Joes began construction on an extensive underground location, the PIT III. I can only imagine during this period, the need had arisen for a mobile fortress crammed with sophisticated electronic monitoring gear to maintain security on the surface. It would be the base of operations for scout patrols, act as air and ground traffic control for incoming aircraft and a staging area for missions carried out in this interim.


How does the toy 'stack' up to the task? Well in spite of its size, it is a little on the small side as a mobile base. Nowhere is this more glaring than with its first floor repair bay.












The box art displays a Triple T in that bay, which makes sense since it shared the same year of release as the MCC. But the bay really shines when you put an AWE Striker in there, as the MCC includes a spare engine one can replace the Striker's with. Or so I've heard. To date, I have yet to get an AWE Striker. Getting the MCC is probably the large, beige straw that broke the camel's back for me on that score. The point is, the bay is small. Put anything larger than an Armadillo in there and you battle to place figures around it. A Desert Fox or even VAMP is too large to fit all the way in... Optimally I'd say this vehicle would have crushed my criticism if a Rolling Thunder could snugly fit in. But then this would be as large as a Flagg. Cramped as it is, it boasts plenty of features with a very nice crane that feels sturdy and moves smoothly with great range. There are two lube points with flexible hoses and a fuel nozzle who's hose winds nicely into its retainer.









The front wall has very spacious storage slots, a feature I am always fond of as I constantly need plausible places to keep weapons, packs and gear. The sculpt is busy, with plenty of unpainted pop. A custom paint job begs, but I love the mintiness of this specimen too much.









Next level! A sticker proclaims that this is level number '2'. This is the Command Center portion of the MCC. With that said, the mandatory brig-in-the-most-sensitive-location is present, as it was in the 1983 HQ. This time it is a cramped steel box for our captured baddy. No cushy beds, just a ledge seat in the one corner. He has slitted vents on side, and above his head. Water torture, anyone?






Couldn't resist. With Dark Knight Rises opening here next week, it's Batman season again.

There is some old-school techno-detail in the front end, with screens and a reel-to-reel computer of absurd dimensions. The bank of monitors on either side have some ill-fitting decals that clearly ignore the ridge lines on the mold that separate the two screens. Perhaps I will peel and cut the decals to fit if I feel up to it.









Need a guy like Mainframe to tend to that vintage computer. I mean, his included hardware had two floppy drives.


The sweetest detail has got to be the clear display board. Now this is tech that is not yet dated and redeems the command center with some touch screen, multi-function display shit. Some criticize there being only one chair back there, there is of course a simple solution, short of picking up another chair from a scrap lot. See the picture above? Lady Jaye's chair courtesy of Playmates Star Trek line.






Aw naff! I just discovered that the decal should be applied to the frame and not the bunk! The cost of buying loose 2nd hand stuff. It's gonna be a bitch to correct.


There are a pair of fold out bunks, and I have not yet decided how I feel about them. It seems odd for a pair of Joes to be napping in the nerve center of the vehicle. Then again, with a round the clock vigil, a nearby area for an off-duty techie to rack out might be very apt. I propose they also help to vary the kind of functions level 2 can have. For instance, remove the screen and put in a table from a complimentary line, re-imagine the brig as an ablution area/shower and you have a handsome living quarters. Throw in some extra bunks and you have an enlisted quarters.










Creating a medical bay is also childsplay - it would go some way to explaining the technical detail on the decals applied to the sides of the fold out bunks. Very sci-fi. And if the MCC was indeed large enough to accommodate a Rolling Thunder in level one, this is exactly the type of variation we would expect to see with all the additional space on level 2. The sculpt is less busy, but this only helps in making the space convertible, and not really a criticism.




Level 3 serves two functions: an anti-aircraft missile battery complete with additional missiles and a landing pad, which is barely large enough for a Sky Hawk.






In my imaginary upsize, you could land a Tomahawk on that pad. Don't hate on my imagination. But the pad is not really supported well, so it is ill-advised to try and put anything too hefty on there. The SAM launcher is fun, it flips out from concealment, encloses the operator, has a full range of motion and even slides forward or backwards on a rail system. The top level also boasts a sneaky escape chute that allows Joes a quick egress to the desert floor if the evacuation is called for.


















The final play area is the cab which holds three Joes on rather reclined seats. I'm never much of a fan of driver positions that aren't upright, and it's not like the MCC's cab isn't spacious enough for proper seats, but what the hell. Can't have it all right?





To help the crew fight off their drowsiness, a Head-Up Display is provided in the form of a very sexy decal, and I really do love the large glass panels that the MCC boasts. This is not a front line vehicle by any stretch of the imagination so I won't begrudge the glass as I usually do. The cab has a large dish/missile launcher adorning it and two dual .50 caliber coaxial guns. The missiles pivot up and down and 360 degrees around and, rather surprisingly, the guns have some limited side to side motion. I did not expect that.



Fending off attacks from the rear there is an automated missile launcher which boasts the same type of missile that the front launcher and the Snowcat from '85 do. There are a handful of machine guns and spotlights which mount on the walls when the MCC is splayed out in base mode for you to largely ignore.




And when in vehicle mode you can take the lift! Gets you from the bottom to the top easily enough, and I do like how the gate swings open when it reaches the bottom floor.




So what criticisms can I level at the MCC in one fell-swoop? It gets a bad rap for being frail. Setting my expectations to egg-shell, I was pleasantly surprised when I opened the air-mail box (originally used for a vacuum cleaner) and found it intact. Well, reasonably. One of the side glass panels from the cab was snapped, but the seller wasn't too pedantic in how he packed it. The panel had loosed itself and was crushed under the vehicle. I don't suppose he consulted his magic 8-ball, so I gave him a perfect score on the 'bay anyway. But everything else was in good nick, clean, and the transformation to fold-out base mode is not jarring. I don't think anything is likely to break. It's sturdy, just don't stress it by say, rolling it upside-down when converted and you should be okay.


Wasn't I trying to crit the toy? Here you are. The conversion does have a few bogus side effects. 1) The elevator has to be removed and placed on an alternate location. Why? If it were on the other side of the MCC this would a)be unnecessary and b) not get in the way of the service bay door. It could even have replaced one of the support pillars; 2) the machine guns and searchlights can only be implemented plausibly in base mode. Clearly the intention by the designers is that it actually rolls into the desert and unfolds, it's not merely a mechanism to allow access; 3) There are two gaping holes in the starboard side of the vehicle when it is folded up. Practical hatches would have cured this famously. Like the ones in the Flagg's tower perhaps?

The front end has a cow catcher that rides really low. Sure, you don't want to attempt rolling up a mountainside in this beast, but this bumper barely clears the ground and is a bit of a hindrance. On smooth surfaces and shallow carpeting the MCC rolls nicely. This surprised me most, especially after learning that the huge hunk of plastic rides on only four teeny rollers. Forget about cruising on grass, brick, concrete or asphalt. The nose, or something else will snag.

So yay or nay on the MCC? Yay. A base is so fundamental in my typical Joe adventure. One that is mobile is a huge plus. It is a smaller representation of the real thing in my mind, so landing Tomahawks on the roof and parking the Rolling Thunder down below is all part and parcel of this monstrosity's many functions. It can fight the good fight if Cobra mount an attack on it and has a goodly amount of internal play value. AWE Striker, here I come at long last. And the MCC is tougher than most let on, so don't let the hype get you down. I must add though, that I bought the Spy Troops re-release, so it doesn't have quite as many years on it as the original and that might help the overall sturdiness. But the $75 I paid couldn't be argued with. An original would have easily been upward of $120. I thought I had really scored, until the $90 shipping quote arrived. Whatever. It's a big toy. I live in Africa. Fun purchase. Happy boy.

Cobra HISS II

Cobra HISS. Two words that should have no logical connection to an armored fighting vehicle. But to a fan of GI Joe, these words should spark images of an angular, black, tracked vehicle. The HI-Speed Sentry was Cobra's first entry into the ground vehicle category. It had a solid helping of armor, firepower, mobility, versatility and capacity. It also had an iconic look that entrenched Cobra's flair for the unconventional. As a solid workhorse of the Cobra arsenal, it served with distinction in every major medium. But there was of course room for improvement and six years after the first HISS tank saw combat, the second generation of HISS tanks arrived.


The HISS II is beefed up in every regard. Where the original was piloted by a single operator, it's successor seated two. The cannons were enlarged and a third barrel added. Additional weapons such as coaxial machine guns and missiles were added, as was a rear hatch with capacity for four troops. All welcome changes that continue the legacy and adding to the versatility and capabilities of the HISS. All changes for the good. But here's the rub. The colour. Opting to ditch the original black in favor of a blue-grey, we have red accents in the form of the canopy and weapons. Basically we see the seeds of the poor toy coloring choices that dominated the nineties. Toxic Crusaders anyone?


Colors aside, other oddities to this design are the fact that the pilot egress is via a lowering 'jaw', for lack of a better word. It's a bit finicky in toy form. In reality I can only imagine it's a maintenance nightmare. The pilot seats are pretty spartan, but then again, Track Vipers look more like robots than humans. How a human head fits into that helmet I will never know.

 The tank has teeny tiny (red: why?) roller wheels and not the functioning treads reserved only for the zenith of Joe armor - the MOBAT, Mauler and Patriot Grizzy. Okay, not the last one. But bizarrely if you take the rollers away the universal joint between the treads doesn't clear the ground!

Silliness! And if you are cruising thru moderately long grass, forget about the missiles. They ride so low that they snag everything. With two crew up front, the tank has a tendency to be front-heavy and can flop forward. The barrels of the gun are quizzical in a number of ways. How are they loaded, where is the ammunition stored? The gun mold is hollow and as you tilt the guns up, you get a big ugly eyeful.

But the guns do have a pretty solid range of movement and look like they could do some damage. In addition to the standard armament, the crew portion has slits side and read to poke rifles through if the opportunity should arise to ward off infantry. The rollers move well, while I do always prefer functioning treads, they never give as good a roll as the lil' wheel approach, so the compromise brings advantages. The tailgate mechanism can be a little finickity as it drops and slides out, but I praise it for allowing one to access the troop section simply without, say, something as phony as the roof splitting for instance. And it is vital that you access the troop section. Placing figures in their cramped seats would be nigh-impossible otherwise. In a nod to the original there are footpegs on the tailgate, but it would be in those troops' best interests to disembark before the gate drops on their shins.

 So in closing, what are my thoughts on the HISS II? In every respect an improvement on the original. It retains the Cobra eccentricity, adds new capabilities and yet is not dramatically larger. Aside from the red, I'm fond of the colouring, as I say, my only criticism is it being out of place next to the other Cobra vehicles. But then again, for every HISS, Stun or Ferret, there's a Maggot or Rage. You are not spoiled for choice when it comes to Conra armor, but you can do no better than the HISS II.

MOBAT with Steeler

Early this month I recorded a podcast wherein I outlined my 'Original 13' team - that being, if I was to reboot the team, who would make the cut. In an attempt not to reinvent the wheel, I looked long and hard at the actual Original 13 and determined who did not make the cut. Characters like Short-Fuse, Grand-Slam... even Grunt and Rock & Roll had far more compelling predecessors. Another huge consideration was vehicle and playset choices. I wanted all the bases covered. 'Base' being the operative word, the Original 13 would have included the '83 Headquarters and all the vehicles that interacted with it. The VAMP, MOBAT... instead of the Dragonfly, I opted for the obvious utility of the Tomahawk with it's transport function. Looking back over the early comics, my affinity grew for the MOBAT driver - Steeler. If he had only gotten a bit more time in the sun he could have been a real fan favourite. His filecard alluded to frequent clashes with authority. And in world of very disciplined soldiers, having a 'Wolverine' type in the mix might have spiced things up a little. His comic appearances did not however live up to this potential, and being 'the tank driver', as soon as the MOBAT toy began being phased out, so did he embark on his voyage to obscurity. But with his potential in mind, he made my cut as the armor specialist, and the tank commander. And I started to really dig the guy.


And the tank. There is some allure to the Original 13, the green team, that a Joe fan can't ignore. The figures are dated. No doubt about that, even from an o-ring perspective. But the vehicles? The attention to detail is unsurpassed. Such quality. Such real-world adherence, but always with a dash of science fiction. A tank. A jeep. A jetpack. You get the picture...

So after falling in love with that early gear, the Steeler (potential) character, and the fact that I had an '83 HQ, a VAMP, a Dragonfly but no MOBAT, I promptly bid on and won a very nice 1983 MOBAT.

A startling 2 weeks later, it arrived. (That is very quick in my experience).

Now the MOBAT has since gone down in history as being comically small. This factor together with the fact that it was cleared through customs very quickly and attracted no customs duty made me think I was probably going to pick up something the size of a shoebox. So I strapped on my backpack, hopped on my bicycle and zipped off to the post office. Shoebox size? No, try case of wine size! Fitting it in my backpack was not a possibility so I cycled home one-handed with a hulking box under my other arm. Going under the subway was a near-death experience. Was the MOBAT larger than I had anticipated?

From left to right: Power Team Elite; Chap Mei; Hasbro; Lanard. Love how high the Corps! tank rides. That thing is floating.

No, the seller was just a very meticulous packer. After stripping away layers of paper and bubble wrap, I had my prize. The blueprints were unfolded and packed flat in a rigid sleeve with a very minty Steeler Filecard. Nice touch that, and much appreciated. The figure was possibly the mintiest action figure I had ever beheld. I don't think anyone manipulated its joints in its entire 28 years since production. It showed - my attempt at bending his knees resulted in his right thigh cracking and breaking off. I glued it back appreciably well. No heartbreak there. The main selling point to getting an original Steeler over the 25th anniversary version was that sweet helmet. It was present, complete and clean. The visor was a bit longer than I had been led to believe, but it's the 80's! Tech like that wasn't efficient on space. And he came with that sweet, sweet uzi. Oh object of my desires. The same one Snake Eyes came with, just in dark grey, and I'd say it's still the finest example Hasbro has ever produced.

As for the MOBAT? The toy was in great shape. Only three decals, a little dust and a very mend-able crack on the machine gun but certainly no deal breakers. And the mechanism works like a charm. Okay, it's pretty slow as the clip attests, managing just over 4.5 km/h (adjusted for scale). But after all these years, it works. One could do far worse.

And there isn't much more to say. It's chief criticism is that it doesn't have much going for it beyond the feature. There are no crew hatches, and Steeler's command position doesn't allow him to seat very deep in the vehicle. But scratch the surface with me readers.

Tow rope and tools. But I think there was a scaling dispute between the designs and the finished product. The very small size of those tools suggest that this tank was meant to be larger, or the figures smaller. Seriously, Steeler could probably only fit two fingers in the spade grip.

The mold is immaculate. there is a real dearth of flat surfaces on this thing. Any place they could have added a mold detail, they have. And they bulleted it on the blueprints. Tools, tow ropes, small-arms stores, hatches, vents, rivets, spare track links... marvelous. A quality mold this is. And it possesses the one thing all tanks should have standard but so few do - real tracks with working bogey wheels. And the MOBAT, in spite of it's slight size has the other thing tanks should have. A really good heft. Even without the two 'D' batteries, she weighs about a kilogram. More so with the batteries in.

Again with the tiny tiny tools...

This toy has reduced me to an 8 year-old again. I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I do. I sleep with it on the pillow beside me and make it ride across the bed and scare the cat in the dead of night. And just when it's appeal began to wear, I pair it up with the HQ and lose all sense of reason. What a thing of beauty. The design team were so switched on back then. Such a unified aesthetic, great quality, detail, interactivity, purpose. Such purity of purpose. No ninjas, Dreadnoks, Eco-Warriors. Just the most well-equipped and proficient soldiers fighting a shadowy organisation that had an affinity for snakes. Up until the MOBAT, I had never owned a G.I. Joe main battle tank. To be fair, there aren't as many as one might expect. But I don't know if a Mauler or Grizzly or (gasp) Brawler will likely usurp this little green bastard. I really love this tank. I have plenty hulking Abrams, but never got this much enjoyment out of them. It's like they are just other tanks. The MOBAT is my protagonist.

Further size comparison. I'd say the Abrams is pretty close to 1/18 scale.

How do I envision it's use? Well it is a mini tank, making it perfectly suitable for Joe's typical mission requirements. It's fast, fully automated so it can either be used remotely or accommodate a driver and commander/gunner and is comparatively light so it can be hauled by a C 17 Globemaster and still allow for an APC and VAMP.

Shifters

For the bulk of my childhood, GI Joe was a toy and nothing more. The filecards offered information enough to paint a decent picture of the figure, but there were no cartoons and very few comics floating around.  So who could blame me for using the figures  a little more... creatively?

With influences like Star Wars/Trek and superhero flicks, Joes became placeholders for more fantastical characters. Tomax was a Jedi. Charbroil was The Flash. Hydro-Viper was a mutant. Balrog was a vampire hunter. Zartan was the vampire. Out of these very disparate influences a common thread of narrative emerged for me and my buddies. We even gave it a name. Shifters.

It was in the wake of The Matrix, where kung fu and bullet time was very much in vogue. I wanted to incorporate superhuman powers into our protagonists, giving us free reign to push the envelope on action sequences. All of a sudden, your character could come out on top of overwhelming odds, leap vast distances, perform all sorts of acrobatic feats and move at inhuman speeds. And if that wasn’t fun enough, he could transport himself to parallel universes.

The gimmick here all started where, at a certain point in history, Cobra became a world power. It’s dominion was that of North America and an underground resistance movement was spearheaded by the former members of the G.I. Joe team and their followers. Rob’s, Al’s and my protagonists were Cobra enforcement operatives tasked with hunting down and brining to justice those who would seek to threaten Cobra’s rule. The hunt culminates in thwarting Conrad Hauser’s attempt on the life of the supreme Cobra leader. But instead of turning him over, Hauser convinces them to fly to the site that once was Cobra Island where the decisive battle between the forces of G.I. Joe and Cobra was fought. Amid the twisted, moss-covered wreckages, they find the remains of Cobra’s final weapon – a mass-brainwashing device, capable of using satellite networks to subvert the minds of the nation. The only ones unaffected were those on Cobra Island. At the same time, deep Cobra moles in key positions coordinated their efforts along with the mass-brainwashing to install themselves as captains of industry, ministers, military leaders and even the president. On returning to the continental US, G.I. Joe find themselves labelled as traitors and outlaws.

Sound familiar? Well, they say there isn’t an original idea out there. But I was playing this out back in ’99, okay! So IDW and Paramount can ki$$ ma @$$!

Around about that time, Cobra has grown wise to this subversion of their top agents and bombs them to kingdom come. But they survive...

As a sort of impending death, knee-jerk, the three have used their latent shifter powers to escape into a kind of limbo. There they meet their handler, Tyrell, who drops a few bombshells.

They are a trio of Shifters super beings able to move through the multiverse of parallel dimensions. They are each hundreds of years old. They were tasked with hunting down reality-hopping baddies. They discovered something that made all three elect to induce amnesia within themselves. But fate brought them back together.

So they get back into the saddle, and for a brief time, this was the best time I ever had with my action figures. Possibly the best time I ever had with my two best childhood friends. The possibilities were endless. From the most conventional military settings to the most far-fetched fantasy world. There was a roster of recurring

 characters, a shadowy inter-dimensional organisation pulling the strings, journeys of personal discovery, love won... and lost. And through it all, three individuals that weren’t merely custom characters. They were our ideal protagonists, not our interpretations of another author’s work, not existing within predetermined rules and limitations. They were pieces of us, to shape as we pleased. Our influences in both character and plot could never be described as original. Far from it, we emulated any and all action/sci-fi/fantasy influences that took our fancy. I even bought a strobe light to play out a similar scene to the opening of Blade, you know, the one in the club, where blood sprays from the sprinkers? But the culmination of all these influences meant we were creating something superior – a culmination of all of them. It was a play pattern without limitation in that we could be in outer space one week, in an ancient civilisation the next and STILL maintain continuity and character development. It was unlike anything to come before, unlike anything that came after. It was a fantastical time. Possibly even a swan song for my friends and my imaginative life. Since then my pursuit of this hobby has been a lot like chasing rainbows.

Retraction

Remember in Feb when I said toy reviews on Youtube were shit and I needed to up their game? Well, that was before this guy just exploded. Best leave it to him then. And he's got a waaaay bigger collection than me. Hey, maybe when time and bandwidth allow I'll post myself talking toys, but way to go, FORMBX257.

GI Joburg Podcast Launch

I have published my first Podcast, have a listen and comment!

http://gijoburg.podbean.com/

Or listen here!

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Lifeline

Do you remember your first G.I. Joe? Frequenting Joe boards as I do, I realise a great deal of fans do remember. For me, it’s between three figures. Iceberg. Monkeywrench. Lifeline.

That old-skool Lifeline was easily my least favourite figure. And being one of the oldest, he was pretty beat up. No thumbs, O-ring hanging by a thread, screws rusted beyond recognition. He had the distinction of being the only figure I had for a very long time that included a pistol. And I did love that pistol intensely. Some irony there, of course. I remember clearly hiding it in his Rescue case and closing it up. Even more irony. It was not to last though, the pistol was the first to go. Then the gas mask. At the time, I never knew that it was meant to plug into the hole on the side of the case. I guess the ‘administer oxygen’ playpattern was not a popular one. The aerial on the backpack snapped off while it and the case spent a few weeks lost in the garden mulch heap. Maybe that’s where the pistol came to rest? That part of the garden has since been dug out and bricked. So I’ll never know...

By complete accident (read: seller fuckups) I came into possession of the pistol and gas mask again. The pistol was included with a Mint, Complete Hawk (1986), and the gas mask with a similarly Mint, Complete Ripcord (1984). So I had a complete Lifeline again!

Not really.

In the interim, I decided that Lifeline needed to be sacrificed so that a Sky Creeper figure of my friend’s could have a back screw. You may remember me saying that Lifeline’s screws were rusted beyond recognition? Well, a combination of that and my 8-year old total lack of mechanical skills meant that the most efficient way to get the screw out would be to completely smash the figure that enclosed it. So one afternoon, Lifeline succumbed to a combination of being hurled at the concrete and caved in by a brick.

Writing those words was a little painful. While he certainly met his end as an action figure that day and went into the bin, he fought bravely to the end and did not surrender his rusty screw. So Sky Creeper got the Presstick treatment.

Several years later Rob located a Funskool India Tiger Force Lifeline, so we had a medic on the team again. As I recall though, in spite of his newness, he was just a necessary figure to have riding in the back of the Warthog, and was never featured or spotlighted in our games. Lifeline was still not the cool figure everyone wanted to be.

Not any more.

I can’t be more enthusiastic about the 30^th Anniversary figure of Lifeline if I tried. The more I look at him, play with him, marvel at what Hasbro have done with him, the more his importance is elevated in my Joe-verse. Just look at that coolly-sculpted face. The T-1000-esque glasses mask the eyes of a man who has seen the worst conflict has to offer. This is not the face of a preachy pacifist. He’s out to save lives. 

The card art is also phenomenal at capturing this character, adding so nicely in ways that the sculpt leaves open to our imagination. By that I mean his five o’clock shadow. This man doesn’t soldier for show. He’s not on parade. If you are in the shit, he will get you out and keep you breathing. Contrast this with the goofy grin of the original. Subliminally this must have knocked the medic character down a few pegs in my child-opinion. But with his newly stern expression, I’m thinking of elevating this figure to a more leadership role. I mean, back in ’83, the next highest rank down from Hawk and Ace was in fact Doc. I think this makes perfect sense, as the ultimate aim of an anti-terrorist unit is to save lives right?! Since I have no Doc figure, and have no intention of getting one I think I might hybridise Edwin Steen’s dossier, opting to make him a corpsman instead of a former fire department member, and elevating his rank to Lieutenant. And what the hell, a pistol marksman.

Enter the controversy. Both Doc and Lifeline were quite famously penned as pacifists who would under no circumstances use weapons or even offensive hand-to-hand. I read somewhere on the net that this is not entirely accurate, as US armed forces require their corpsmen to carry a sidearm. How does that affect the Hippocratic Oath? Well, I guess it would break down like this: if you can shoot to incapacitate, do so. But if it comes down to the terrorist’s life or the lives of say, a busload of innocents, that terrorist made his decision. He’s going in the bag. Ironically, it was the old skool Lifeline cardart that depicted him wielding that enormous silver pistol. The new cardart leaves to your discretion. My Lifeline is a marksman who regularly competes with his buddies Lowlight and Wetsuit on the pistol range.   

'I can help you or hurt you, your choice...'

I do however prefer Lifeline to be a ‘righty’ so he holsters his pistol across the chest; the hypo goes in the left leg holster. Doubt my correctness? Then feast your eyes on this. The pistol was always intended to go in the chest holster, the holster just was inactive and empty on the original, as it was with 1986 Hawk. The two holsters on nu skool Lifeline really are interchangeable, the holsters are simply the reverse of one another. And with the added wrist articulation, Lifeline can pretty convincingly grasp the pistol butt across his chest. I do have one criticism of the new articulation – it does leave Lifeline’s palms pretty swollen. He doesn't hold the pistol fantastically well, but a sight better than 30^th Snake-Eyes weird grip issue. On that, I find few if any fans share my dislike for those hands. They have seen reuse on the Cobra Troopers and Stalker, and in each case I’ve swapped them out for appropriate fodder hands. Why do I hate them so? After all, they have superior articulation. I hate them because they don’t fully encompass the weapon grips. Contact is made between the forefinger and thumb and nowhere else, particularly with those included silenced pistols. It really bugs me, and seems to be apparent on all reuses of those hands, so they had to go. Snakes got the hands off of a ROC Paris Pursuit Snake-Eyes, and Stalker got his hands from the Ultimate Battle Pack Stalker.

Ham hand. And the knife is on the opposite boot to the original, but who cares? I love that the straps have a paint app. I had to do the honours on 30th Stalker. Even his belt was unpainted. Laziness!

What more can be said about the Lifeline figure? Paint apps are crisp, spot on, and frighteningly faithful to the original. Tooling reuse with a few new touches accurately reproduce the busy sculpt of the original with flourishes like the pouches on his chest, thigh, that silver instrument also mounted on his thigh, the (now active) chest holster and knife sheath, the ‘RESCUE’ paint app. Glorious when so much effort is made to recreate something as opposed to assembling parts that could pass and selling off a frankenjoe. Yes Hit & Run, Shockwave. I’m looking at you.

Accessories. Some pretty inspired work here Hasbro, I salute you. Newly sculpted pieces all, save for the pistol and knife. Starting from the top, the helmet is a perfect reproduction with the bonus of it being fully removable. It fits snugly, yet not so tight that it’ll give Lifeline a bald spot any time soon (by that I mean rubbing off the painted hair). The chinstraps dangle realistically- on the original they ran under his chin, the sculptors could have omitted them. But instead they went one better. Great Job.

Gun and knife we’ve seen before, but they are great inclusions that increase your Lifeline options further, something I wish we had on a figure like Airtight, whose ultra vintage-accurate approach misses some opportunities to improve on said vintage.

Defibs and IV totally removable. But the case doesn't look quite as jazzy without them.

The case opens and is fully sculpted and painted with details like vials, a hypodermic needle, aneroid blood pressure monitor, sculpted slots for the removable IV bag and defibrillators. The dainty, but very accurately scaled defibrillators have sculpted cables running to the charger; the IV bag has simulated print on it and a hole for a clear tube to connect. A pony bottle of O2 attached to a face mask via clear tube is included an everything can be wound up and stored in the case. Magnificent. So you can do everything and more than the original, and that’s before the stretcher!

A picture is worth 1000 words, and since this article is getting very word-heavy, I give you:

THIS! 'cos I'm lazy, my stretcher is 1500 kilometers out of reach (no joke), and I want to get this article out. So thanks, Planned Banter!

Do I miss the vintage backpack? Not really. Lifeline’s MO was never communication specialist, and while it made some sense for him to carry the radio, please bear in mind he was released in the same year and Mainframe AND Dial-Tone. Overkill on the radiomen! The old case was a bit more filled in, there was clearly a non-functioning first-aid box within it, whereas the new case has a lot more empty space, allowing you to cram it with the loose goods. Or whatever you will. I still have love for the old one, but I love the new one too. I just hope the clasps and spine have the same longevity as the vintage. My vintage is still unbroken, I shit you not.

High praise for a job well done, Hasbro. This is the classic case of a truly bang up job elevating a character I had no love for and making him the star of the show. Lifeline is now a primary character for me, all thanks to this fantastic presentation.