Number 1
I finished school. I also started making money and that meant that over the next few years, the toy collection swelled considerably. Ebay was my friend.
Number 2
New GI Joe comics were once again seeing print. They had been absent since the Marvel run ended with issue number 155 in 1994. The new Joe book was carried by Devil's Due and picked up in real time, with the Joes being reinstated after an eight year hiatus.
Number 3
Hasbro made the Night Attack Chopper.
Of course, Hasbro made a bunch of other shizz that year. None worth mentioning I'd say. Well, perhaps one or two. But they are a distant second or third to this baby.
Packed in a windowless open box during a 'experimental' period of GI Joe, the NAC did go quietly into the night as a footnote of GI history. It pains me to think that this gem was on clearance in some stores in the USA for as little as $8. Ooh. The pain. Cheap awesome toys. Ouch ouch.
Well it does pain me, dammit. The one I scored off of Ebay cost me $40. A fair price, but an uncontested auction. Should I have paid less? Some fools were duking it out in bidding wars approaching $60-$70.
Biz.
zarre.
What sense can one glean from the previous paragraph? Well, this: the NAC is a far more sought after item now I feel than it was at the time of its release. For this I blame Hasbro. GI Joe has been without a competent replacement for the venerable Tomahawk since, well, the Tomahawk. A truly indispensable vehicle with a truly vital role which saw only one release. Since then we've had this:
And this:
And most recently this:
None which match the versatility, capacity and fun the Tomahawk had in buckets. The NAC is the closest we received since. And I feel it is finally getting the respect it deserves. It is a damn fine chopper.
Available in two flavours- original mint and liquorice or caramel and chocolate, she could either have the intended Night Force-looking gettup; or look very respectable next to a Tomahawk or three in a desert scheme. I fancied the desert look more for a number of reasons. Three to be precise.
It looks good next to a Tomahawk.
It has a Soviet attack helo resonance.
It didn't seem like anyone else was bidding on it.
Why did I wait so long? Was it worth the hype? And the inflated postage cost? A whopping $60.
Read on.
I passed her up for the longest time for the same reason so many of us did. It has some pretty wacky elements. Examine if you will, the package art. Duke and Snake-Eyes are riding the missile launchers. Now vintage Joe vehicles were always portrayed on the package with obscene amounts of troops hanging off of them. But the toys themselves would typically have some runners with footpegs for you to place figures on that selfsame spot yourself. Slightly less absurd that this wicked Dr Strangelove routine.
Then there are the rotors. Weird. And why? I think they were the biggest detractor for me. You too? I think so. And to think, the designer who dreamed these up thought they would be a selling point. Excellent job, Percy. To the front of the class with you.
Then there are these words: Sound Attack! Sound and Light-Up Features! Spinning Rotors! Fold-Down Handgrip!
Action features are typically greeted with disdain. Particularly by Joe fans, I've noticed. I think it's because for the longest time we did without them and did just fine, making our own sound effects, strapping our own torches to our toys, spinning our own rotors. Well, maybe not the last one. If every GI Joe and Cobra chopper had the same mechanism as the 1983 Dragonfly, I'd be a happy boy. But as soon as we had toys with oversized sound effect backpacks, ninja chopping action, obscenely large spring-fired missile launchers, we began to sneer. Haven't stopped since. Bitter and twisted old men we all are.
But I'm gonna do something plain vanilla insane in this article and say I like the NAC's features. All of the NAC's features. Even the Sound Attack port.
So let's talk about why this helo is a worthy addition to your Joe team.
First off, it does this:
And this:
Spinning rotor mechanism is always welcome on a helicopter. It's a royal pain in the arse to hold the damn thing and spin the rotors by hand and make whup-whup-whup sounds with your mouth . But with this beauty, you just hold the tail, pull the trigger and all is taken care of. Pulling the trigger even causes a red light in the nose sensor cluster to glow for the duration of the sound effect. Granted, the weight of the helo makes me reluctant to hold it by the tail only, since there is a joint where the tail plugs into the fuselage. My fear is the chopper sagging at the joint and ultimately snapping it. Not quite 'Sturdy Construction for Rugged Play'.
The missile tubes are pure vanilla. Fold down a handle, crank back on the trigger and the winglets flip out. Pull back on the trigger (provided you wound up the nobs on the back of the tubes sufficiently) and missiles will shoot out from both sides until all are gone. I can't find a way for alternating fire, which is a minor sadness, but not a deal breaker. Joes go in hot! The downside to the mechanism is that the fold away handle reduces the interior space to pure lip service. This is alright in my book because anyone who actually played with their choppers know how fiddly it is to seat action figures inside. It's more a case of land, chuck 'em in, dust off. But if setting it up on your shelf is what you're into, you can very snugly fit a figure in this recess,
slide the door shut, fold down the winglets and pretend he was never even there. Was there a point to that? Egh, pretend there are figures in there. Or sandwich the requisite amount on top of one another. There are your two options.
Did I mention doors? Yes, the NAC and DAC one-up the Tomahawk by having side doors. That slide shut. And can be removed completely if so desired. Score.
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| Closing doors. NAC 1, Tomahawk 0 |
Up front, things are far more spacious. The pilot has a great bubble canopy for excellent vision, a central control column easily within grasp, and a nice sticker for instrumentation. The front seat folds forward allowing ease of access to the two back seats. Like a Maclaren sports car, the driver sits up front centrally, with two seats behind on either side. Not quite sure whether the role of the occupants is crew or passenger. There are no instruments or controls, so I'm gonna go with passenger. Which makes this a pretty demanding whirlybird for one pilot to operate. And speaking of pilots, one must assume this is Wild Bill's new ride, though no pilot was included. Instead, Bill got packed in with the Patriot Grizzly tank. Yeah. That confuses me too.
The gun armament up front is staggering. A little overwhelming for me really. There is a beast of a chaingun in the middle which is sadly limited to side to side motion; and a chaingun and miscellaneous other gun which have Sound Attack plugs that can be used interchangeably on the left and right ports. Only one is active though, and using a discreet button you can activate the gun firing sound effect. Never a selling point, it's not a detractor as it is nicely tucked away and I do catch myself wondering how best to customize my port. Scarlett's crossbow? How about Blowtorch's flame pistol? Maybe the obscene gun they strapped to the Conquest released around this time? Now I'm just being rude.
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| Laughably the Sound Attack weapons are designed to be wielded. Very Rob Liefeld. |
When all is said and done, I like the look of the chopper with no guns. The middle one is a bit tasteless in how far it sticks out. And this brings me to my (and probably every review's) great gripe about this toy- it has no ground clearance. When it lands, it is almost belly-flush with the ground. There are token wheels - active ones on either side and a molded fixed one in the tail, but they offer not even a centimeter of height.
As a result, the nose gun cannot be mounted beneath the cockpit as with the Dragonfly and Tomahawk, but instead protrudes rather obscenely like a mid-air refueling nozzle. Thankfully all of the guns are designed to be freely removable. But it's a gunship right? It needs a gun! And this matter is what plagues me every night, tossing, turning, unable to sleep.
Last feature worth noting. This bird makes an entry in the list of Joe helicopters to be equipped with a winch and a wind-out, wind-in feature and a good foot or more of rope. But unlike its brethren, this chopper's line descends from cabin level, so as to be of practical use for the occupants. To this end, the line attaches to a foothold or handhold and not a hook, so the intention is clearly to use this to disembark or retrieve personnel and get them on board, not simply to have them dangle from a hook for the flight home. Come to think of it, that always bugged me about the Tomahawk. Glad they seem to be correcting it in the re-release...
...wait, they aren't. Another point to the NAC.
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| Tasteful: the winder knob is well concealed. Tasteless: a sticker proclaiming 'Blast'. |
