 Hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. Ha ha ha! Today we are so great. Top tier glove, G.I. Joe. Oh, swatterized it! Bites, sights! Rain! Ready! Ready! Ready! Silence kill. Hello everybody, Hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. It's time for the final review of Battle Force 2000 Month. We made it six reviews in five weeks. I thought it was going to be difficult, and I was right. It was really difficult. For this review, there's only one vehicle and one figure left from the first wave of Battle Force 2000. So we are going to look at the Vindicator Hovercraft and the Driver Blaster. This is another figure like Dodger that I think had some influence from the Colonial Marines in the movie Aliens. As you know, if you've been watching this series, this year at the G.I. Joe Convention, we are getting updated modern Battle Force 2000 figures. So Joe Fan-82 is going to give us a preview of the exclusive Joe Con figure. Hey guys, after HCC reviews the Vintage Blaster, I'll be looking at the 2017 version we'll be seeing from the Collectors Club at Joe Con this year. Stay tuned. Thanks again, Joe Fan-82. I really could not have done this without you. Also in this video, we get to complete the Future Fortress. All of these Battle Force 2000 vehicles had a gimmick. You could remove parts of them and then put them together to form the Future Fortress. We have been building the Fortress piece by piece the whole month and we finally get to finish it. But wait, these Battle Force 2000 vehicles reconfigure and combined to form something bigger, that sounds a lot like a Transformer. Maybe that's what we need. We need to look at these Battle Force 2000 vehicles and the Future Fortress from a Transformers perspective. But I know more about your butt than I know about Transformers. So what do we do in this situation? On this channel we call in an expert. I needed a Transformers perspective so I got on the hotline and I called Cyber Tiger. Hello everybody, I'm Cyber Tiger here from Cyber Tiger Retro Toy Showcase and Reviews. And today I'm going to be taking a look at the GI Joe Battle Force 2000 Future Fortress. I'm going to have a quick look at it and give my judgment from a Transformers point of view. Thank you, Cyber Tiger. Stay tuned for Cyber Tiger's in-depth, detailed, Transformers review of the Future Fortress. No more stalling, we really can't put it off any longer. HCC788 presents the Vindicator and Blaster. This is the 1987 GI Joe Battle Force 2000 Vindicator Hovercraft and the Driver Blaster. This figure and vehicle were available separately in 1987 and 1988 and were discontinued for the year 1989. Battle Force 2000 hit the shelves near Christmas time in 1987. So they appeared under many Christmas trees that year. That's not a bad way to launch a new team. Battle Force 2000 had every advantage. Its lack of success was due to flaws in the product, not for lack of marketing. Blaster was first available as a single carded figure in 1987, then in a two pack with his Battle Force 2000 teammate Avalanche in 1988. Unlike most dedicated GI Joe vehicle drivers, Battle Force 2000 figures were not packaged with their vehicles. They were all sold separately. Battle Force 2000 acquired a rival in 1988. Destro's Iron Grenadiers were released with the Battle Force 2000 logo on the packaging, but they were only rivals on the toy shelves. They never faced off in GI Joe media. As opponents, Iron Grenadiers and Battle Force 2000 are a study in contrasts. Battle Force 2000 was high-tech and futuristic, but the vehicles were mostly raw and unpainted. Their unifying style was a lack of style. Early Iron Grenadiers vehicles were also high-tech and futuristic, but they were also jet black with highlights of gold and red. They were made in the image of their creator, Destro. Iron Grenadier vehicles had their own flaws, but they had style. I'm going to set Blaster aside for now so we can look at the Vindicator. I'll start out by saying I like the name. Vindicator is a cool name. Battle Force 2000 vehicles had one thing going for them. They had great names and with no strained acronyms. The Vindicator is a hovercraft. GI Joe had another famous hovercraft, the 1984 Killer Whale, and the Whale was one of my favorite vehicles. The Vindicator takes no design cues from the Whale, not in size or color, not in features. They could not be more different. The Vindicator is missing an essential feature for a hovercraft. It isn't a water vehicle. The Killer Whale could float and it could go on land. The Vindicator is designed to be a land vehicle. What is the Vindicator's advantage over a traditional wheeled or tracked vehicle? Hovercraft do exist, but they don't look like the Vindicator. They use blowers to create a cushion of air under the vehicle. They usually have flexible skirts so they can move over small obstructions without damage. The Vindicator has none of that. Real hovercraft look more like the Killer Whale. The Vindicator has an arrowhead shape with a long tail. And let's be honest, it looks like a dust buster. It even has a handle. Now I do appreciate that it is pointed at the front to get into those hard to reach corners. The dust buster people really should release a model that looks like this. Let's look at the parts and the features on the Vindicator. Starting here in the front, we have what the blueprints call Pivoting Anti-Armor Gun System, or AAGS. They are black, they do pivot, and they are gun systems. I think Captain Obvious must have worked in GI Joe R&D. These guns can rotate all the way around to face aft, but they do bump into the rotors. These guns can become very loose to the point that they're kind of floppy. I have a couple of Vindicators and on my other one, the guns are extremely loose, so do watch out for that. Next we have the cockpit, and the cockpit is interesting. It is a two-seater cockpit, and it has a control stick on each side, and it has a center console with lots of detail, and it has a lever right here, which will release a hidden sub vehicle. We will demonstrate that later. Blaster can fit in the cockpit. He fits rather snugly, and you can put his hand on the control stick. It is a pretty tight fit. You can put one of his teammates in, so his teammate can ride along. But this is a pretty tight fit for a two-seater cockpit. They may have been better off just making this a one-seater. Behind the cockpit, on each side, we have these stabilizer fins, and they look too small to be effective to me. Then on top, we have this blue air intake with an exhaust in the back. The Vindicator rolls on wheels, but we are not going to look at the underside just yet. We will look at it after we detach the sub vehicle. On the sides, it has what the blueprints call lift-off titanium-finned lifting-hover rotors, and there's one on each side. The rotors are the same on both sides, and you can spin the blade by turning this wheel on the top, and you can tilt them. In fact, you can spin them all the way around. This really isn't a bad feature. These tilting rotors would be used to control forward and reverse movement. Finally, there's that lock-unlock detail that we have seen on all Battle Force 2000 vehicles. The Vindicator has a long tail with a ton of details. It has these circular details that may be the non-usable fuel ports we have seen on other Battle Force 2000 vehicles. It has one on each side. The tail looks more like part of a helicopter than a hovercraft. On each side of the helicopter-like tail, there is a black gun. The blueprints call these side-mounted, vertically-pivoting 5.56 millimeter machine guns. 5.56 millimeter by 45 millimeter is an intermediate-sized NATO round. These guns can pivot up and down, and they can spin all the way around to be forward-facing, but they don't really work that way because they are aimed at the body of the vehicle, so they only really work as rear-facing guns. At the end of the tail, we have another rotor, and the blueprints call this a titanium-finned yaw-control rotor. Yaw is rotation around a vertical axis, so this rotor allows the vindicator to move in a twisting motion like this. This is the same type of rotor we saw before. It can turn all the way around, and you can spin the blades by turning this wheel. Now let's release the sub-vehicle, and this is the most exciting part. In the cockpit, there is a black lever, and it says Unlock in the forward position. So just press it in that direction, and from underneath the vindicator, it releases the rocket sled. The box for the vindicator calls this a rocket sled. It's kind of folded up here. You can open it up by flipping up the control panel and the deflector screens. The rocket sled is a two-seater vehicle, and the vindicator was a tight fit for two figures, and this is even smaller, so it will be an even tighter fit. There are two control sticks, one in the center of each seat, and there's some decent instrument panel detail there. Blaster only barely fits in that seat, because he has a sculpted pocket on his leg, and that makes him a little bit wider, so that is a very tight fit to get him in that seat. Once he's in, though, he's not coming out very easily. We have a green control panel with some instruments there, nothing spectacular. Then we have this green deflector screen. I think that's what the blueprints call it. The rocket sled has four small missiles, two on each side, and they peg into very small pegs with very small holes, and the pegs are actually kind of shallow, so they don't always stay in very well. The blueprints call these Whistler LG9 laser guided hex finned missiles. They are all black and otherwise not know worthy. The rocket sled rolls on very tiny wheels, very low set on the underside, and in fact, when the rocket sled is attached, these are the wheels that the vindicator rolls on. So without the rocket sled, the vindicator doesn't have any wheels, so you just kind of have to hold it up and make it fly around. Finally, in the back we have a universal GI Joe tow hook, and it's funny that it's here. It is totally useless when it's attached to the vindicator, and even separate from the vindicator, it's almost useless on the rocket sled, because it's so low to the ground that it will not fit most GI Joe towed weapons. About the only towed weapon that I can think of that would fit it would be the Mountain Howitzer, but even that one only fits barely. There's not much clearance there. To reattach the rocket sled to the vindicator, just fold up the control panel and the deflector screen, and then the seats for the rocket sled fit in the cavity under the vindicator. So just line them up and press until it clicks. The vindicator has its flaws, that is true, but whatever flaws it has, the pop-out sub-vehicle is kind of fun. We are ready to complete the future fortress. We have been working on this all month. There is one piece left, the piece from the vindicator, the rocket sled is what goes to the future fortress, and it goes right there. I didn't have much of Battleforce 2000 as a kid. I wasn't able to complete the future fortress until I finally got all the vehicles just a few months ago. It was a milestone in my collecting journey to complete the fortress. The fortress itself though is unimpressive. It is not an integrated play set. The wall provided by the dominator is the most fortress-like piece, and it only covers half of the fortress. There is no backside. The back of the fortress is nothing more than the pieces from the eliminator and the vindicator, just sitting near the rest of the pieces. We have been building the future fortress for a month, and now that we can see the whole thing, I have to declare it not very good. But maybe there's another perspective we should be considering. This is essentially a G.I. Joe transformer. So maybe from a transformer fan's point of view, it has some merit. For that point of view, I have asked my Transformers expert on call, CyberTiger, to prepare an in-depth, thorough Transformers analysis of the future fortress. CyberTiger, from a Transformers perspective, is the future fortress good? No. Thank you, CyberTiger. That analysis was transformative. Let's look at Blaster starting with his accessories. He came with this weapon, which the contents of the card on which he was packaged tall, an infra-green laser pistol, DK528. This looks like an 80s camcorder with a microphone attachment. This is my least favorite Battleforged 2000 accessory. It is blocky. The design is not streamlined or aggressive. On my example of Blaster, this laser pistol only fits in his left hand. The left thumb is a little stretched out. And the right hand is just a little too tight. Blaster's other accessory is his face mask. It is a green face mask that fits onto his helmet. And you can remove it. It pegs in with these two tiny pegs that fit in holes on the sides of his helmet. I do not like this accessory. I think it is unnecessary. I guess they wanted a detachable accessory other than a typical microphone. But a microphone at least allows you to see the figure's face. I don't think this is a good look for Blaster. I think the figure looks better without it. And without the mask, other than the holes in the side of the helmet, you wouldn't even notice something is missing. Let's take a look at Blaster's articulation. He had the articulation that was standard by 1987, meaning he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow so he could move at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep. He could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could bend his legs at the hip about 90 degrees and then he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's look at the sculpt design and color on Blaster, starting with his head. And on his head, he has a non-removable helmet, which is typical for Battleforce 2000. But the helmet looks good. It has multiple paint applications. I like the silver piping around the back. And the face has character. If you look closely, you can see his mouth is slightly open. We can see a little of his hair on the sides and it looks like he has black hair. On his chest, he has a green shirt and a camouflaged armored vest and some gray straps that criss-cross across his chest. And those straps continue around to the back. Some decent detail there. On his arms, he has rolled up green sleeves and he has a black glove on his right hand and a green and blue glove on his left hand. But there's something weird about these arms. Take a look at his arms. He has sculpted cloth folds on his bare skin. It looks like they originally intended for him to have long sleeves but changed their minds at some point in the production process. But rather than re-sculpting these, they just painted flesh tone over the cloth folds on his arms. And that looks really bad. On his waist piece, he has a pretty plain black belt over green trousers. His legs continue those green trousers and we can see he has a harness connected to his belt. It looks like a garter belt to me. He has a blue electronic device on his right thigh. He has a pocket on his left thigh. Some, I guess these are knee pads but they're actually sculpted above the knee. That's kind of weird. Then he has some tall boots with a camouflage pattern. He has a knife on his left boot. Let's take a look at Blaster's file card. His file card has his faction as Battlefield 2000 and GI Joe. And we have a portrait of Blaster here. It has his code name as Blaster. He's the vindicator pilot. His file name is Brian R. Davis. His primary military specialty is Ground Effect Vehicle Operator. Now that's awkwardly worded but I think that's referring to his hovercraft. His secondary military specialty is Microwave Technician and that is the same secondary specialty as his Battlefield 2000 teammate Knockdown. I assume when they retire from Battlefield 2000, these guys will go into business together repairing microwave ovens. Just kidding, they're both dead. His birthplace is Panama City, Florida and his grade is E5. This top paragraph says Blaster built his first hovercraft at the age of 13 using mail order plans from the back of popular mechanics. This is a real thing. The magazine Popular Mechanics did feature ads for home-built hovercraft. By his mid teens, he was designing his own variations and looking for ways to fund the building of prototypes. Undaunted by the failure of hovercraft to make an impact on the civilian market, he took his concept to the most responsive consumer, the military. This bottom paragraph says, okay, so he's a little single-minded. Maybe even a bit obsessed, but how many of the Joes aren't? The plus side is that he's willing to push his hovercraft to the limit and beyond just to prove it's worth. The end result is faster and better support for the ground pounders, something they don't mind at all. This guy is obsessed with hovercraft and has been his whole life. I guess he found the right line of work. Just kidding, he's dead. I now turn it over to JoFan82 to provide the last JoCon figure preview. Thanks, HCC. Well, this is it. Our last preview image for the JoCon exclusive figures. And this is 2017 Blaster. And this looks like a pretty good attempt at recreating the vintage design for the modern era. He's got the green uniform with the traditional camo pattern vest. The blue and green helmet looks very similar, although it does not include a face mask. They even have him wearing the gold camo pattern boots. The figure comes with a removable holster, knife, assault rifle, his original DK528 laser weapon, and figure stand. We'll have to wait for in-hand images of the figure, but this mock-up looks pretty good to me. That wraps up our look at the exclusive figures we'll be seeing from JoCon this year. Let us know what you think about these modern versions in the comments below. Back to you, HCC. Thank you, JoFan82. JoFan has his own YouTube channel, and he looks at a lot of modern GI Joe figures. I know some of you are into that kind of thing, so you may want to check them out. Let's talk about the Vindicator and Blaster's appearances in GI Joe media, as with the rest of Battle Force 2000, they did not appear in the animated series. Battle Force 2000 was only animated for commercials. In the GI Joe comic book series, Blaster was introduced with the rest of the Battle Force 2000 team in issue number 68. He appeared in later issues, along with the rest of the team, but had no noteworthy solo appearances. He died, along with most of the team, in issue number 113. One thing has been bugging me about the death of Battle Force 2000 in that issue. Only Dodger survived the artillery of bombardment that killed the rest of the team. The artwork for Dodger just didn't seem right, and now I've figured out why. He was drawn with Blaster's helmet. Looking at the Vindicator and Blaster overall, both figure and vehicle have some knocks against them. The Vindicator just doesn't work. It's a dust buster. It even has a handle like a dust buster. It's hard for me to see it as anything else. It definitely doesn't look like a hovercraft. Some of the detailing is well done, and the pop-out sub-vehicle has some merit. But the rocket sled is small, it rolls very low to the ground, and it looks more like a go-kart. My apologies to fans of the Vindicator, but I have to put it in the bottom tier. Blaster is a bit better. He does remind me of Dodger. He has that alien's colonial marine inspiration, but it doesn't quite reach the heights of Dodger. Blaster's color scheme is not quite as good. The camo pattern is nice, but the base green color is just a little too bright. Dodger had a bolder design, and I think that's why he's a fan favorite. I really dislike the accessories. The weapon is clunky, and the mask should be scrapped. The sculpted cloth folds on the flesh-colored arms really bugs me. I almost put the figure in the bottom tier for that reason. But I'm going to say it's a middle tier figure. There are some good ideas on this, but they don't quite come together to make a great figure. Looking at Battleforce 2000 overall, there are so many great possibilities that didn't pan out. The concept of a team that tests experimental equipment for G.I. Cho could have worked, but as presented, it was redundant. Designating them as a rival for Destro's revered iron grenadiers could have been a good idea, but the match-up never happened. The future fortress could have been a great bonus feature if they had actually given us a fortress. Instead, they gave us six pieces to place in a square. And you've already seen the judgment from a Transformers perspective, it still stinks. I can't say I have a lot of love for Battleforce 2000, but after looking at them closely for the past month, I did find a few things that I liked. I even put one of the figures in the top tier. Unfortunately, there are too many miscues and misfires to save it. Larry Hama in the comic book gave them a fitting exit. That's it. We've completed our journey through Battleforce 2000 month, and we have covered a lot of territory. We have looked at the concept as it was presented, and we've looked at a few ideas that might have made it better. I really wasn't sure doing a whole month of Battleforce 2000 was a good idea, but your responses have been great. Thank you for your support. Thank you, Joefan82 for doing all those previews. I felt they were important with JoeCon coming up. I could not have done them myself. I am grateful for your time and effort. Thank you, Cyber Tiger Retro Showcase for the Transformers analysis. You are my Transformers expert. On his own YouTube channel, Cyber Tiger speaks from the heart about many things, but especially if you're a Transformers fan, you may enjoy it. So give it a look. Just a reminder, I will be taking next week off. No new review that week. And after that, we will be doing another Patrons Choice Review. And the poll for the Patrons Choice is up as I'm shooting this. It'll be closed by the time you see it, but I don't know who the winner will be. This one is pretty tight. It's probably the most exciting poll we've done so far. Thank you, everyone, for watching. Please remember to like this video on YouTube, subscribe to the YouTube channel, share this video, like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, support the channel on Patreon, and visit hcc788.com. I'll see you in a couple weeks for a non-Battleforce 2000 review. And until then, remember, only G.I. Joe is G.I. Joe. To protect America, a top secret team creates the battle vehicles of the future. We're in real trouble here, Oscar. I'm calling in Battleforce 2000. Battleforce 2000. Secret force of G.I. Joe. Displitting in two. And reforming. Battleforce 2000. One track and take on any poll. Oh, G.I. Joe. Battleforce 2000. Finely defeat. Cobra, find out at Marvel Comics.