 Alright, I put a poll up on Patreon for this week's review and the viewers chose Targat. I want to go the extra mile by demonstrating how Targat drops into action. Okay, you can do this. Just keep your knees bent, take slow, deep breaths, and jump when I say go. This is going to be great. I am so psyched up for this. I've never been this high up before. How far up are we? I can't do it. This is the worst idea I ever had. Mommy! I look down and my body locks up. I may have to change my pants. Don't be chicken. You have to do it for the viewers. This was your idea. But do I have to jump? Can't I just get down some other way? Like, maybe I could climb down a long rope. Well, check! This is my life we're talking about here. I'll check. Ready, silence kills. I forgot to bend my knees and breathe. This week's review was chosen by patrons. They made an excellent choice. This gives us a chance to look at Destro's Iron Grenadiers again. This also seems to be a very popular figure. I get a lot of requests for it. HCC 788 presents Targat. This is Targat, one of Destro's Iron Grenadiers. This figure was first introduced in 1989. It was also available in 1990 and was discontinued for the year 1991. Targat stands for Transatmospheric Rapid Global Assault Trooper. As noted before, Targat was a member of Destro's Iron Grenadiers. Destro was Cobra's weapons supplier introduced in 1983. For many years, Destro worked for Cobra, sometimes serving as a field general under Cobra Commander. He also had a romantic relationship with Cobra's intelligence officer, the Baroness. In 1988, Destro created his own army, the Iron Grenadiers. They were the rivals to both Cobra and G.I. Joe. As they were portrayed in the G.I. Joe comic book, they were excellent fighters and professional soldiers. The first wave of Iron Grenadiers in 1988 included the second version of Destro with his dispoiler, the basic Iron Grenadier soldier and Destro's general, Voltar. They also had a couple of vehicles and vehicle drivers. They had the Demon Tank and the driver Ferret. They had the AGP and the driver Nullifier. I don't have the AGP and the Nullifier to show you. In 1989, Destro added new minions to his team, Annihilator and Targat. Darklawn also joined Destro, but he has his own story which we will tell another time. Initially, the Iron Grenadiers were set up to be rivals for Battle Force 2000. Early Iron Grenadiers packaging included the Battle Force 2000 logo, but Iron Grenadiers was a little late to be opponents for Battle Force 2000, and they were never used that way in the Cartooner comic books. There was a second version of Targat in the vintage toy line in 1993. It reused the mold for the first version, but with different colors. Also, the references to Destro and the Iron Grenadiers were gone, and they were Cobra troops. The body for Targat was used for the Malaway figure called Name Your Own Cobra or Create a Cobra in 1993. Only the head was changed, and of course it used different colors. That figure is pretty rare now. Let's take a look at Targat's accessories starting with his weapons. The card on which the figure was packaged just calls this a laser gun. It is gold. It is made of a flexible plastic. It tethers to the figure's wrist with this C-clip. This will prevent Targat from losing his weapon while in freefall. With this C-clip, you can clip it to the figure's forearm and fit the pistol in the figure's hand. There are variants of this laser gun. The earliest versions were made of hard plastic. Later variations were made of soft plastic. The softer plastic allows the connector to bend and attach to the figure better. Next, we have what the card contents call a joystick. It's really a pistol grip, not really a joystick, but I guess he uses this to control his backpack. This joystick has a knob on the top, and that knob connects to a standard black hose, and that black hose then connects to the backpack. The left hand on my action figure is way too tight to fit the joystick. They will fit in the right hand, but I like to put the laser gun in the right hand. That means most of the time one of these accessories is just left dangling. The hose connects to this knob on the backpack, and that brings us to the final accessory, which the card contents just call a shell. This shell backpack is in light gray. It looks like a rocket pack, but the rocket packs are pointed straight back rather than down as you would expect. It has a fin, and it has wings that are synchronized so they can close and open together. This reminds me of Sergeant Savage General Blitz's backpack, but that backpack had spring-loaded wings so they would pop out. The detail on this side of the shell is impressive, but the detail on the underside is mind-blowing. You wouldn't even be able to see this most of the time on the figure. It has what I guess is supposed to be a machine gun. It has an ammunition belt that goes to an ammunition canister. It even says ammo on it, so this isn't just a rocket pack, it's also a weapons system. Form BX-257 had a theory about this backpack that target would free fall back first, and the rockets are used to slow him down, and I think that's right. Once he reaches a certain altitude, the wings would pop out so he could glide toward the target, but it would not be powered to flight. He wouldn't be able to land with these wings, so I suspect the final stage for this shell would be to deploy a parachute. This is an impressively sophisticated accessory, and I have to give it all kinds of credit for that. And it even fits with Targat's specialty. We haven't even talked about his specialty yet, we will get to that. Targat's final accessory is his visor. It is light blue, the same color as the helmet, and it does attach to the figure's head. It can flip up and down. It has minimal detail, and it can be removed, so you do run across a lot of Targat's missing the visor. Be careful when removing or replacing this because you are putting stress on hard plastic. Let's take a look at Targat's articulation. He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures by 1989. He could turn his head from left to right and look up and down, 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 bend at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep, so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with the rubber O-ring that looped around the inside of the figure. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far, he could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees, and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of Targat, starting with the head, and under that blue clip-on visor is a gold face shield. It's pretty generic. The helmet is that same light blue color as the visor. The gold face shield looks like the gold visor on astronauts' space suits, considering Targat's specialty that is appropriate. On his chest, he has a black flight suit. He has a blue strap that goes over his left shoulder, that's front and back. On that blue strap, he has Destro's logo in red. That red on the blue can be a little bit difficult to see. Around his belly and lower back, he has a blue belt with a ring of red upside-down grenades. This is very strange-looking. Why are they upside-down, and why are they on his back where they would be difficult to reach? This is very distracting, and it's my biggest problem with the figure. On his chest and back, that flight suit has some stitching that looks like the stitching on a baseball. His arms have black sleeves with some blue-rigged padding on his upper arms and forearms, and he has red gloves. His waist piece is black and unpainted with very minimal detail. His legs are also black, with more of that blue-rigged padding on the outside of his legs. He has a black pistol on each thigh. He has a black knife on his right ankle, and he has red boots. The color on this figure is not bad, except the blue is too light. A slightly darker blue would have worked better. The base color is black, which it should be for Iron Grenadiers. They could have given him gold highlights, like the basic Iron Grenadier soldier, but I understand they were trying to set these guys apart from the unspecialized Iron Grenadiers troops. The blue works for that while still having the feel of an Iron Grenadier figure. Put the colors of the figure together with the accessories, and you have an impressively diverse but harmonious color palette. There were other Iron Grenadier soldiers, like Annihilator, that didn't stick closer to the color themes of earlier Iron Grenadier figures. Honestly, these guys don't look like they should be on the same team. Let's take a look at Target's file card. The file card had his faction as just the enemy, and that was common with other Iron Grenadier file cards. It has a portrait of Target here. It has his codename as Target, and we see that's an acronym, which stands for Transatmospheric Rapid Global Assault Trooper. Transatmospheric hints at how Target enters the battlefield. This top paragraph says, Always in the forefront of technology, Destro's technicians have developed a method for inserting troops into totally inaccessible locations. Transatmospheric Rapid Global Assault Troopers are deployed into orbit from a shuttle, wearing armored, self-contained bio-system suits and ceramic composite heat shields that double as hang gliders and weapons platforms. Their re-entry over their Target could easily be mistaken for a meteor shower until they start shooting. They drop from space. With only a suit and a heat shield backpack, they drop from space. This bottom paragraph has a quote. Targets are quite formidable as assault troopers, but their psychological impact on defending troops is even greater. Who wants to fight a person who's crazy enough to turn himself into a human meteor? Psychological impact on opposing troops? What about the psychological impact on the guy falling from space? Extra space should have been sculpted on the figure's backside, because this space suit is going to be pretty full by the time he lands. A major problem with this concept, Iron Grenadiers didn't have a shuttle. They didn't even have anything close to a shuttle. They had the AGP, but it wasn't designed to go into space, and it didn't carry any figures other than the driver. Maybe the Iron Grenadiers could borrow Cobra's stellar stiletto, but that couldn't carry any extra figures either. How exactly were kids supposed to follow the play pattern described when they didn't have vehicles that could do it? Any suit that could survive such a drop would be too bulky for fighting once Targat hit the ground. But maybe the Targat suit is just for the drop. Once he hits the ground, he sheds the trans-atmospheric suit, and he has a standard Iron Grenadiers uniform under it. Looking at how Targat was used in G.I. Joe Media, they had only one appearance in the Deke animated series, in Operation Dragonfire Day 1. They had a total of about 10 seconds of screen time and no lines. In the G.I. Joe comic book series, I haven't found any appearances of Targat in the Marvel Comics series. There were issues where G.I. Joe went into space, and they even had an issue where the Joes were dropped into battle from orbit. If they ever did that with Targat, I haven't found it. I haven't even seen Targat in the background of any comics. Annihilators made an appearance, but not Targat. That guy. No harm done then. Looking at Targat overall, this is a middle-tier figure, but it's at the high end of the middle tier. There are just a couple things that keep it from being in the top tier. First, the good parts. The black looks great. It's hard to screw up a black figure. You give me a figure in black, and you're already starting out ahead of the game. And most of the details are decent. The red helps the figure fit within the Iron Grenadiers roster. The blue highlights are a little too light. A darker blue would have given Targat a night attack color scheme. The upside-down grenades. What the hell? I mean really, what the hell? This is usually how they put the grenades on the figures. His are upside-down. Why? His accessories are pretty good for his specialty. And his specialty is crazy. But I guess if you can suspend disbelief enough to accept the idea that a guy can drop into a target from space, yeah, I guess his accessories go with that. I guess my biggest problem with this figure is not with the figure itself. They didn't give Iron Grenadiers a way to get Targat into space. With a backpack that size, it could have been made to dock with a small space vehicle. That would have been amazing. That was my review of Targat. I hope you enjoyed it. One quick announcement. I will be taking the weekend of November 26th off. No new review that Sunday. There will be a new review next weekend though, but there aren't very many weekends left in the year. It's hard to believe 2017 is almost over, and it's about time to plan for 2018. Thank you to everyone who joined the channel in 2017. I love getting new subscribers. For one thing, we get to share our enjoyment of GI Joe, but more importantly than that, every new subscriber is potentially a new friend. I have met some amazing people through this project. I can tell you there are already some great plans for 2018. I am so grateful that all of you are coming along for the ride. Please find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon. Check out the website, htc788.com. Thank you all for watching. I'll see you next week with another vintage GI Joe toy review. And remember, until then, only GI Joe is GI Joe. This is the worst idea I ever had. Mommy! My body locks up. I may have to change my pants. I look down, my body locks up. I may have to change my pants.