 Hello everybody, HoodedCobraCommander788 here and I'm back with another vintage GI Joe Toy review and I'm doing another requested review here. I am looking at the 1983 Pack Rats. The Pack Rats were introduced in 1983, they were also sold in 1984 and 1985. They were discontinued after 1985 for retail, but they were available as mailaways from 1985 all the way up to 1992. The Pack Rats were sold separately, but I'm reviewing them here in a single video because they're tiny so an individual Pack Rat wouldn't really take up an entire review video. The acronym Pack Rat stands for Programmed Assault Computer Rapid All-Terrain and they're basically remote controlled robotic fighters. There were three Pack Rats, the Missile Launcher, the Machine Gun and the Flamethrower. These toys were very inexpensive at retail. Their price point was about $3 a piece, which was about the same as an action figure back then, but their flag point value was actually one half flag point. You would only get half a flag point for each of those, which is less than you would get for an action figure, which was roughly the equivalent in price. These are intended to be remote controlled robots. They do each come with a remote controller. They're not supposed to be little autonomous R2D2 type robots, but you know how kids play. Kids probably played with them like their GI Joe's robot pets. I have the original box for one of the Pack Rats. It's the Missile Launcher, so you can kind of take a look at that and see how that looked. This is how they were boxed when you got them in the stores back in 1983. You can see that the one half of flag point has been cut out of this one on the back. It looks like hawk operating the missile system, and that's what you would see on the shelves. These small Pack Rats were a contrast to the later vehicles that came out, starting in 1984, 85, 86, which tended to be much larger. The size of GI Joe vehicles tended to inflate over the next few years. You got much larger vehicles like the Whale Hovercraft in 1984, in 1985 they had a freaking aircraft carrier, and so the vehicles just seemed to get bigger and bigger over the years, but in 1983 they went the other direction. They gave you these really cheap vehicles, these really cheap weapon systems, and you know if you're eight years old, you could probably pick up all three of these with one week's allowance. So if the 1984 Whale Hovercraft is the big mama of the vehicles, these would be the babies. They're babies! Come on Wolverine, you gotta push, push for my Wolverine, don't give up on me now. Push, push, push with all your might. Don't forget to breathe, don't forget to breathe Wolverine, you gotta push this baby out. You gotta trust me Wolverine, I'm a doctor, I went to Harvard, I know what I'm doing, and I know you gotta push and that's what you gotta do, you gotta do what I say. Push, push that baby out. I don't know nothing about birth and no babies. Shut up Scarlett, don't listen to her Wolverine, you do what I say, you do what your old pal Doc says and you push that baby out. Here it comes, here it comes, grab them bolt cutters, we gotta cut that core. Congratulations Wolverine, you gave birth to a missile launcher. That's so cute. Let's look at each of these individually starting with the missile launcher. The missile launcher came with this remote controller and as you can see it's kind of walkie talkie style. It's got a very thin antenna on it and that could probably be broken off fairly easily. Now I haven't seen a lot of broken antennas on these but that's mainly because usually these are lost altogether. You can see how small it is and you can see how this is just going to disappear if you put it in the hands of a kid. Finding the pack rats on the secondary market is fairly easy but finding the stupid remote controllers can be a bit of a pain. The pack rat missile launcher had four missiles and they pegged into this slot here in this little hole in the front portion. As I stated in my review of the 1984 Cobra Stinger, these missiles were reused for the Stinger but when they were used on the Stinger they were one solid piece of red plastic whereas on the pack rat missile launcher they were two pieces. It was a two stage missile with this grey piece at the back end and red on the front end. On my review of the Stinger I did identify a real world missile that I thought closely resembled this missile system but looking at it again I don't think it's close enough. It doesn't look similar enough and it doesn't function the way this is supposed to. I mean this is supposed to be a surface to air missile. So for now I'm going to say I don't have a real world analog to this toy missile. The turret for the missiles can rotate all the way around and it can elevate at least as far as the missiles will allow it to. If you kind of line up the missiles straight like that it can turn all the way around but if you turn it slightly then the missile bumps into the body of the pack rat so it doesn't elevate very far. It is very easy to pop this turret off. You basically just turn it to the side and lift and it just comes right out. The missile system is definitely the simplest of the three pack rats. The other two are both more complex toys. Next let's look at the machine gun and you can tell right away this is a more complex toy than the missile launcher. The remote for the machine gun was this joystick style remote. It has a handle that goes in the hand of the action figure and it has this joystick on the top kind of like a video game. The pack rat machine gun has four big machine guns and it moves around quite a bit. It can rotate all the way around and these two on the outside can elevate so when you're going to take down aircraft those can flip up and shoot up toward the airplane there. It has an antenna that kind of flips up and down like that. It has four wheels instead of fake treads. The wheels on mine do not roll very well. It just skoots more than it rolls but it does have this articulated steering here. They can kind of swing in and out like that and so you can definitely tell this is a more complex toy than the missile launcher. It's not bad. I'd say this is probably my favorite of the three. It also has some pretty impressive detail. Look at the circuitry on the back of the machine gun. I mean this is a pretty good looking toy. It's pretty fierce and it looks like it'll take down some bad guys. That brings us to the flamethrower and the flamethrower is by far the most complex of the three pack rats and it's probably also my least favorite. The remote controller for the flamethrower has this kind of pistol grip with an antenna sticking out the front. It looks kind of like a ray gun. This one I think is kind of goofy looking. I don't care for that much. Here are the remote controllers for all three of the pack rats on the side so you can identify them. A robotic flamethrower is actually more practical than a human-carried flamethrower. For one thing, a human being can only carry so much fuel for a flamethrower like this, but a machine could carry a lot more fuel and it can shoot at a farther range than a hand-carried flamethrower could. However, flamethrowers are no longer a part of the US military's arsenal and they haven't been since 1978. This flamethrower can rotate all the way around and it's really a dual weapon system. These guns on the bottom here are twin 35mm machine guns and this tab on the back can move those as well. Those can move independently of the flamethrower on the top. The flamethrower, like the machine gun, has an antenna. This one is red and you can move it up and down like that. It has a plastic wire in the back and this is often missing. If you're looking to get a flamethrower pack rat, make sure that's there. That's something that you might miss. On the front here it has some deflector shields and these can move too. There are a lot of moving parts on this flamethrower. It just moves everywhere. This is a really complex toy, more complex than you would expect to be set up with these other simpler toys and for the same price. The big downside of the flamethrower, however, is the legs. The legs are what really frustrate me and make me really not like this toy. All three of these legs move independently and they can move up and they can move down like this. The treads on each, all three of them, they can move independently so you can get it really low like this or you can raise it all the way up and move them all the way down. The problem with that is that they're actually really hard to get lined up. So you often have the legs, one leg is lower than the other one or you can maybe get the side legs lined up but the front leg isn't lined up so the wheels on the bottom don't all three make contact with the ground at the same time. So it doesn't roll properly and this is a real pain. It's difficult to pose it, it's difficult to play with it or maybe if they had somehow fastened them together so they all moved together or if they had just made them stationary, just keep them in one position, I would have liked it a lot better. I think really this is unnecessary articulation and it makes the toy harder to play with. The flamethrower looks really cool and it has a lot of moving parts. It's a complex vehicle for the price point but this I could really live without and these also can break. You run across a lot of flamethrowers with broken legs so that's another strike against it. Overall I think the pack rats are fun toys. I really liked them when I was a kid and I still do. They add to your GI Joe Arsenal and they were really cheap when they came out in 1983. I mean you could just pick up all these at once and it wouldn't cost you very much. So that's a big plus and they're a nice contrast to these super big vehicles that would come out starting in 1984. So I really do think that these are good toys. I do have some knocks on the flamethrower but overall I think they're worth getting and I love displaying them. They're just nice little baby GI Joe. If any GI Joe toy could be described as cute, that would be the pack rat. That was my review of the 1983 pack rats. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you're thinking of getting the pack rats I hope you found this video informative. Don't forget to subscribe because I've got a lot of great new GI Joe toy reviews coming up and you do not want to miss them. I've got a really special one coming up next and I won't tell you what it is but I will give you a little hint. 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