 Commander 788 here and it's time for another vintage GI Joe toy review and as promised this review will continue Tiger Force Month. For the entire month of April and 2016, all of the main reviews on this channel will look at Tiger Force toys. And this is the review I wanted to do last week. I wanted to kick off Tiger Force Month with a bang. Well, I may not have been able to review this toy last week but it's still an exciting toy to look at for week 2 of Tiger Force Month. And once again I get to thank Arthur who sent me that really awesome care package full of vintage and modern GI Joe's. Finally, I get to dip into that box for a main review on this channel. Arthur, this one's for you. HCC 788 presents the 1988 GI Joe Tiger Force Tiger Rat and Pilot Sky Striker. This is the Tiger Force Tiger Rat and the pilot code name Sky Striker. This vehicle was introduced in 1988 and was also available in 1989 and was discontinued for the year 1990. The Tiger Rat was in the first wave of Tiger Force vehicles from 1988. The second wave from 1989 only had two vehicles, the Tiger Force versions of the Devil Fish and the VAMP. Tiger Force was a sub team within GI Joe and the idea of Tiger Force as it was expressed on the back of Tiger Force Duke's file card was to use captured Cobra vehicles and re-outfitted GI Joe weapons to battle the forces of evil. There is absolutely nothing new in Tiger Force. Tiger Force entirely consists of reissued toys. The only new character introduced was the pilot of the Tiger Rat, but even this action figure was made up of parts from older action figures. The Tiger Rat was a reissue of the 1984 Cobra Rattler and the Cobra Rattler also came with a pilot. It came with Wild Weasel. The Tiger Rat, like the Cobra Rattler, is inspired by a real-world jet, the A-10 Thunderbolt 2. But there are some modifications in the toy version and we will talk about all of them. This wild outlandish color scheme for Tiger Force vehicles may seem so out there that it could never happen in the real world. No one would really paint their jet like this, right? Tiger Force was inspired by the NATO Tiger Association, which has annual NATO Tiger Meats and the NATO Tigers were formed to promote solidarity between NATO Air Forces. For their Tiger Meats, the Tiger Association members paint their jets with wild colors, including Tiger Stripes just like this. The 2016 Tiger Meat will take place in Spain next month. The Tiger Rat did come with an action figure, the pilot, and you did hear that code name correctly. He is called Sky Striker. Nope. This is a Sky Striker, G.I. Joe's first combat jet from 1983. And if there was ever a G.I. Joe vehicle name that should not be reused for something else, this is it. Everyone associates the name Sky Striker with this jet. You can call that figure a turkey sandwich for all I care. This is my Sky Striker. G.I. Joe has reused names before. Viper, which was the name of the Cobra Glider, got reused for a Cobra action figure. Falcon, which was the name of the G.I. Joe glider, got reused for a G.I. Joe action figure. And the vehicle name Armadillo got reused for a later action figure. But I don't think that's so easy to do with the name Sky Striker. The name Sky Striker is so closely associated with G.I. Joe's first combat jet that I just don't think you can reuse it for anything, really. I mean, a Sky Striker is a Sky Striker. And whatever they want to call this guy, that's not a Sky Striker. Of course, we can't look at the Tiger Rat without looking at the toy of which it is a reissue, the 1984 Cobra Rattler. I think the Tiger Rat also takes its name from the Rattler, Rat, Rattler. We're really not stretching our creativity too far here. As far as I can tell, the Tiger Rat and the Rattler use exactly the same mold, right down to the 1984 date stamp on the Tiger Rat. The most obvious difference is the color, and I really liked the Cobra Rattler in that classic Cobra Blue. The Cobra Rattler was a very welcome and needed addition to the Cobra Air Force. The Tiger Rat's colors, however, are just wild. That bright yellow with the black stripes, it just screams, look at me, unlike the original Cobra Rattler. I mean, you are not going to miss this jet. The Tiger Rat has that same tilt-wing design that the Cobra Rattler had, and that was always a really nice feature on the original. The Tiger Rat also has the same missiles and bombs as the Cobra Rattler, of course, with different colors. If you choose to get either one of these toys, you might consider displaying it with the wings tilted up. It really makes a nice display, and it shows off all those missiles and bombs. So the Tiger Rat has a lot of the strengths of the Cobra Rattler, but it also has all of the Cobra Rattler's weaknesses, and we will talk about those in detail. Let's take a look at the parts and the features of the Tiger Rat. Before we get started, I would like to point out that this particular example has both United States and Canadian stickers. I'm not sure how that happened, but it is interesting. Let's start at the front, as we always do, and we have this nose cone here, which is made out of a slightly softer plastic than the main body of the toy. I wouldn't say that it's softer rubbery, but it is slightly softer than the main body plastic. And then we have this nose cannon, and this, the blueprints call a Jawbreaker CDY9B nose cannon. I really like this feature. I would use this more than I would use the missiles and the bombs. There's lots of nice detail on there, and it has a little thumb wheel here, so you can spin the Gatling gun just really cool. Very cool feature, very cool detail. This nose cannon is inspired by the A10 Thunderbolt, which has a similar nose cannon. On the A10, it is the GAU-8 Avenger 30mm auto cannon. It looks great, it looks fierce, it looks like it means business, and it is inspired by the real world. Now we have the canopy, and the canopy is in two parts. This main part, which if you squeeze it and pull it open, you can open it up and put the pilot in. So it has this front windscreen here, which if you kind of squeeze that, you can pop the tabs out and that is removable. Without the canopy, we can look inside the cockpit and see some of the cockpit detail. And there is some detail there, some instrument panels, some electronics. It's not a lot of detail, but it's more detail than the sky striker, I'll give it that. Let's look at these stickers on the sides, and I guess these stickers are supposed to be like tiger teeth and eyes. They look more like shark teeth to me. And that does harken back to another GI Joe jet with shark teeth, the X-30 Conquest. Notice the color fade from white to brown to yellow. That must not have been very easy to do, I mean, they probably would have saved money just by making this whole jet yellow, but they actually did this kind of color fade there. That is very impressive for a reissue vehicle, which really just stamped out an old vehicle. They did kind of add something there. You can fit the pilot in the cockpit like so. He can go in straight legged, you don't have to bend his legs. And it's a bit easier if you take the windscreen off in order to get the pilot in. But you can pop him in there and then pop the canopy back on and closed. It's a little bit of a tight fit, but it was a tight fit for Wild Weasel too. It's not a very big cockpit. Next we have the gun turret, kind of a midships here. This gun here can elevate, goes down pretty low, and it can elevate pretty high, and the turret can rotate all the way around 360 degrees, and the canopy on there can open. You can put a figure in the gunner's position, and I'll demonstrate using Tiger Force Troop Wire, why not? He will go in facing forward, facing the front of the jet, and you do have to kind of wedge him in a little bit, his shoulders a little bit wide, but he goes in there pretty deeply, and the canopy can close over him. There are a couple of removable panels, one on this side, which you can pop out and see some detail of the inner workings of the aircraft. The other one is around the other side, here toward the back of the fuselage, you can pop that out and see some engine detail there. The Tiger Rat came with a couple of damaged panels, just as the Cobra Rattler did, and you can use these damaged panels to replace the removable panels, so your Tiger Rat will have some battle damage, so you can just replace that one, you can see some bullet holes in the side there, not bad, swing that back around, and just pop the damaged panel in on the other side, and now you have a damaged panel on that side too, so yeah, you can have a battle damaged mode for your Tiger Rat. I don't know how you feel about these, I was never very fond of them, any part that you're going to remove and just not have on the vehicle is a part that is likely to be lost, so I'm not a big fan of these, but I guess they look okay on the jet, they do look kind of cool, those bullet holes, but yeah, that's something that's going to go missing pretty easily. We have these two things on the side here, and my understanding is that those are supposed to be lights, like flood lights or something like that. The Tiger Rat has three jet engines, and that is a bit of a departure from the real world jet that inspired it, it has one jet engine here at the tail, and that's pretty much static, you can see the turbine sculpted on there, it has an engine on each wing, and each of these engines has a removable engine cover, that allows you to see some really nice engine detail, looks really good, and this is a feature that I really liked on the Cobra Rattler, and I do indeed like it very much on the Tiger Rat. The Tiger Rat is a VTOL jet, or vertical take off and landing, which means that it can take off and land kind of up and down like a helicopter, without taking off on a long runway, and more specifically the Tiger Rat is a tilt wing aircraft, meaning that it swings tilt, pointing the jet engines up, allowing the jets to lift the aircraft into the air. This is a departure from the A-10 Thunderbolt, the A-10 was not a VTOL jet, but tilt wing design is a real thing, tilt wing planes have existed, but tilt wing aircraft are usually propeller driven aircraft, not jets. There are jet VTOLs, but they usually go about it in a different way. Now it's time to look at those great missiles and bombs, and to do that we really need to turn it upside down, and we can see that vast array of weapons, I mean it's really just bristling with weapons, and as you can see most of them are colored red to provide a contrast with the yellow and the black. Each of the bombs and missiles fits on the airplane on this peg, in a dumbbell shaped slot, and that is universal, so you can move them around and swap them out and put them in any configuration you wish. Let's start with this one, and the blueprints call this one a Loretz constant scan two stage missile, and it actually does come apart in two stages. If this is based on a real world missile I have not been able to identify it, then we have this one which the blueprints call an EO-118 electro-optical renegade bomb. By electro-optical what they're saying is this is a camera bomb, it's a bomb that's equipped with a camera that transmits a bomb's eye view back to the aircraft. Next we have four of these black missiles, and I don't know what they are. I've looked at the blueprints a couple times, and I don't think they're identified, they're just missiles. On the wingtips we have bomb racks, each with three bombs. The bomb racks are removable, and the bombs are removable from the racks. The blueprints call these PL Mark 48 radar sensitive cluster bombs. A cluster bomb is a bomb that releases multiple sub-immunitions. These are red, and they have a little shark face on them, and that is adorable. Now we have to talk about the weakest part of this toy. It was the weakest part of the Cobra Rattler, and it is still weak on the Tiger Rat, and that is the landing gear. When I say the Cobra Rattler and the Tiger Rat use the same mold, I am not kidding. These tires still say Cobra V-Tall. These landing gear are extremely fragile as they were on the Cobra Rattler, they're really just the wheel attached to a long thin piece of plastic that's holding it on, and the front and the back, and it takes a fair amount of force to push the landing gear up and pull them back down, which means they are going to break very easily. They are woefully under engineered. To make matters worse, when these back landing gear are out, they don't snap into place completely down like that. They tend to tilt inward, which is going to make your jet sit cockeyed. It can be a real chore to get the Tiger Rat to sit on its wheels rather than tilting over like that. As with the Cobra Rattler, I will demonstrate the landing gear one time, and then I'm not going to touch them again because I don't want to break them. There is no mechanism, you just push them up and pull them back down. Alright, landing gear up, back one up, back up, and then the front one carefully up. To get them back down, you just pull them down as gently as possible until they get over that little snap there. Pull the gear down ever so gently until they sort of lock into place, and once you get them either up or down, however you'd prefer to display the Tiger Rat, just leave them. We have to look at the paint deco on the Tiger Rat because I think that's a feature. We rarely got painted vehicles in GI Joe, and when we did get them, they were usually like more traditional camouflage like the slugger, which I loved. I only wish we could have gotten more of that, but for the most part, GI Joe vehicles were unpainted. But on the Tiger Rat, you have multiple paint sprays, and they are really bold. They are not subtle at all. Now, you may love Tiger Force or you may hate it, but you have to admit, this was something special. This did not happen all the time. And I think they really needed to do that because this is a reissued toy, and they're asking kids to buy a toy that they already have. So if they're going to do that, they really have to add something special, and I think the paint does that. Maybe we would have preferred them to use different colors, but the Tiger Force vehicles were inspired by the NATO Tiger Meat, so even in their garishness, they are grounded in the real world. Let's take a look at SkyStriker. Here we go. A look at the SkyStriker. Starting with his accessories, and the accessories like the rest of the action figure are just reused and recolored parts. And these accessories come from the 1984 GI Joe slugger driver, Thunder. This helmet headset advisor reuses the mold from Thunder's helmet headset advisor. But that's not all this action figure gets from Thunder, and we'll get to that in a minute. Let's go ahead and pull this helmet off and take a closer look at it. This is a three-piece assembly, and it does look pretty cool when it's all put together, but you can take it apart by pulling the headset off, and this headset fits on the helmet with a couple pegs, and it has a couple antennae on there. The pegs of the headset also fit through the holes on this clear visor. This visor is clear, and the one that came with the 1984 Thunder was black. GI Joe did have other clear visors, like the one that came with this 1982 Hawk action figure, but you can tell if you have a SkyStriker clear visor. For one thing, the SkyStriker visor is a little bit smaller than those 1982 visors. So the 1982 visors only had pegs on the inside of the visor to connect it to the helmet, but SkyStriker's visor has holes in the side, and SkyStriker's visor has a little notch there for the nose. At the bottom of everything is this standard helmet, and I would call this a burnt amber color, and this type of helmet was issued with a lot of GI Joe action figures, including grunt. That's the same type of helmet, different color. Let's take a look at the articulation on SkyStriker. He had the standard articulation for 1984 GI Joe action figures, not 1988 figures. That means he could turn his head from left to right. He could also lift his arm up at the shoulder about so far. He could swivel his arm 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, so 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 move his leg at the hip about 90 degrees, and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of SkyStriker, and once again this is where he borrows from thunder. That head sculpt originally was thunders, it's just a different hair color. A SkyStriker has brown hair, and thunder was a ginger. There's nothing wrong with this head sculpt, it's a really nice head sculpt, I like it. It's just a head sculpt that belongs to somebody else. It's not a terrible thing when GI Joe figures reused parts, but I have a harder time with it when they reused heads, because it makes GI Joe look like the clone army. The rest of SkyStriker comes entirely from Wild Weasel. That is, Wild Weasel's body just recolored. On his chest he has a bright orange shirt or jacket with tiger stripes, that's easier to see on the back. Now this orange color is closer to the yellow end of the spectrum, but that is definitely orange, and he has red orange pouches and a scarf. He has black straps for a parachute, but neither he nor Wild Weasel came with a parachute. His arms, again exact copies of Wild Weasel, continue the orange and black tiger stripe theme, and we have brown gloves. On his waist he has a couple brown belts, and they are pretty well detailed. They continue all the way around to the back, and it looks like this lower belt is for a holster, for his brown pistol on his right leg. On his thighs he has some maps and charts, and it looks like he has grey trousers. Those grey trousers continue down the lower legs, and we have a pouch on the right leg, and around on the left leg we have a knife, sculpted on, and then we have brown boots. He has zippers down the inside of his leg, and I think that's an excellent detail. But this detail really belongs to Wild Weasel, it's hard to give SkyStriker credit for it. Even though this is a copy of the body of Wild Weasel, I really prefer it on Wild Weasel. I have a problem with the way they recolored it for SkyStriker. For Wild Weasel this is a red pilot's jumpsuit, probably a G suit, and this is perfectly appropriate for a pilot to wear, a jumpsuit like this, but since they've colored the top half orange and the bottom half grey for SkyStriker, it looks like he's wearing a jacket and trousers. And really, I think he ought to be wearing a jumpsuit as a fighter pilot. This continues my observation that Tiger Force had two color schemes. One Tiger Force color scheme had pretty good military colors with greens and browns and blacks, and those looked really not bad at all. Then they had another Tiger Force color scheme that had this kind of really bright Tony the Tiger orange color with black Tiger stripes, and it's a lot harder to justify sending a troop into battle wearing this kind of color. Now I don't have quite as much of a problem with SkyStriker's color scheme. Now I do prefer more realistic military GI Joe figures, but I do know that you can't have all just realistic military camouflage colors in your toy line. You can't look out at the toy line and only see greens and browns and blacks. I get that. You need some kind of color interest. And the way you get that color interest is to give those brighter colors to troops that are not going to be like ground combat troops, like pilots, like sailors, divers, and technicians. So yes, SkyStriker's color scheme is loud, but if you're going to give somebody a loud color scheme, it's not quite as bad if you're going to wrap an airplane around them. I would have preferred SkyStriker and really all of Tiger Force to have a color scheme A like flint here. But in SkyStriker's case, I think the color of his jet is more problematic than the color of his uniform. Let's take a look at SkyStriker's file card. This file card was printed on the back of the box in which the Tiger Rat was packaged and it has his faction as GI Joe and it has a portrait of SkyStriker here. It has his codename as SkyStriker and it just says Tiger Rat right here. I think they mean Tiger Rat Pilot. His file name is Alexander P. Russo, his primary military specialty is Tiger Rat Pilot as it should be. Secondary military specialty is combat technician. His birthplace is Providence, Rhode Island and his grade is 05 Lieutenant Colonel and that's a surprisingly high rank for him. Larry Hama, the writer of the GI Joe comic book, wrote most of these GI Joe file cards but some of the file cards were written by Hasbro employees. Now Hasbro is based in Rhode Island and they like to make their characters New Englanders. This section says, you might say that flying is in SkyStriker's blood. He grew up on an Air Force base in Maryland where his father was in charge of flight operations. Fascinated with fighter jets, SkyStriker decided to make a career for himself in the Air Force. Upon graduation from the United States Air Force Academy, he went on to flight officers training school to become a pilot. After he received his wings, and you don't have to put that in quotes, I think we know that he didn't literally grow wings. SkyStriker flew X-30 fighters during several GI Joe attacks on Cobra Island. He shot down over 15 Cobra Mamba copters, severely crippling Cobra's island defenses. SkyStriker was tapped for duty on Tiger Force because of his fearless attitude in the face of danger. 30 is referring to the Conquest X-30 which is a GI Joe jet that was released in 1986. And this attack on Cobra Island is probably referring to the Cobra Civil War which GI Joe did participate in in the GI Joe comic books. This bottom section has a quote. It says, the man was born to fly. I saw SkyStriker pull off a double loop nosedive in front of two enemy fighters, then shoot them down before they could pick him up on their radar scopes. It was unbelievable. When it comes to combat acrobatics, this fly boy takes the cake. Well, isn't he just super? This is another GI Joe file card that describes the character as just born to do his job. And that is not my favorite type of file card and really not my favorite type of character. I really don't think that necessarily makes a character interesting or compelling. I'm much more interested in a character that isn't born to do his job, but works hard and learns and becomes proficient. I can be very brief about SkyStriker's GI Joe media appearances. He had no appearances in the GI Joe animated series. He came out in 1988 and unfortunately that was in the gap between the end of the Sunbow animated series and the beginning of the Deke animated series. He also had no comic book appearances as far as I can tell, even though Tiger Force did have a couple appearances in the GI Joe comic books and special missions. Looking at the figure overall, the figure is made up of entirely reused parts. There's nothing original about it. So at best it's going to be about a middle tier figure. I should hate the orange with black tiger stripes on this figure, but I don't mind it as much as you might think. SkyStriker is not a ground troop and by giving these bright colors to pilots and vehicle drivers, you can brighten up the toy line while having the ground troops with more realistic colors and camouflage. Looking at the Tiger Rat overall, I think the jet looks like something special with its bright yellow color and its bold black stripes, but I'm torn. As a child, I would have hated this vehicle. The younger me would have thought this vehicle was an eyesore. I'm still here. What are you doing here? I'm here to stop you from being stupid. Well I think as an adult collector that it really stands out on a shelf and it really makes a statement. Yeah, it says shoot me down, I'm a big fat obvious target. That's not fair. I think the color change distinguishes it from the Cobra Rattler, which is a jet that I love and if you're going to reissue a toy, you have to do something to make it fresh and new and I think the color change does that. Nerd. Settle down, Beavis. Now younger version of me. You will die. So this vehicle cannot be a top tier vehicle due to the lack of originality, but I still like it and I'm going to say it's at the top end of the middle tier. Shut up. That was my review of the 1988 GI Joe Tiger Force Tiger Ratt. We have more Tiger Force toys coming all this month. You don't want to miss it. Make sure you thumbs up on YouTube, subscribe on YouTube, like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter. That is the fuel that keeps this channel going. Don't forget to check back next week for another vintage GI Joe Tiger Force toy review and until then, never forget only GI Joe is GI Joe.