 Hello everybody, hooded cobra commander 788 here, it's time for another vintage GI Joe toy review. In my last video I did a very large vehicle, the killer whale, so called because it almost killed me. That review was huge, it took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and it was really exhausting. This time I'm ready to do something smaller, something a little easier, so let's look at an action figure this time. We're going to look at Zerana, she came out in 1986, and she was the sister of Zartan. Zartan of course was a character introduced in 1984, he was very popular, and so following up on the popularity of Zartan, in 1986 we got Zartan's sister Zerana, and his brother Xandar. Zerana had a couple variants, one of which was a very minor color difference, I'm not really going to take a look at that one. However the other variant was major, she had an entirely different head, and so we're going to look at both of those versions of Zerana. This is Zerana, and as you can see we have two figures, which means we will be looking at a variant. Zerana was introduced in 1986, she was also sold in 1987, she was discontinued in 1988, but she showed up some time later resold at a convention with different accessories. Zerana is the sister of Zartan, who was introduced in 1984, he was a very popular character, and he had a gimmick, he was made out of a color changing plastic that would change color in sunlight. So Zartan was a very popular character, so they wanted to capitalize on the popularity of Zartan. So in 1986 they introduced Zerana, and Zartan's brother, Xandar. I don't know if Zartan, Zerana, and Xandar are supposed to be their real names, but if so, their parents really had a thing for Z names. Zartan was the leader of a motorcycle gang called the Dreadknocks, and in 1985 we got the first three Dreadknock action figures, Torch, Ripper, and Buzzer. And then the following year in 1986 we got Zerana and Xandar, and since they were related to Zartan, they were, by extension, Dreadknocks. So these two figures expanded this subgroup of Dreadknocks within the GI Joe universe. Let's take a look at Zerana's accessories, and she came with this weapon, and this looks like a rifle, but it is not. The contents of the card that Zerana was packaged in call this a razor honed spur cutting weapon, and this is somewhat typical of the Dreadknocks. They didn't seem to carry firearms all that often, and most of the time they were given some kind of a cutting weapon, maybe a projectile weapon that was not a firearm. It seems like the Dreadknocks were more interested in property damage than they were in using lethal force. You can see some pretty impressive detail of the blades there. You can see the rivets on the blades. That is really amazing. So apparently there's supposed to be a mechanism inside the body of this weapon that spins this blade so that it will cut, and if you look on this side, it kind of looks like there's a belt drive that is coming out of the front end that would drive this spur. So I guess that's how it's supposed to work. I guess this accessory is okay. I have to be honest, I'm not typically impressed with Dreadknock weapons, and this is a pretty typical Dreadknock weapon, so this is not my favorite. Zerana came with one other accessory, her red backpack, her very red backpack. It's really hard to mistake this for anyone else's. This is definitely Zerana's. It just really stands out like a sore thumb. It does have some sculpted detail on here, though it may be kind of hard to see because it is all red. It has some pouches with some flaps and some buckles up here. It has a pair of grenades, both also red. I don't know where she picked up red grenades, but she has grenades that match the color of her backpack. It looks like another pouch down here. It has this cylindrical thing, and I'm not really sure what this is supposed to be. It's a scope of some kind. I really don't know. It does, however, give Zerana's backpack a very distinctive look. I honestly don't think she needs this backpack. I kind of think they threw the backpack in so that we wouldn't think we were getting shorted on accessories, but I really don't think she needs it. It's just an extra thing. Let's take a look at the articulation of Zerana. She had the typical articulation of 1986 G.I. Joe action figures. That means she could move her head from left to right like that. She could also look up and down. Her neck was on a ball joint. She could move her arm up at the shoulder about so far, not as far as a lot of other figures from that era, because it's slightly obstructed by this armor plating on her arm, but she could swivel her arm all the way around. She had a hinge at the elbow. She could move the elbow about 90 degrees. She had a swivel at the bicep. She could swivel her arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That means she could move at the torso a little bit. She could move her legs apart about so far. She could move her leg at the hip about 90 degrees, and she could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's look at the sculpt design and color of Zerana, starting with the head, and this is where we get into the variant. The first versions of Zerana's head looked like this, and as you can see, she has ear rings. This version of Zerana is known by the ear rings. This is referred to as the Zerana with the ear rings. She has this Mohawk or faux-hawk kind of thing on top of her head, and that's a separate sculpted piece that's glued onto her head that's not supposed to come off. She does have very bright reddish pink hair. This is really striking. This first version of Zerana's head was replaced pretty quickly by this second version. Bill Merkline, the sculptor of the second Zerana head, said they changed it because the first version was not attractive enough. They just wanted a different look for it, so they came up with this. They did this as a running change. They did not change the packaging. They did not, in any way, announce it as a new version. They just changed the head and then just shipped them out. This is the second version of Zerana's head that we got. This is a very different look, and this version does not have ear rings. This is referred to as the Zerana without ear rings. She has lipstick like the earlier version. Even the sculpt on this faux-hawk bun kind of thing on her hair is different. That's completely different, not from the first version. It is a very different look. She has a longer face than the wider face from the first version. This second version of Zerana's head is more common and is probably the version that most of us remember, but I have to admit I prefer the first version of Zerana's head. I think it was a little bit more detailed, looked a little bit more natural. The second version has a bright of Frankenstein thing going on. On her chest she has a pink shirt that goes over only one shoulder. This is really pretty racy for 1986. It shows a lot of skin, and that continues around to the back. The shirt is also kind of a mid-riff. She also has a holster strap that goes around to the back and a very tiny little pistol holster. In fact, it looks almost unfinished. It's kind of the paint sort of just ends there. It doesn't even look like it's fully sculpted, and that's kind of odd. And stranger, she has a pistol holster, but no pistol, so I really don't know why this is here. I assume it's just to add some detail to what they might think is an otherwise plain shirt, but it's an unusual detail and I really don't get it. A couple observations about Zerana's chest. The chest is molded in the flesh color plastic, and the pink is painted on. Now since there's this much pink, normally what they would do on these figures is they would make it out of the pink plastic and paint the flesh tone on, but they couldn't do that with this figure because this is made out of that color change plastic. So they had to use the flesh colored plastic and paint the pink on, which unfortunately looks kind of bad when the pink paint starts to wear off. You start to see some of the flesh tone coming out through it. Another unusual thing about Zerana's chest is her chest and her back piece are glued together. Like all other G.I. Joe action figures, she has a screw in the back and normally that screw, if you took that out, you'd be able to pull the action figure apart, take the O-ring out. You can't really do that with Zerana because the chest and back pieces are glued together as they were with Zartan and with her brother Xandar. All of the figures that have the color change plastic gimmick seem to have the chest and back pieces glued together. Why that is, I can't be certain, but that is something that they all have in common. Her arms feature pink armored plating at the shoulders and that piece is also shared by Zartan, same upper arms just colored pink for her and Xandar has it too except his are in blue. She has some black and red gloves that have a really nice texture pattern on them and some elbow pads that look pretty vicious, they look like spiked elbow pads, some great detail on the gloves, excellent arms. Her waist piece is very small, unusually small, definitely smaller than the male action figures for G.I. Joe. I assume they did this to make her look a bit more feminine. She has a reddish belt and she has blue trousers which I guess are probably blue jeans. She has this odd little belt thing that comes off to her right side that just stops there. I think maybe this was intended to be an extension that went down to this sheath where she has this dagger on her thigh, but that's not actually sculpted or painted in, it just stops there, looks a little bit unusual. On her right thigh she does have that really nicely detailed dagger and the handle on that has some gold metallic paint and as usual that metallic shiny paint that Hasbro used, it came off very easily, it's often rubbed off, it's partially gone on mine. There were some other bits on her that had that shiny paint kind of like the buckles on her shoulder holster here and a lot of that paint is also gone, so that's something to watch out for. On her left thigh she has a huge rip in her jeans and under that rip we don't have a flesh color, we have this pink color which I assume means that she's wearing pink tights under her jeans and she has knee pads, I really like knee pads, it's a great feature and these are really nicely detailed knee pads, got a really cool design to them. She's got some tall black boots and these boots are also kind of unique. They're sort of like cowboy boots, they have pointed toes and they have spurs and that's kind of a nice little addition, that's a nice touch. Really unique looking boots and a really nice sculpt overall. Let's take a look at Zarena's file card. The file card was printed on the back of the card on which the figure was packaged, you can see some of the artwork from the front of the card here and it has her faction as the enemy and that is correct. She was not an agent of Cobra, at least not when she was first introduced, so it just says the enemy there, it doesn't say Cobra. It has a portrait of her and I have to admit the portrait looks more like the newer head, the no earrings head than it does the original head, so I think the portrait better reflects the later version of her. Before Hazard this design of Zarena was inspired by Wendy O. Williams and early design sketches did not have this armor plating on her and she had a tattoo on her arm and there were some other minor differences. It has her codename as Zarena, it says that's her codename not her real name, in fact it doesn't say anything about her real name and it says she's Zartan's sister which I think is kind of funny, obviously that's not her specialty, they just really wanted to make sure that Zarena was associated with Zartan, the very popular character. It does not list her primary or secondary military specialty or her place of birth as it usually does on these file cards. In the G.I. Joe animated series I think Zarena's accent was vaguely Australian-ish, that would fit with the dread knocks since most of the dread knocks are from Australia but it was never clear exactly where Zartan was from. The file card split into two paragraphs and this top paragraph says Zarena is a professional assassin who gains access to her victims through skillful acting and masterful use of makeup and disguise. So she is a master of disguise like her brother so it could have listed master of disguise on her specialty but of course it didn't, they just wanted to make sure she was associated with Zartan. While her brother Zartan concentrates on the purely physical aspects of disguise Zarena works from the method actor's point of view to completely become the object of her impersonation to think, feel and react like another person. She is an expert in small arms, explosives and edged weapons. Like her two brothers she also has the ability to change skin color. This ability to change skin color is never explained and we have no idea why they have that ability. Also it says she is an assassin and she is an expert in small arms and explosives So it would have been nice if she had come with some assassin's weapons other than this spur weapon here, maybe a sniper rifle, maybe some explosive, something like that. This bottom paragraph has a quote, it says Zarena could have had a brilliant career on the professional stage if the evil in her nature hadn't been so strong. She throws tantrums, cuts ahead on lines and never leaves a tip. I think it's funny that some of the examples of her evil nature are really just petty rudeness. She throws as an oral hygienist for six months on one assignment, armed only with a reel of specially coated dental floss to incapacitate her unwitting victims. She escaped, dressed as a granny lady hobbling on a walker, right past the cops and into a cab. The cabbie remembered her, she didn't leave a tip. A note on regional dialect, it says she cuts ahead on lines and that's kind of an eastern thing where you stand online. In the Midwest and a lot of other parts of the country you stand in line, so that would say she cuts ahead in lines. Her file card speaks to a lot of skill and disguise but it also speaks to some general anti-social behavior like throwing tantrums. The whole thing about never leaving a tip kind of reminds me of reservoir dogs. As she was depicted in the G.I. Joe comic book though, she was a fairly strong leader and she sort of became the de facto leader of the dread knocks when Zartan wasn't around. Looking at the figure overall, this is a very 80's style punk. It's colorful and flashy, it's very non-conformist which really fits with the dread knocks and you can definitely tell this is a bad guy in the G.I. Joe universe. The sort of non-conformity flashy style was usually associated with the bad guys. The dread knocks were kind of established as the weirdos in the G.I. Joe universe and Zerena really kind of reflects that. The figure has some great detail and some very bright and interesting colors and I think it was a very wise choice since they went with bright colors like this to stick with a fairly simple color scheme. We have pink, blue and a little bit of pinkish red and that's it. It would have been very easy to go overboard with excessive colors and that would have really messed it up. For instance, I think the way they did, Xandar. They really went overboard with Xandar, but this is not a review of Xandar so I'll save my comments about Xandar for another video. I think the tiny holster is weird and kind of out of place. However, this empty holster was in the original design art by Ron Rudat who designed this character for Hasbro. I just don't really know why it's there. Why does she have an empty holster? And why is it so tiny on the action figure? In the G.I. Joe comic book, Xerena is very strong-willed, like her brother Zartan, whereas her other brother Xandar sort of fades into the background, really doesn't have much of a personality at all. Another of the first things Xerena did when she was introduced in the G.I. Joe comic book was rescue Zartan who was held captive by the Joes. Xerena also had a very memorable fight with Lady J following the Cobra Civil War. In the G.I. Joe animated series, very interestingly, Xerena developed romantic feelings for one of the G.I. Joe's, Mainframe. And this is where I would normally show you the Mainframe action figure, but I don't have a Mainframe action figure, which is weird because I thought I had one, but apparently I don't. Why don't I have a Mainframe? I like Mainframe. Note to self, get a Mainframe action figure. Xerena was also featured very prominently in the 1987 G.I. Joe animated movie, but we don't really like to talk about that. Okay, I'm in my backyard for another test of the color-changing feature. This time we're going to test it for Xerena. Just for comparison purposes, I put Zartan and Xandar under this box as well. I'm going to lift the box, expose them to direct sunlight and we will watch them change color. Here we go. All right, and there they go. All right, you can see Zartan is definitely changing color very quickly. Sorry about the noise in the background. His skin tone is changing very dramatically. Xerena, I can see a little bit of skin color change there, not as much. On the newer version, it seems to be more pronounced on the new head version, although it's made of the same plastic. This is changing color much faster. Let's see. Yeah, I'm doing a little bit better on this one, getting a little bit of a darker skin tone. And Xandar really is changing color quite a lot. Xandar's color changing skin is doing quite well. You get a lot of color change on that. After several minutes of direct sunlight exposure, we get dramatic skin color changes on Zartan on this version of Xerena and on Xandar. But this first, this earring version of Xerena still is not changing color very much. I wonder if it's just my copy, maybe, I don't know, there's something defective about the plastic. But this Xerena did change color very well. That was my review of Xerena and her variant and her file card. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're thinking of getting a Xerena action figure, I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it, make sure you give it a thumbs up on YouTube and make sure you subscribe. I've got a lot of great new GI Joe toy reviews coming up. You don't want to miss them. Don't forget to like the Facebook page. You get a lot of updates there. You don't get anywhere else. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week with the next GI Joe toy review video. Xerena X Thunder Machine with drivers sold separately.