 Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here and I'm back with another vintage GI Joe toy review and the last several reviews that I've done I have looked at some of my favorite GI Joe toys but I can't look at a favorite GI Joe toy every review. I've got to mix in a few reviews of toys that maybe aren't my favorite so this time I'm going to review this. Just a quick reminder before we get started, if you'd like me to review a particular GI Joe toy, leave a comment on this YouTube video and I will get to it as soon as I can. I have received a couple of requests and I will get to those, I need to get a few pieces before I do those reviews but they are on the list and I will get to them soon. This is the Cobra Snake Armor and the acronym Snake stands for System Neutralizer Armed Cloaking Equipment with cloaking spelt with a K. They really stretched the bounds of reason, logic and spelling to make this an acronym. Really not everything needs to be an acronym. The Cobra Snake was introduced in 1983, it was also sold in 1984, it was discontinued in 1985 when it was replaced with a blue version of this same toy. The Cobra Snake was worth one half of a flag point which is the same flag point value as the GI Joe pack rats. The Cobra Snake Metal Armor was a toy that could be used with an action figure, you could put an action figure inside it or you could use it as a standalone toy like this. Let's look at the parts of the Snake Battle Armor and if you think about it all it is is a bunch of parts. It came apart in pieces like this, it's essentially disintegrated like that. This is the front piece, you can see it has a black sticker for goggles that is not a clear plastic piece. It has this number six on it, it has Cobra symbols on the side, on the inside it should have sticker control panels but the stickers are missing on mine. This is the back piece and it had some pegs for these attachments and I will get to those later. These are the arms, there is a left and a right arm, they are not identical and both arms had pegs for the attachments, they're pretty long pegs. If you take the attachments off the arms are in fact pretty short and the arms had these kind of rubbery discs that were used to attach the arms to the main body of the toy. That brings us to the legs and there is a left leg and a right leg, they are not identical and each leg is two parts, you split them apart down the middle there, you take both of them apart because when you put the action figure in you will put these on the action figures leg. Inside the Cobra Snake Armor when you didn't have an action figure in it was this body support piece. It was rubbery, it had a couple pegs at the feet here that would go inside the legs of the battle armor to kind of just hold it together when there was no action figure in it. That brings us to the arm attachments and there were four. There was the flamethrower, the machine gun, the missile and the claw. Each one of these arm attachments was two parts, there was this base part that would attach to the arm of the snake armor and of course there was the end attachment for each of the devices, the claw, the missile, the machine gun and the flamethrower. As far as I can tell these base pieces for the arm attachments are identical and interchangeable. Let's take a look at the features of the snake armor and the main feature was that you could reassemble it with an action figure inside and Storm Shadow is going to help me demonstrate that feature. The first thing to do is to assemble the leg pieces around the legs of the action figure and you need to make sure that you have the left and the right leg on the same side. The leg will always have an inside indent like that so you can know which one is the left and the right. This one is the left leg. Let's assemble one leg around Storm Shadow's left leg and assemble the second leg around his right leg like so. The front part of the leg had these pegs that would fit in the holes on the back leg so you could line it up perfectly and snap it on. Next we assemble the main body of the armor starting with the back piece and you make sure you get the correct arm. The arm will sweep forward slightly like that and you use this disc and put it in the slot on the side of the back piece. Same thing with the other side you just push it in and it should hold long enough to put the front piece on. Next we need the action figure and we need to place the action figure in the back piece. There isn't really a good place for the arms so I think you just need to fold the arms in like this. This is actually kind of difficult to do with a straight arm figure. It's easier to do with a swivel arm action figure so just fold the arms in like that so they don't obstruct the front piece as it goes on. The front piece has these pegs much like the legs did and the pegs fit in the holes on the back piece. It's pretty easy to line up you just place it there and you press it on and you have a mostly assembled snake armor with storm shadow inside. Now we need to put on the arm attachments and you can choose any of the four that you want. I'll choose the machine gun. It doesn't matter which arm you put them on, they fit on either arm, on the other side I'm going to put the claw and they just slide into the pegs there. They are kind of rubbery so you do need to push them on fairly firmly but they do stay on quite well once you put them on. My younger viewers who don't know how to count yet, the toy has two arms but four attachments so you need to have a place to put these other two attachments and that's what these pegs on the back are for. You just put the pegs in the holes of the arm attachments like so. Now you have the two arm attachments that you're not using stored and the other two on the arms. That leaves this piece kind of just hanging out there when not in use and if you're nine years old you will probably just lose it. Let's take a look at the articulation of the snake armor and the articulation is the same with or without the action figure. The arms can swing all the way around and you can kind of rotate the attachments like that. The legs do not have articulation at the knees so they can only move at the waist a little bit and I mean only a little bit because if you move them too much it will pop the entire thing apart. The stiff leg design of this toy reminds me a lot of the robot in that movie Robot vs Aztec Mummy. I am a robot. This brings us to the main reason why I'm not a big fan of this toy. Look at this. How cool does Storm Shadow look inside the Cobra Snake battle armor? The correct answer is not very cool. At no point can you even see the action figure and if you can't see the action figure the action figure might as well not even be in there. Really just looking at it can you tell that Storm Shadow is inside this toy? Well as a point of fact he isn't. I hope you'll forgive the sleight of hand but it's just to illustrate the point that the action figure actually adds no play value to the snake armor and the snake armor adds no play value to the action figure. I mean the action figure can actually do more when he's not inside the snake armor. The design of the snake armor is clunky. It does not look like a weapon of war. It doesn't look like this would give a soldier any kind of advantage in war. In fact a soldier wearing this in war would be at a disadvantage because if you knock this thing over there's no way he's ever going to get up again. It's like a turtle on its back. The Cobra Snake armor is white which started a very brief trend of coloring Cobra vehicles white which continued with the Cobra Claw powered glider. There are several colors that I really like for Cobra vehicles. Black, blue, even red but unless it's an arctic vehicle white is not one of them. This does not look great as a color for a Cobra vehicle. I especially have a problem with the pegs on the back for the extra attachments. Now I do like it when they give us storage on the toy for the extra bits. But in this case they stick out really far and it looks pretty ridiculous. It also puts the toy off balance and it tends to fall backward. The toy doesn't balance well, it doesn't move well, and it falls apart very easily. None of these pieces snap into place. So if you play with it too rigorously it's just going to disintegrate. I have some sticky tack on the bottom of one of the feet to help hold this thing up and that even isn't helping all that much. You may know from my previous videos that I'm not a big fan of excessive science fiction in G.I. Joe and this is entirely a science fiction piece but that's not why I disliked the toy so much. I dislike it because it's just not a very good toy. The different G.I. Joe media used the snake armor in different ways. The G.I. Joe cartoon used it as a robot and the G.I. Joe comic book used it as a kind of mind control body armor that people would wear much the way Storm Shadow did in my demonstration. Since the snake armor makes for a really crappy battle armor I think it actually makes more sense if you have it as a robot. Even though I don't like a lot of science fiction in G.I. Joe, if you're going to do it you might as well do it in the most plausible way and this is more plausible as a robot than battle armor. Consider this. In the G.I. Joe comic book issue number three Cobra had a giant robot and it was a pretty smart robot but if you re-imagine that as a big dumb robot and then later Cobra creates this snake robot instead of a battle armor later still Cobra creates the bats the battle android trooper and they were smaller than the cobra snake and smarter. So if you take these robots in order you start out with the big dumb robot and you end up with the smaller smart robot and this would be an intermediary between the two. Those three robots would represent a technological progression as Cobra's robotics technology improved over the years. So if you're going to have science fiction in G.I. Joe that is the way to do it. You can see a progression in the technology over the years and that is much less likely to break the suspension of disbelief. Of course the way the snake armor was represented in the comic book as a battle armor it was also a technological progression since it used the technology from Dr. Venom's brain wave scanner. Of course if you go that route then you kind of lose the progression of robotics technology but I kind of like the robotics technology progression better than using the brain wave scanner in battle armor. I just think it makes more sense. That was my review of the 1983 Cobra Snake battle armor. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you're thinking of getting a Cobra snake I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it go ahead and give it a thumbs up and whatever you do make sure you subscribe because I've got a lot of great new G.I. Joe toy and comic book reviews coming up and you do not want to miss them. Also if there's a particular vintage G.I. Joe toy you would like for me to review make sure you leave a comment on this video and I will get to it as soon as I can. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you all later. Move at the hip very little and the legs can kind of move at... Crap.