 Hello everybody, hooded cobra commander 788 here, it's time for another vintage GI Joe toy review and this time we're going to look at a figure that I recently acquired and it's a character that's somewhat controversial. This is a character that is not universally loved to say the least. We're going to look at the 1986 cobra emperor, Serpentor. This is Serpentor, the cobra emperor, the character that at one point deposed a cobra commander as the leader of that terrorist organization. Serpentor was available in 1986 and 1987. He was discontinued in 1988 and he was available later for a few years as a male away figure from Hasbro Direct. When Serpentor was discontinued in 1988, we didn't exactly get a replacement for him, however in 1987, while Serpentor was still on the shelves, we got a new version of cobra commander to challenge Serpentor for control of cobra. We also got Cobra Law, which was introduced in the 1987 GI Joe animated movie and wasn't so much a replacement for Serpentor as they were an extension of the concept. Serpentor and his air chariot were worth two flag points and since he came with a vehicle, he would be classified as a vehicle driver, however he was more of a deluxe figure that was sold at a higher price point and came with a small vehicle. Really mainly you were buying the figure and you were getting the vehicle as a bonus. Other deluxe figures that were sold like this with small vehicles included Zartan and Sergeant Slaughter. I'm going to set the air chariot aside and we're just going to look at Serpentor for now. Let's take a look at Serpentor's accessories starting with his only real weapon, his dagger. And this dagger as you can see is very tiny. The dagger is somewhat ornate with a little bit of a design to the hilt and the handle. Looks really nice, it's pretty cool, but it is very small so it does tend to get lost very often. Some of the male away versions of Serpentor came with no cape and two daggers. Now let's look at the cape and this cape is extremely delicate, it's very rare to find one of these capes that is not torn. It's made out of this kind of very thin see-through even fabric and it tends to tear at the arm holes which it has on this one. If your Serpentor still has his cape I would recommend removing the cape very carefully. Try not to put any stress on those arm holes, just very gently remove it. If you're concerned about condition and you have a cape that isn't torn and you want to keep it that way you might just put it in a plastic bag and put it away somewhere safe rather than leave it on the action figure and maybe if you want the action figure to have the cape get a repro cape instead of using the original. There are really just very few of these originals left that don't have a rip in the arm. To me it's absolutely crazy to make an accessory out of this material and sell it as a children's toy. I mean whoever decided to do this must not have been familiar with children and how they tend to play with their toys. This thing is incredibly thin, it's really just a few molecules away from non-existence. I'm not sure exactly what this material is but it's really barely there. It's like it's made out of pixie sneezes and wishes. I'm going to carefully set this aside so we can continue looking at Serpentor's accessories. Serpentor had a head shroud that pegged into his back exactly like a typical GI Joe backpack with a peg like that fit in the hole in the back of the action figure and that's what held it in. This head shroud has some pretty incredible detail on it with like the snake skin scaling like that definitely very snake like. You can see around the back peg it has an impression of the back of the action figure to help it fit a bit more snugly and this head shroud completes the look of a hooded cobra when it's on the action figure so his head really looks like a cobra now. And finally Serpentor came with a snake, a cobra snake with his hood out so he looks like he's angry and ready to strike. And this cobra was made out of a softer plastic so it had some bend and some stretch to it. It's a little bit rubbery and that's good. It helps keep it from breaking. It also gives it kind of a snake like quality. There were a lot of variations on the color of this snake and gold, this kind of solid gold color was the most common color. It came also in a slightly browner color like this one. This one's a little bit more brown but it also came in some other colors that ranged from gold to brown to almost greenish. Let's look at the articulation on Serpentor. He had the typical articulation of 1986 GI Joe action figures. That means he could turn his head from left to right like that. He could also look up and down. His neck was on a ball joint. He could move his arm up at the shoulder about so far. He could also swivel it all the way around. Swivel is a little bit hindered by this sculpting of a snake on his shoulder. He could move his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep. He could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside so he could move at the torso a little 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 sculpted design and color of Serpentor starting with his head. And as you can see on his head he has this cobra mask. It's a cobra snake head. And his real face is kind of poking out there from behind the fangs. And this is a very unique look even for G.I. Joe action figures at the time. You just didn't see this kind of outlandish costuming at the time. These fangs are not really sharp. They're sort of rounded off. But they do break frequently. So you have to watch out for that if you're getting a Serpentor action figure. Make sure all four fangs, two top and two bottom are there and not broken off. There is a variant with these Serpentors that came with the air chariot. Most of them have this sort of normal flesh tone neck as you can see there. But a few of them came with a yellow neck. Yellow sort of painted on there. And that looks a little different. I have to assume that the choice to go with yellow was to make it look like a continuation of this yellow on his chest. But at some point they changed that and they decided it just looked better with a regular flesh tone neck. I do prefer the more common version. I think the yellow neck version just looks a little bit odd. Looking at Serpentor's chest we can see a continuation of the snake theme with the gold snake scales and the yellow ridged chest. And it looks like he has a couple green snakes coiled around him like this. In the G.I. Joe animated movie these sculpted on snakes were depicted as alive and moving. Which I think is creepy and weird and I don't really care for it. I can kind of accept this look as a costume but having part of the costume alive and moving around I just think takes things a little bit too far. Lots of sculpted scaling on the back and those green snakes. It really is very impressively detailed. Now this bright shiny gold color here that is not paint. That is plastic. So you don't run into the problem with a lot of the shiny metallic colored paint that Hasbro used in which it would rub off the action figures and that would make it look really bad. But this is actually the base plastic color and that was a good choice if you're going to go with this much gold. His arms do not have the scaling pattern but they are that same gold base color and he has some extra large muscles sculpted onto his arm. Not all G.I. Joe figures had these sort of bulging muscles on the upper arms. So I think this is to indicate that he is very physically powerful. The sculpting on these extra muscular characters always struck me as a bit odd. It looks like they have extra biceps all the way around their arm but their elbows and their forearms are normal size so it looks kind of like a reverse Popeye. His left forearm features this snake head gauntlet with fangs and a yellow glove. That looks pretty cool. His right arm has this silver painted electronic device. Not sure exactly what that's supposed to be but probably some kind of communication device maybe I guess. Like a Dick Tracy wrist radio or something whatever. And on his right arm he has this sort of snake themed scaly gauntlet and another yellow glove. His waist piece continues the snake theme with the gold scaling and this yellow ridge portion continues down and it looks like he has a green snake belt that goes all the way around and a sculpted snake head right there in the middle. His thighs feature more of that gold snake skin scaling. It's a little bit sloppier here on the thighs than it is on his back and upper body. He has these green thigh pads and he has knee pads and that's nice. You know I like knee pads so at least he has that going for him. And that snake theme continues down to the bottom with more gold scaling, criss cross snake pattern across his shins and we finish it up with some green snake scale skin boots I guess. Let's take a look at Serpentor's file card and this file card would have been printed on the back of the box that the air cherry came in. There's nothing on the other side, it's just the back of the box. It has his faction as Cobra, which is certainly correct. He is the Cobra Emperor. It has a portrait of Serpentor and this would have come from the artwork on the front of the box. It has his codename as Serpentor and in fact that is not his codename. That is his name. He doesn't have any other name. He was created as Serpentor and so that's just who he is. It says he is the Cobra Emperor, which is a position he had to wrestle away from Cobra Commander. The file card is broken up into two paragraphs and this top paragraph says, a secret cabal of Cobra scientists under the direction of the interrogator and Destro combed the tombs at sarcophagi and relics of the great despots of history to find cells with DNA traces. Okay, this requires some explanation. The interrogator is referring to Dr. Meinbender, who was originally intended to be an interrogator. He was later billed on his file card as the Master of Mind Control, but at the time Serpentor's file card was written, they may not have had a name for Dr. Meinbender at the time. In fact, Dr. Meinbender in the comic book was first introduced with a different name. They called him Dr. Brainwave. Later on, he sort of became Cobra's resident mad scientist. Destro of course was Cobra's weapons supplier and although he was an agent of Cobra, his loyalty was not entirely to Cobra. Destro is the type of character that would scheme against Cobra Commander to create someone to replace him. From these long dead genetic blueprints, they produced a composite clone with the military genius of Napoleon, the ruthlessness of Julius Caesar, the daring of Hannibal and the fiscal acumen of Attila the Hun, the ultimate Cobra Emperor, a master of political intrigue and a brilliant tactician. He is capable of wrestling power from Cobra Commander for the benefit of the interrogator and Destro. Fortunately for the Joes, the Cobra Emperor's own ambitions were not taken into consideration by his creators. Serpentor is a clone made up of the DNA of a bunch of dead military leaders, but in the G.I. Joe comic book, one of his DNA donors was none other than Storm Shadow and it became a pretty cool way to resurrect Storm Shadow who had been killed in a previous issue. So Destro and Dr. Meinbender created the ultimate leader and he is going to serve his own aims, not theirs. This bottom section has a quote that says, his eyes have seen the legions of Rome trample the galls and nervii into the dust. The galls and nervii is referring to Julius Caesar's victory in the Gallic Wars in the years 58-50 BC. His hand lifted the horse hair baton that signaled the first charge of the Carthaginian armored elephant phalanx. The Carthaginian developed and deployed war elephants during the Punic Wars. His ears have heard the rattle of French Queer Assers on the streets of Moscow. These French Queer Assers on the streets of Moscow is referring to the Napoleonic Wars. In 1812 the battle of Moscow led to the fall of Moscow to Napoleon, but it is his mind we must fear the most. The thoughts of the Cobra Emperor have not drifted from global conquest since the reign of King Solomon. In one paragraph, this file card sweeps through millennia of history, this is like a little mini history lesson, and it sets up Serpentor as a very strong character. Whatever anyone might think about Serpentor, this file card is very well written and intriguing. Okay, let's set Serpentor aside and look at his air chariot now. The air chariot like all other GI Joe vehicles came with a set of instructions which on the other side had blueprints and I'll be using these blueprints to describe some of the features of the toy. You can see the Cobra air chariot has a cobra snake theme like its driver and it has this big cobra head out up in front and it has this head, it moves with the handlebars in the back. The blueprints call it a cobra shroud covered radome so there's supposed to be a radar in there. It has this battle shield and intakes for the horizontal engines. It has these two forward facing weapons here and they do pivot a little bit and the blueprints call these autoload 7.62mm strike attack guns. It has some detailing on the underside and at the control panel it has these handlebars which we already saw. It has a foot peg and that's to hold the action figure on so Serpentor can ride his air chariot. Just put the peg and the hole in the bottom of the foot of the action figure and he can ride it just like that. It has a pair of black stabilizer fins in the back here and then it has the hover engine intake and on the bottom it has a little handle which you can spin to make the hover engine spin. So this thing is supposed to hover in the air, that's why it's called the air chariot. I think this is a spectacularly bad idea. For one thing the hover engine is in the back and the rest of the weight of the vehicle is in the front so if you turn this thing on it's just going to flip end over end like that. It's not going to actually fly or hover. Another problem is it has an open intake that spins and it's directly behind the driver so if he takes one step back his foot is going to get caught in there and chewed up and the driver of this vehicle is wearing a cape so that increases the chance that he's going to get caught up in his own engine and then that's all she wrote for Serpentor. Hmmm, I guess I didn't have to worry about that guy after all. Looking at the air chariot overall I have to say I appreciated more now as an adult collector than I did as a kid. I guess it would be pretty impressive for the troops to see Serpentor flying in on this thing that would be pretty awe inspiring. As a kid though I really just didn't have much use for this vehicle. Looking at Serpentor overall, man this guy is weird. One thing he's really gold and he really is taking that Cobra theme to the extreme. I mean the Cobra commander figures and other Cobra troopers before him, I mean they had a Cobra symbol but they wore you know sort of pseudo military uniforms but Serpentor essentially wants to be the Cobra. Serpentor's origin story in the G.I. Joe animated series and in the G.I. Joe comic book was similar. However the story was told in two completely different ways. In the G.I. Joe animated series his origin story was told in a multi-part mini series whereas in the comic book Serpentor arrives somewhat abruptly. His origin story suddenly just sort of comes up all in one issue. One gets the impression that Larry Hama the writer of the G.I. Joe comic book wasn't entirely on board with Serpentor and kind of had to shoehorn Serpentor's origin story into the overall story arc that he was already working on. Serpentor just doesn't feel like a G.I. Joe character and he never really has. Now as you probably know I prefer the more realistic military side of the G.I. Joe line. However over the years I have accepted some elements of science fiction and fantasy within G.I. Joe for instance Zartan who is not a very realistic character at all. But I always prefer to have G.I. Joe grounded in something more realistic. It didn't have to be perfectly realistic but I appreciated that G.I. Joe at least in the comic books sort of existed in something that kind of resembled the real world. The introduction of Serpentor though really pushed the limits of what I was willing to accept as a part of G.I. Joe and I probably would have completely rejected a character as ridiculous as Serpentor is if it had not been for the really superb way he was written in the G.I. Joe comic book. After all you have a character that's an amalgam of all these great military leaders from history so Larry Hama sort of used Serpentor like a history lesson. This ridiculous character in the snake costume became like a teaching tool. I also appreciated how in the comic book they didn't just get all the DNA of all these great military leaders to create Serpentor because as you probably know DNA does not entode memories or experience or anything like that. So Larry Hama addressed this by using the brain wave scanner to implant all of these alleged memories, supposed memories from these military leaders into Serpentor. The brain wave scanner was a piece of science fiction technology that had already been introduced in the G.I. Joe comic book and we had already kind of accepted its existence. So by using the brain wave scanner to help create Serpentor Larry Hama sort of helped ease us into this new fantasy element that we were getting. And I have to admit after re-watching the animated miniseries Arise Serpentor Arise it's really pretty good. That's right I said something good about the G.I. Joe cartoon. So we had Serpentor and I remember as a kid not being thrilled about this but I accepted Serpentor reluctantly. Even with Serpentor we still had a semi-realistic military line to ground the fantasy but unfortunately the year after Serpentor was introduced Hasbro decided to take it one step further and they introduced these guys. These guys are Cobra Law and they are the main factor in my decision to leave G.I. Joe behind. When I was a kid in 1987 Cobra Law was one step too far. So now that we've looked at Serpentor the character that represents where I drew the line for what I was willing to accept in G.I. Joe now we really should look at the characters that crossed that line and we will in next week's video. That was my review of Serpentor and his air chariot and his file card and of course his yellow neck variant. I hope you enjoyed it and if you're thinking of getting a Serpentor action figure I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it make sure you give it a thumbs up on YouTube and don't forget to subscribe. Now I've got a lot of great new G.I. Joe toy reviews coming up you don't want to miss them. Also 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 another vintage G.I. Joe toy review. See you then.