 Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here and this is my video review of the GI Joe vehicle, the Cobra Fang Helicopter. This is the 1983 Cobra Helicopter, the Fang which the box says is a fully armed negator gyrocopter. So that's what Fang stands for and here it is. It was produced in 1983, 84 and 85 and was discontinued in 1986 and it really wasn't replaced by anything in 1986. There were some other Cobra small aircraft like the claw powered glider and the flight bubble, the flight pod but the Cobra helicopter that sort of replaced this didn't come out until 1987, the Cobra Mamba. This was one of two Cobra vehicles that came out in 1983. The other one was of course the his tank and throughout the entire run of the GI Joe toy line there were never as many enemy vehicles as there were GI Joe vehicles. There were really a lot of GI Joe vehicles released in 1982 and those vehicles were re-released in 1983 and then even more vehicles were added to the GI Joe team in 1983, but these were the only two real Cobra vehicles that we had. More Cobra vehicles of course came out later, more larger, better vehicles I guess you could say, but these were the the primary armaments of the Cobra Army and even though the Cobra vehicles were fewer in type you were meant to army build these or get multiples of them so that you could have an entire army of his tanks and fang helicopters. Of course I don't know of any kids whose families had enough money at that time to buy a whole set of these so usually we just got one and we'd have to pretend that one tank and one helicopter was really an army. Let's take a look at the box that the fang helicopter came in and this box is not in great shape but it will serve our purposes. It's got a picture of the fang on all sides. This one still has the original price sticker on it. It was $496 at Kmart in 1983 and we've got some really nice box art, nice picture of the helicopter and on the back this guy is worth two flag points. You were encouraged to cut these flag points out and send them in for some special mail away offers that you could get things that you couldn't get in the stores and here we have what is supposed to be the toy actual size when assembled so just out of curiosity let's let's see if that is the actual size. Let's see what size comparison it's it's a little bit larger in the picture very slightly but that's close close to actual size when assembled. This box unfortunately is pretty rough I have it's missing a side here and what I've done is I've taken a basically a small us postal service flat rate box and I've slipped it inside there to help the box keep its shape and I may eventually you know custom cut some cardboard to slide inside there to just help hold this thing together. Let's look at some differences between the art and the photography on the box here and what we actually got in the toy because there were some differences between the toy and the information on the box. I think one of the most notable notable differences is the the change in the housing here on the shaft that connects the propeller blades. This was apparently added later as it's not on the photograph on the back either and I think one reason why that might have been added is because these these shafts here are very fragile and are often broken on these fang helicopters. In fact I have a spare fang helicopter in which this is broken and I've had to kind of repair it a little bit so that's one difference. Another minor difference is the color of the ball turret here which in the box art is black and in the actual toy it is kind of a gray color. These are minor differences though the box art is really pretty good a nice representation of the toy itself. Now the artwork on the box has the fang helicopter being piloted by the cobra soldier and like so I can't put the cobra soldier's hand on the joystick because this is the straight arm version. I don't have a swivel arm cobra soldier at the moment and you would really need a swivel arm really to have him pilot this using the joystick but I disagree really with with the choice of the cobra soldier on the as the pilot really the darker blue doesn't provide quite enough contrast with the black of the helicopter itself so the the figure doesn't stand out very well I really like to use the 1983 swivel arm cobra commander because I think his light blue uniform really provides a nice contrast with the helicopter itself and and looks really good let's get you in there cobra commander there we go and since he has a swivel arm he can reach over and he can grab the joystick and fly the aircraft I'm not the only one who thinks that this is an appropriate choice as a pilot the instruction sheet in the section where it shows how to place the figure and uses the cobra commander action figure the same one that I'm using here now let's look at the parts of the faying helicopter it had propeller blades which in the original box these were separate and needed to be assembled snapped on here it has it has four red missiles which the instruction sheet calls heat seeking air-to-air rockets I'm not going to take these missiles off because they are pegged in there with these very thin slots going into very very thin pegs here they're actually really hard to get on and they're also really close together which means getting one of them on with the other one already on is very tricky because you end up knocking the one off as you're trying to put the second one on it's it's really frustrating also since the slots are so thin and the pegs that they go in are so thin and narrow these rockets are susceptible to cracking and and you can see on this lower one that we have some cracking on here so I'm just going to leave those on at least on this one I will take the rockets off of my spare faying helicopter to show you what I mean see those little pegs right there are meant to go in this is really a mess here but these really tiny little slots front and back and I can tell you that these can be really frustrating to put on and to keep on they also had stickers and these stickers often come off in fact missing a sticker on that top missile and it's because the the sticker is meant to stick on a rounded surface here but but it's a flat sticker so it kind of it can come up at the edges get some dirt and crap in there as as this one has and over time they want to peel off underneath it had the negator bomb with a nice cobra symbol on there I think the cobra sticker is supposed to normally go vertical rather than horizontal but whoever owned this before put them on that way which is fine and this one is a little bit easier it pegs in with a much larger slot on the bottom I don't know exactly what a negator bomb is or how it is different from a regular bomb but there you have it another part of this vehicle is the so-called roll bar or this sort of red cage around the engine and these are often missing or broken and unfortunately this is an example of a broken piece these are unfortunately really too hard to find harder to find than you would hope intact so if you're lucky you can get a fang helicopter that has one still on there and if you do I would just leave it on there because those have been known to break quite often another part that is susceptible to breaking is the propeller shaft and often right here at the base where it goes into this this housing here that breaks quite frequently and in fact my spare fang helicopter is broken there and I've done a slight repair on it it's held together with a pin that I put in there which allows it to still rotate a little bit but but it's very fragile and I don't want to mess with that too much I'm afraid that it'll break further but in as much as the propeller blades are intact it spins pretty freely nice easily spinning propeller blades and that of course was the main feature of the helicopter was the propelling spinning propeller blade the other really prominent and important feature was the front ball turret or bubble turret gun which the instruction sheet calls a 30 millimeter rapid fire cannon and I'm going to assume that this is some kind of machine gun and not a laser with the exception of the 1982 character flash I'm generally opposed to lasers on these vehicles which is one of the reasons I was a not a great fan of the cartoon series because of the excessive use of science fiction weapons where some real world weapons really would have done much better so this is to me a machine gun not a laser gun it had a spinning propeller blade in the back which is a nice touch but I don't know of any kid back when you know when these were out and played with who had to keep that blade spinning while playing with the helicopter even so it's nice to know that you can now looking at the Fang helicopter overall we have a really nice color scheme this vehicle is not painted and really most of the Hasbro GI Joe vehicles were not painted any kind of color scheme that it had or color interest came from just using different colored plastics for the parts and so the red roll cage the kind of gray bubble turret with the red gun and the red rockets contrasting against the black helicopter really make it look good it's a really nice colorful design without any kind of paint job let's take a look at the cockpit it's a pretty plain cockpit it does have a sticker inside with some instrument panels on it it has this single joystick which is probably quite breakable but I've found a lot of Fang helicopters that still have the joystick so apparently it's not as breakable as you might think there is a backpack to fit the in the holes of the back of the action figures to hold them in there and if the backpack were not there the figures probably would stay in fairly well but I can see why they added it it is an open cockpit and so they probably are more susceptible to the figures falling out than for instance like the dragonfly helicopter which had a closed cockpit so this is just for a little bit of extra security to keep the figures in it has a ridged seat I guess these are supposed to be cushions of some kind and armrest which I think was a missed opportunity if you take a look at the box art the cobra soldier here flying the helicopter basically has his left arm resting on this comfortable arm rest here whereas they could have molded in some extra control instruments here and it would have worked I think a lot better than this sort of lounge chair look the skids are also often broken so be careful with these skids but they have these foot pegs where you can have the figures ride on the on the skids using the holes in the their feet for the foot pegs but these foot pegs are pretty thick kind of like the dragonfly helicopter and so I would just not try to force the figures feet into these foot pegs and just leave them for show I would be concerned about cracking the heels of the figures trying to force them in there they are rather thick so even though theoretically you can have two figures ride on the outside of the helicopter I would just leave that feature unused just so that you don't risk breaking an action figure let's take a look at the engine detail some nice engine detail there and our great big exhaust port on the back which when we were we were kids of course we would pretend that this was a jet engine so that the helicopter of course could fly at jet speeds and really if you look at the box art that's what it looks like it looks like a jet flame coming out the back there now as I said this is the only cobra helicopter for a while at least until 1987 when the cobra mamba came out and so it was kind of a a rough time for cobra in the air because they had to go up against gi joe's 1983 helicopter the dragonfly and I could compare the two but really there's no comparison the dragonfly is really bristling with guns and missiles it's a two-seater helicopter with a special feature of the spinning propeller blades with the the trigger that causes them to spin it's really a much more impressive toy and a much more impressive machine of war than this very small open cockpit single single pilot fang helicopter the fang does have some missiles and this single turret but it would be tough to for the fang to match up against the dragonfly in the air I think the only hope that the fang would have is to have a whole fleet of them attacking the dragonfly at once that's about the only way the fang is going to have a chance that's my review of the 1983 cobra fang helicopter I hope you enjoyed it I and if you are thinking of getting a fang helicopter yourself I hope this review was helpful to you thanks for watching and watch for more videos in the near future