 Corporate Commander 788 here and this is not a quick shot this is a full review a full review in the middle of the week I wanted to review the GI Joe machine gun defense unit and this is a small set so a full review of it really shouldn't take very long the machine gun defense unit was available in 1984 and 1985 and was briefly available for mail order in 1988 the machine gun defense unit was one of the battlefield accessories also known as defense units the others that were available in 1984 included the missile defense unit and the mortar defense unit three others were available in 1985 the ammo dump unit the forward observer unit and the rifle range unit these were diorama sets they were not integrated play sets they were all just separate parts but they could be placed anywhere on your battlefield and you could mix and match the parts if you wanted to let's take a look at the parts of the machine gun defense unit the machine gun defense unit came with two of these tripod barricades and these are tank traps they are two parts that come apart this beam here connects in this tab with this slot and they form a tank trap now these types of tank traps were known as the check hedgehog and they're designed to be a barrier that tanks could not roll over although they are very simple these are very nice realistic replicas of a real-world check hedgehog style tank trap then we have the piece that gives the machine gun defense unit its name the machine gun it has a removable ammunition belt and we'll take a look at that in a minute now the blueprints call this a 750 rpm ex 344 universal machine gun as for what real-world weapon this might be based on it doesn't exactly match any that i can find but it looks a little bit like the soviet dshk but the soviet machine gun had a rate of fire of 600 rpm not 750 the detail on this machine gun is fair it's not the best it has a rectangular shaped hole for the ammunition belt and it can rotate on its tripod using rock and roll gi joe's first machine gunner you can see the grip for this machine gun is way too thick to fit in the action figure's hands i would not recommend trying that you will break a thumb then we have this ammunition belt which the blueprints call a 50 caliber ammo belt and it's pretty simple pretty plain but it's also pretty innovative you can feed it into the machine gun and you can pretend to fire off the rounds and that's pretty cool that's the first time gi joe did that kind of thing a working ammunition belt like this would have been great with the heavy machine guns that came with roadblock then we have the ammunition box which has a 50 cal sticker on each side it's hollow underneath and it has minimal detail but it's effective then we have this sign which has a sticker on it which says danger restricted area stay clear no one beyond this point this means you i think stuff like this is kind of cool this sign does not have to stay with the machine gun defense unit you can use it anywhere so if you're setting up a base like a field headquarters you can put this sign in front of a restricted area and it really gives it more of an authentic feel finally it had figure stands it came with two figure stands i only have one here although i'm i could square i had both figure stands for this set but when i was putting the set together to do this review i could only find one of them i i don't know where the other one is but they were both the same they were this darker green color it should match the color of the rest of the plastic it was nice to get these figure stands at the time uh action figures did not come with figure stands the only way you could get them was in battle gear accessory packs or these battlefield accessories uh so you could put rock and roll on the figure stand and he could man the machine gun unit the tripod on the machine gun is really low though so rock and roll should fire it in the prone position here's where mixing and matching these sets works really well because i think these sandbags from the mortar defense unit works better with the machine gun defense unit than these tank traps now i do like the tank traps but i just don't think the tank traps go with the machine gun very well and the sandbags do another alternative you could use the wall from the missile defense unit and the gray wall matches up quite nicely with that gray machine gun if you should choose to keep this set together the dark green of the machine gun defense unit works very nicely with the dark green of rock and roll's uniform and the box art for this set does feature rock and roll here is each set with the action figure that was shown on the box art for the set grunt with the missile defense unit rock and roll with the machine gun defense unit and short fuse with the mortar defense unit another thing about the box art all three characters are shown wearing visors on their helmets but rock and roll and grunt did not come with visors so i have borrowed a couple visors from other action figures so we can match them up with how they look on the box i do like these battlefield accessories they are small but that's why i like about them in the gi joe line they did do a lot of large sets giant play sets an aircraft carrier a space shuttle but they did not neglect to give us the small details that would help us build our gi joe world one odd thing about these sets though is that it seems like they're not necessarily made for gi joe they don't say gi joe anywhere on them the handles for the accessories are not designed to go in the action figures hands now they do come with figure stands so that's something but other than the figure stands none of this really necessarily has to do with gi joe at all you could use these sets for like military dioramas without gi joe figures and they would work just fine that was my review of the 1984 gi joe machine gun defense unit i hope you enjoyed it i will review the other battlefield accessory sets as at some point as i have time and i'll probably do them as short reviews like this but i do want to look at all of them and i'm looking forward to it i'll have another full review coming up next week so watch for that thanks for watching and until next time remember only gi joe is gi joe