 Hello, G.I. Joe fans. HCC here. This week we are reviewing the Mobile Battle Bunker, so I constructed my own Mobile Battle Bunker. I built a fortress out of sofa cushions. The soft materials should protect me from anything. But how is it mobile, you ask? Move! That's how. Commander 788 here, it's time for another vintage G.I. Joe toy review, but before I start with that, I need to give a codename to a new patron. Real Wraith77 has added his support on Patreon. After entering the parabolas and vectors into the secret codename computer, super high technology has determined that Real Wraith77's codename will be 777-Hitiyawah-Layer. Thank you for your support, 777-Hitiyawah-Layer. Speaking of patrons, this review was chosen by supporters on Patreon. I could not do the show without them. I've recently made some patron-only posts on Patreon with a specific example of how important their support is. Without their support, this channel could not reach its goal of reviewing every vintage G.I. Joe toy. From time to time they get to vote on what will be reviewed on this channel. The swamp matcher lost. Again. They chose the Mobile Battle Bunker, an intriguing vehicle from the 90s. This toy was donated to the channel by Lawson Allen. Thank you Lawson. The Mobile Battle Bunker is a rolling contradiction. It tries to be everything all at once. It's a bunker. It's a tank. It's a cube that opens a gateway to a dimension of endless pain and suffering. The Mobile Battle Bunker may have some things going for it. Maybe it has something inside that makes it a lot of fun. Like maybe it's filled with candy like a pinata. We're going to find out today. HCC788 presents with special thanks to patrons the Mobile Battle Bunker. This is the Mobile Battle Bunker. G.I. Joe's missile firing defense tank from 1990. This vehicle was introduced in 1990 and was available in 1990 only. It was discontinued for 1991. This is the only version of this vehicle in the vintage era. It did not include an action figure. A bunker is a reinforced underground shelter typically for use in wartime. Whatever its other merits, the Mobile Battle Bunker is not a bunker. It is a tracked armored vehicle. It is a square tank. I think the vehicle is meant to look more like a pillbox. A pillbox is sort of like a bunker, but it's at least partly above ground and usually has slots or loopholes through which weapons can be fired. The Mobile Battle Bunker looks sort of like that. And what would be wrong with a mobile pillbox? Wouldn't that let you move the fortification to anywhere on the battlefield it's needed? Maybe, but a pillbox is heavily fortified with thick walls and is often partly underground for extra protection. It's impractical to put tracks on that and make it mobile. The Mobile Battle Bunker is a tank. It is a square tank. The box even calls it a missile-firing defense tank. As a tank, it doesn't really work. It's sort of cubicle, which provides a lot of broad surfaces for anti-tank weapons to strike. Two of the three occupants are seated on the outside where they can't take advantage of the armor. That was a common problem on a lot of G.I. Joe tanks. Looking at the Mobile Battle Bunker from a practical, real-world standpoint, it has a lot of flaws. There are some reasons I can forgive the flaws, and I will explain. It's difficult to decide in which lineage of G.I. Joe vehicles the Mobile Battle Bunker fits. It's roughly the same size as the 1987 Persuader, and it has a couple of the same angles, but the features are totally different. It's more like the 1987 Mobile Command Center. It's both a base and a vehicle, like the MCC. It has a tackle box-style top-opening feature, but it's much smaller than the MCC. You could think of it as a baby MCC. Let's look at the parts and the features of the Mobile Battle Bunker. It has two modes. It has Bunker Mode, which it's in now, and it converts to Tank Mode. To convert it to Tank Mode is pretty easy. The first thing you do is you take this top section and move it up and back. The other step is to move the treads down and forward. The Mobile Battle Bunker has some features that are accessed when it is in Tank Mode, but I'm going to put it back into Bunker Mode for now, so we can look at the outside first. In the front we have what the Blueprints call the Front End Antipersonnel Slash Obstacle Battering Ram. It suggests you're supposed to run over people with it. The piece is made of black plastic, and it sits very low to the ground. I think too low. It would push obstacles in front of the tank, rather than allowing the treads to roll over them. On each side we have a side-mounted weapon in silver plastic. The Blueprints call these double-barreled, pinpoint-accurate mortar cannons. They both look the same. It doesn't look like there's a left one and a right one. It looks like they're just flipped over and pegged on to the other side. They do elevate. You can elevate them. You can actually point them backwards, but they do not pivot. They are very low to the ground, which means they can't be used without the entire vehicle being exposed to enemy fire. This is why tanks have turrets on top. I guess it could be used for anti-aircraft, but that's not what the Blueprints suggest. The main body is in green. It's in two sections, the top and bottom section, which we saw earlier when we converted it to tank mode. On the top section it has some slots, middle, and one on each side, at the driver's eye level. It has some molded-in details, some panel lines, and some mechanical detail. There is a texture pattern on some of these lines that makes it look like welding stitches, and that's kind of cool. I kind of like that. There isn't a lot of detail on the outside, at least in the front, but I do like the color. This is something GI Joe vehicles did sometimes, and it made the more fantastical designs seem a little bit more realistic and grounded, even though they were just made-up designs. This is an unrealistic vehicle, but at least it's an army green. On the top, in the center, we have what the Blueprints call dual-pulsating twin machine guns. In silver plastic, they are mounted on this center black piece, which the Blueprints call a 5,000-round capacity laser ammunition dispenser. Laser ammunition dispenser for laser bullets, I guess. The machine guns can elevate to about 90 degrees, maybe a little more than 90 degrees, and the turret can rotate 360 degrees, but the guns can't fire in 360 degrees for reasons which will become evident. We have black plastic treads on both sides. They are fake treads. They don't really roll on these treads. The mobile battle bunker has wheels underneath, and it actually rolls on those wheels. These wheels were reissued in a different color on the 1992 paralyzer. I'm not sure if the mobile battle bunker is supposed to be mobile when it's in the bunker mode and its media appearances. It is shown driving around in this configuration, but the tracks are way to the back. The front is almost like a sled. It slides on the ground. It has no clearance at all. In the back of the top section, we have two seats in black plastic. It's a good thing they are in black. It breaks up the monotony of the green. Each of those seats has a seat clip. By pressing up on the clip in the back of the seat, those seat clips can be removed. I've not been a big fan of these seat clips on other vehicles, but they're not quite as bad on the mobile battle bunker. Because of the open cockpit design, the figures can be clipped in very easily, no problem at all. You don't have to reach in and put them in, so it's much easier to get them in with this type of vehicle design. And here lies the problem with the 360 degree rotation on that top turret, because when facing rear, it is aimed at your two guys in these seats. Those seats are for manning the command control area, which has lots of molded in detail, lots of instruments and gauges and some control sticks. Maybe a sticker or two could have added some color, but still overall very nice. Under the command control area, there is a gap that exposes some of the support structure for the tank mode. So that is maybe a little sloppy, but there is some engine detail, so that's not bad. Would have been nice though to have a removable engine panel over that. We finish our look at the exterior of the mobile battle bunker by looking at the rear platform. It is in black plastic. It has two foot pegs, so you can add a couple extra guys to ride along. And that is nice. It increases the troop carrying capacity of this vehicle, not a bad feature at all. It also has a tow hitch. The tow hitch is too low to the ground to do you much good when it's in bunker mode, but if you put the treads in tank mode, it's high enough off the ground to tow a towed weapon. In 1990, there were no new towed weapon systems or trailers released, but you could use it to tow something old school, like the 1983 whirlwind. It's time to look at the interior features of the mobile battle bunker now. So let's convert it back to tank mode. We already have the tracks in tank mode, so now all we have to do is open the top, which causes the missile rack to pop up. That is a pretty cool feature, I have to say. Unfortunately, when the top is closed, the missiles are not lined up to fire through the slots. So when it's in bunker mode, the missiles are basically useless. Inside the mobile battle bunker, we have one interior seat on the port side with a black seat clip that has a lot of molded technical detail in that green plastic. Looks pretty good. It has some control sticks for the driver. There are more control sticks over on the other side, but there's no seat on that side. So maybe they intended to have a second seat, but they changed it. You can remove that seat clip like the others, but you have to push up from the bottom, and I don't usually find that necessary. Again, this is a fairly open cockpit design with the top up, so it's easier to get a figure in and out. You can place a figure in the driver seat, just put him in the seat and press him into that seat clip. Then you can even close the top. There's plenty of clearance, and so this guy is the only one that's protected by the armor. As we saw when we converted to tank mode, this black arm with a missile rack popped out, and that has five silver missiles. They are all identical, and they each have a red and white sticker. These missiles peg onto the rack with a dumbbell shaped slot. There's a peg for each of them. They are not identified on the blueprints, but the back of the box calls them anti-armor missiles. The missile rack is off-center. It is shifted to the starboard side of the vehicle, so it does not run into the driver when the top is closed. In tank mode, there's a little more clearance on the front end, but not very much. The tracks are still toward the rear of the vehicle, so they wouldn't be able to climb over terrain. The front of the vehicle is very low. On uneven ground, this would make every bump an insurmountable obstacle. You have tank treads. Put them in a position where they can do their job. The mobile battle bunker can hold five figures, including the two on the back platform. One nice thing is there's enough clearance when it's in tank mode that those two figures can still stand on that back platform. That's nice. This is an acceptable figure complement for a vehicle this size, but there is some wasted space inside the vehicle. Space could have been made for at least one more figure. Can you even use the mobile battle bunker as a bunker? It has these slots, and it looks like you would expect troops to shoot out from there, but all of the interior space is taken up with the driver's seat and the missiles. If you remove all the missiles from the rack, there is enough space inside for another figure, but there are no foot pegs or anything like that, so no way to stand him up or hold him in position. And as you move the top forward and the missile rack gets out of the way, the space for putting the figure in narrows very quickly, so you kind of have to wedge a figure in there, and then maybe you can move them around to get them to fire out one of these windows, but it's not very easy and it doesn't work very well. Looking at how the mobile battle bunker was used in GI Joe Media, it appeared a few times in the Deke animated series. It's shown driving around in bunker mode, so I guess it isn't supposed to be stationary in that mode. The Deke series is derided, which is mostly deserved. One thing I will say in its favor, they had good animation models for the vehicles. They weren't necessarily exactly like the toys, but they looked good in animation. As it was depicted in animation, the mobile battle bunker appeared to have more space on the inside than the toy does. In the GI Joe comic book series published by Marvel Comics, the mobile battle bunker appeared in issues number 109 and 110 during the Benzene War story arc. In that series of issues, many Joes lost their lives. In an attempt to get some help to a group of Joes fleeing Cobra in a captured rage, the mobile battle bunker was dropped from an orbiting space shuttle. That's kind of a crazy way to get a vehicle to the battlefield, but I have to admit when I read that issue, I thought it was kind of awesome. As depicted in those issues, all passengers could fit inside the mobile battle bunker, which isn't really possible with the toy. Unfortunately, the help arrived too late. The Joes suffered more casualties in that attack. That would be the problem with inserting equipment into the field from space. It would be slow and imprecise. When it arrived, Duke commandeered the vehicle and used it to get some payback from the saw viper that killed his comrades. Looking at the mobile battle bunker overall, it has a lot going against it. It doesn't work as a bunker. It doesn't work very well as a tank. In the real world, it would be completely impractical. And for those reasons, I cannot put it in the top tier. I can't put it in the bottom tier either because, despite these reasons, I still like the vehicle. It has a lot of features for a vehicle this size. The top opening feature is similar to the mobile command center. Actually, the feature works better than the mobile command center. The smaller size makes it easier to open and close. And the pop-up missile launcher, that's just fun. The vehicle could definitely be better. But if the toy is fun, then it has satisfied the main reason for its existence. I already know a lot of fans are going to disagree with me on this, but I have to call it as I see it. The mobile battle bunker is solidly built, not a lot of fragile parts. It's not in wild colors, it has a fair number of play features, and it's fun to play with. I feel comfortable putting it in the middle tier. That was my review of the mobile battle bunker I hope you enjoyed it. Special thanks to 777 Hityarwa Lair, hell of a guy. If you like videos and you like GI Joe, please consider giving this video a thumbs up on YouTube, subscribing to the YouTube channel, hitting the notification bell, and sharing this video with your friends. You can find me on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, and I have a website, hcc788.com. 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