 Hello everybody, Hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. It's time for this week's Vintage GI Joe toy review and this time we're going to keep it kind of simple. We're going to look at a small vehicle. We're going to look at the 1984 Cobra Claw powered glider. Just a quick announcement before we get started. There will not be a review video next week because during the time of the week when I would normally shoot that video, I will be in Springfield, Illinois at the annual International GI Joe convention. Some of my viewers may also be at JoeCon, so if you see me there, you are more than welcome to come up and say hi. I won't find that creepy and weird as long as you are not creepy and weird. If you'd like to find me at JoeCon, there's an easy way to pick me out of a crowd. I look like this. Take a good look at this face. It does not get any better in person. I look forward to seeing some of you in Springfield, but in the meantime let's go ahead and get this review started. This is the Cobra Claw. It was first introduced in 1984. It was also sold in 1985. It was discontinued in 1986. We did not get an equivalent replacement in 1986, but in 1987 we got the Cobra Jet Pack which fulfilled the function of the Cobra Claw, but rather than looking like a flying wing, the Cobra Jet Pack looked more like a flying brick. The word Claw, C-L-A-W, was an acronym for Covert Light Aerial Weapon, and I don't know what Hasbro's aversion was to just giving these vehicles cool names. I don't know why they all had to be acronyms, but Cobra Claw is a pretty cool name for this vehicle. It does not have to be an acronym for anything. It was worth one half of a flag point and it did not come with an action figure. I do not have the box for the Cobra Claw, however, oddly enough, in one of the eBay auctions I won last year, along with a bunch of other random junk, I got this. Someone just sort of cut a circle out of the front of the box of the Cobra Claw instead of keeping the box itself, and so we can see the artwork that was on the front of the box, and that's kind of nice, even though we can't see the box itself. You can see the artwork in the way that it was packaged. All GI Joe and Cobra vehicles came with an instruction sheet like this, and on this side it had the directions for putting the toy together, and on the flip side it had a schematic of the vehicle, along with a description of some of the parts, and I'll be using this to describe some of the parts and features on the Claw. Let's look at the Cobra Claw's parts and features, starting with these missiles that it has on either side, on the underside, and the blueprints call these 10 pound H.E.8 Venom missiles. They are both the same, they are identical, and they both have this dumbbell shaped slot here where it pegs in to the corresponding peg on each wing of the Cobra Claw. The Claw has retractable landing gear, and you just push them up like that to retract them. These remind me a lot of the landing gear on the Cobra Rattler jet, in that they essentially are just one thin piece of plastic on here, and you just push them up and down to lower them or retract them. They do have a knob right there that slots into this slot here right next to the missile peg, and that will kind of hold them in place, but you have to put some pressure on them, and I don't really like to do that. These look like they could snap really easily. I would like to see a more robust design in these landing gear. You really do have to put some pressure on them if you want to snap them all the way out, and I do not like to do that. The wheels on the landing gear are plastic, and they do roll. The Claw also has extendable wings, these wing tips, that can be slid in like that. I guess for a lower profile for high speed flight, and then for a lower speed flight where you might need more lift, they extend out like that to give you a longer wingspan. They do not snap into place or anything like that, they just slide in and out freely, and they do sometimes tend to get a little bit loose. It has movable synchronized front flaps, and it has movable ailerons. It's nice that they thought about the control surfaces on this tiny little aircraft, so that's really nice. We have a couple fins on top here, again for flight control, and on this side we have a Cobra logo, and on the other side we have a Z32, but the 32, the numbers have lines through them, and I'm not really sure what the purpose of that is. For some reason on some of these Cobra vehicles that had some kind of number designation, they had other symbols that were sort of stamped through them, and I'm not sure of the significance of that. These protrusions in the back are leg shields to protect the pilot from the jet blast, and there are the jet engines in the back, and of course the jet intakes in the front there. The claws main armament is this top gun here, and this is a 2000 RPM 7.6 millimeter machine gun, and that is close to the 7.62 millimeter NATO rounds. 7.62 NATO is the standard cartridge for small arms among NATO countries. Since 7.62 is a standardized size and would be a readily available ammunition for this gun, I'm not sure why Cobra went with 7.6 so it would not fit the standard NATO round, maybe they just want to be different from NATO. The top gun features a removable cover, and it has some detail under the cover, shows some of the detail of the inner workings of the weapon. We have front landing gear on this bar here, and the wheels also roll, and we have control sticks here on the sides, that's so the pilot can control the craft, and a lot of times this does end up getting lost. The whole Cobra claw construction has a top and a bottom half, and that can sometimes split apart a little bit, and if it separates a little bit this thing will just fall out and get lost. On the other side here it has a DES-78B 750 pound flash fire bomb, and it has a couple really nice Cobra symbols on both sides. It has a hole in the top here, and it pegs into the Cobra claw in a standard GI Joe backpack peg, and of course that is where the pilot goes, so you can't have the pilot pegged into the claw, and have the bomb on it at the same time, and there's a reason for this, but I'll get to it after I demonstrate how to put the pilot onto the Cobra claw. Okay, let's demonstrate how to put the pilot on the Cobra claw, and I'm going to use Storm Shadow, who was also released in 1984, the same year that the claw was, and in the GI Joe comic book, Storm Shadow was often seen using the Cobra claw. There's a backpack on the underside of the claw, and there's a hole in the back of the action figure, and you just peg that into the back of Storm Shadow, and that holds him on fairly well, he doesn't drop off, that actually holds him pretty securely. Then of course you can put his hands on the control handles. Now this is a little bit awkward, you have to swing the arm up, swing the shoulder up at a very awkward angle, so you can angle the hand down to fit on the control handle, and that really does not look too good, he looks like a chicken, he looks like he's doing the chicken dance or something. His shoulders are at a very, very awkward angle, that really doesn't look right. I think that if they had maybe made them a little bit lower, or made them a bit more angled or something like that, it would have made for a more natural pose, but no figure is going to look natural holding the control arms like that. Now the pilot could land on the landing gear like that, but if you think about it, why would you ever want to do that? You would essentially be landing on your face, and that would for one thing be terrifying, plus if you didn't get it just right, you could end up face planting in the dirt at about a hundred miles an hour, you don't want to do that, and the answer to that is no pilot would actually land the Cobra Claw like this, the pilot would land probably on his feet like that, much like a hang glider or a parachute, rather than trying to skid in on the landing gear with his face about five inches from the ground. If these front landing gear kicked up a rock or a piece of gravel, he could put an eye out. If the pilot is going to land the Cobra Claw more like a hang glider than an aircraft, then why do we have the landing gear in the first place? Well, the answer to that is that it's not always going to be piloted. The Cobra Claw appears to be intended as a drone. It can double as a pilotless drone, and that's why we have the bomb. With the bomb on, the Cobra Claw can be a remote piloted drone bomber, and that's a nice secondary use for this toy. As I've stated before, I prefer the more realistic GI Joe and Cobra vehicles, and this Cobra Claw, I mean the idea of a personal flying wing like this just sounds completely unrealistic and really dangerous. So I was prepared to put the Cobra Claw in the pseudo realistic category except for this. You strap a couple of missiles on that thing and it is a Cobra Claw. Based on what modern technology can now do, even though the Cobra Claw would have been futuristic when it came out, I am declaring this a realistic vehicle to make a vehicle like the Cobra Claw work. You really have to think about weight versus firepower. This would have to be a very lightweight craft in order to actually fly. But you also have to think about this top gun here. That's going to add some weight and not just the gun, the ammunition. It's got to store some ammunition in there and ammunition isn't exactly lightweight. It's got two missiles on here. It says these are 10 pound missiles, so that's another 20 pounds added. If it's in the drone mode, it has a bomb on there. It also has to carry fuel somehow and the more weight you add, the more fuel it will take in order to maintain its flight for a reasonable duration. Plus, the more powerful the engines will have to do to maintain the thrust. And so that also adds to the weight of the aircraft. So, I mean, this would apparently fly. Something like this would work in the real world. But you would really have to strip it down and use very lightweight materials. If you're going to add armaments, they have to be very lightweight indeed and minimal to actually keep this thing aloft and flying for any reasonable amount of time. The Cobra Claw being a one man aircraft was probably intended to be a rival of the GI Joe Skyhawk, which was also introduced in 1984 and was a one man VTOL. However, the Skyhawk, as you can see, is a bit bigger than the Claw. It's also it also has a closed cockpit. So it's a little bit more like an aircraft, whereas the Cobra Claw is maybe a little bit more like a jet pack. If you consider the Cobra Claw to be more like a jet pack, then it could be the rival of the Jump Jet Pack, which in 1983 was re-released with an action figure, Grand Slam. However, the Cobra Claw with its control fins, its landing gear and its missiles is more like an aircraft than the Jump Jet Pack is. The Cobra Claw is sort of a transitional fossil in between the Jump Jet Pack and the Skyhawk. It just sort of fits right between the two. You could consider the Cobra Claw to be a powered glider. So if you really want to get fancy, you could use it as a rival to GI Joe's Falcon glider. I do like the look of the Cobra Claw and I like its playability as a toy. The white color scheme, I guess I'm used to it. I don't think the Claw would necessarily look right in any other color scheme, mainly because this is just, you know, what I'm familiar with. But as far as white Cobra vehicles go, there was kind of a trend in the 80s of having these white Cobra vehicles like the Cobra Snake Armor. Of course, the Cobra Claw in 1984. In 1985, that trend continued with the Cobra Flight Bubble. And as far as white goes, unless it's an Arctic vehicle, it really isn't my favorite color for a Cobra vehicle. It's kind of a weak color. I prefer to see black or blue or even red for a Cobra vehicle. And white just isn't my favorite. But like I said, since I'm kind of used to seeing the Cobra Claw in this color, I don't think any other color would look right to me. In the GI Joe comic books by Marvel Comics, the Cobra Claw was introduced with Storm Shadow flying it. And they were both introduced in the legendary Silent Issue. That, of course, is GI Joe issue number 21, written in pencil by Larry Hama. And that is not only an important part of GI Joe history. That's an important part of comic book history in general. In the comic book, Storm Shadow also used the Cobra Claw to help Cobra Commander escape from GI Joe. The Cobra Claw was also used in the GI Joe animated series, and it was used to very good effect in the introduction for the 1987 GI Joe animated movie. That movie had a really nice intro, great animation, great music, and really it was the best part of that movie. They should have just stopped there. They should have just done the intro and then roll credits because of the rest of the movie I could have lived without. That was my review of the Cobra Claw. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you're thinking of getting a Cobra Claw, I hope you found this video informative. 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