 Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. It's time for another vintage G.I. Joe toy review and we are going to do a toy review in this video but a large part of this video is going to be a rant so I'm warning you now. We're going to look at the 1987 G.I. Joe 3 pack Cobra Law. In last week's video we looked at the 1986 Cobra Emperor Serpentor and as I said in that video that character really represented the line for how much fantasy I was willing to accept in the G.I. Joe universe. The characters we're going to look at this time not only crossed that line they blew by that line at Mach 3. I've read the message boards and I've read the Facebook discussion groups and I know there are some of you out there that just love Cobra Law and love Serpentor and if that's you that's great. I don't want to change your mind if you found something in this world that you enjoy fantastic keep it but I'm warning you right now this video is about my opinion and it may strongly disagree with yours so maybe you accepted all the weird stuff in G.I. Joe they introduced in the later years maybe none of that stuff crossed any line for you you thought it was all great and if that's the case that's fantastic but every fan still has a line even if it's only a theoretical line every fan has a line at which if it's crossed they're going to say no this doesn't fit in this group so even if you accepted all the weird stuff they introduced in later G.I. Joe the aliens the spaceships and all of that I'll just bet if Hasbro had presented a G.I. Joe Smurfs crossover every single one of you probably would have said no that doesn't make any sense and I don't like it so wherever you draw your line which is probably somewhere short of G.I. Joe versus Smurfs I respect that I completely respect your line and your right to draw your line wherever you choose it's a free country this video however is about my line so if you love Cobra Law and you can't stand to watch a video of someone who strongly disagrees you might want to stop this video now no more warnings after this we're moving forward we've got a lot to say about Cobra Law so let's look at the toys here they are this is Cobra Law they were sold in 1987 and 1988 as a three-pack it included all three of these figures this is Galobulus the Cobra Law leader this is Nemesis enforcer he's sort of like a second-in-command I guess he is the Will Riker to Galobulus's Captain Picard or perhaps he is the Igor to his Frankenstein and then we have the Royal Guard and they were like Cobra Law troopers let's look at some accessories Galobulus came with a weird little laser pistol that I don't have and I don't care Nemesis enforcer came with bat wings because he's a vampire or something they're kind of small bat wings not big enough to help him actually fly you can just imagine them as larger wings I guess they pegged into his back he also came with a set of tentacles which I don't have and I don't care these bat wings are made out of kind of a rubbery material and I bet if you tried really hard you could rip them right in half the Royal Guard came with this big size thing odd shaped bladed weapon he also came with a pistol and an antenna that stuck on the side of his head I don't have either of those and I don't care let's look at me individually now starting with Galobulus and wow he has an unusual piece of anatomy this top part of the figure is like a normal action figure it's put together and articulated like any other normal GI Joe action figure the bottom half however is well this long female pleasuring device you can see it is ribbed for her pleasure it is a bendy snake tail and it does bend somewhat it actually doesn't bend as much as you'd want it to it does not bend enough to like coil around and create a stand for the action figure so you can kind of stand up on a snake leg so it really kind of is more of an impediment than an awesome feature how you are supposed to stand this figure up I'm not sure I guess you can kind of do it that way behold the mighty Galobulus pay no attention to the highly suggestive tail that is pointing directly at you the sculpting has some detail to it you can see he has this kind of red thing that goes around his head and covers an eye looks like a pretty grotesque eyeball there and he has some veins on the top of his head looks kind of like an old school Hollywood horror monster he has this red body armor which is file card says is actually crustaceans these are living creatures that he's using as body armor and they are bred for their super strong shells so this is supposed to protect him it looks extremely ridiculous we've got like some details of crab legs on here it looks like you know he stumbled into the buffet at Red Lobster alright so just imagining this is extremely strong armor made up of crustaceans and suppose this really works alright let's just imagine that this armor makes sense even if this armor is great he missed a few spots so he's gone through the trouble of creating this living armor but he's left a lot of his body parts completely vulnerable his right arm continues the red crustacean armor theme with these armor plates and up here I can't tell if this is just the paint worn off or if this is an unpainted detail but it looks unpainted and it looks terrible he's got whatever that is I don't really care what it is this figure has a crack in the torso and I do not care and his left arm for some reason is green with red veins and I don't know why and I don't care okay let's look at Nemesis and Forcer and this guy is super purple and he's got a lot of textured pattern all over his body the figure itself is really not all that detailed in place of detail we have texture his whole body has this sort of grainy texture all over it really from head to toe having the texture is kind of cool we didn't normally get this sort of texture on regular action figures but it doesn't really correspond to a more detailed action figure we have a little bit of detail we have this whatever it is and I don't know maybe this is more crustacean armor I don't know on his legs we have what looked like they should be either holsters or sheaths for some kind of weapons but when I checked the weapons and accessories that he came with I didn't see anything that would fit these so what these are for I don't really know on his elbows we have these spikes these spikes come out of his elbows and that's kind of cool that might have been a nice feature on a better action figure so that's not bad then he has these shoulder pads that look like they should be part of the shirt that he's wearing they look like they're armored and they have that same texture pattern but they are unpainted this is an unpainted detail and honestly this looks terrible unpainted details are a problem on any figure but on a figure like this where they're trying to introduce a very outlandish fantasy element to G.I. Joe this figure all of these figures really need to be done well and this is not done well this is it just looks bad it looks cheap look at this his zipper it's under a big W that's a movie reference all you young kids can Google it that's Nemesis enforcer now let's look at the Royal Guard he is a bug face and he has this weird asymmetrical pattern on his head he has this collar on here doesn't hinder the head movement all that much if you care about that sort of thing some really high shoulder pads that's really bizarre-looking got more red armor maybe this is more crustaceans I don't know he's got gray pants he also has some pads on his elbows but these pads are just bizarre-looking the shape looks more like the armrest on your grandma's old chair elbow pads should be cool that should be a really cool feature but they managed to find a way to make them uncool he's wearing a gray belt and keep in mind that according to the file cards all of Cobra Laws technology is based on living organisms so apparently this belt and his clothes this is not like modern technology this is supposed to all be based on living organisms even though it looks like he's wearing a belt he picked up from Target he has some barnacles on his legs and he has some red boots and there you go that is the Royal Guard let's take a look at the file cards that also came with the figures they each had one let's look at them quickly here's Galobulus's file card read that quickly there's nemesis enforcers file card you got that and there's Royal Guard that's his file card there we go I have to confess though these file cards are not badly written I don't know who wrote them but whoever did really made an effort to try to make them sound interesting and cool it doesn't work it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense but somebody really did try to make chicken salad out of something that wasn't chicken salad all of these characters were introduced in the much-maligned 1987 G.I. Joe animated movie and according to that movie Cobra Law facilitated the creation of the Cobra Emperor Serpentor so they took Serpentor a character I only barely accepted as a part of G.I. Joe and was just this side of nonsense and decided that no it needed to be complete nonsense so they added this Cobra Law element to it which was totally unnecessary and totally screwed up a barely acceptable character Cobra Law was not included in the origin story of Serpentor and the G.I. Joe comic books because Cobra Law was not in the G.I. Joe comic books because the comic books at least tried a little bit to make some sense so why doesn't Cobra Law fit in G.I. Joe to understand that you really have to look at the cultural context in which G.I. Joe was introduced the new G.I. Joe line was introduced in 1982 this is the early 80s and America was kind of coming out of the hangover that was the 70s of the Vietnam War had really kind of scarred the national psyche and by the 1980s Americans were really ready to feel better about themselves they wanted to feel strong again they wanted to feel powerful I wanted to feel righteous and just so that was the 1980s we were entering into a new phase of the Cold War it was an era in which we felt like we had the upper hand and a lot of our media and our toys for children reflected that the movies were great because in the movies America could always win these movies made us feel better about ourselves and made us feel powerful a lot of the movies were about the Vietnam War Hollywood fought the Vietnam War for years after it ended and you know what in the movies we tended to win more often than we lost so along comes G.I. Joe in 1982 and it really feeds on that national mood I honestly think if G.I. Joe had come along a little bit earlier or maybe even a little bit later it would not have been nearly as successful as it was but it hit at exactly the right time and it gave us a lot of toys that were symbols of American might we got Jeeps we got tanks we got jets but we didn't just get the toys we got something more one thing that sets the toy lines of the 1980s apart is that they didn't just give us pieces of plastic they gave us entire universes a lot of them had media tie-ins so we didn't just get the toys we got universes we got characters that we had grown to know and care about through cartoons and comic books so this is the world in which I was introduced to G.I. Joe I used to get these things with with the pages books I had these books that I would look things up in I had an encyclopedia of world military weapons whenever I would get a new G.I. Joe toy he had a new gun I'd look it up I'd try to find out what real world thing was this representing I loved it it was educational and it built this fantasy that was very appealing to me because the fantasy drew upon things that I was seeing in the real world it made the fantasy feel more real so I did a figure like grunt and I'd see okay he comes with an m16 rifle so I'd look that up in a book and I'd see okay this looks like a 20-round magazine he's only gonna have a couple seconds of sustained automatic fire so I'm gonna have him firing this weapon on semi-automatic so he doesn't run out of ammunition too soon there are no bullets it's just a piece of plastic I could have pretended that he had infinity bullets but that's just not how I played I wanted to integrate some real-world elements into my playtime and that enhanced the enjoyment for me there are always right from the very beginning science fiction elements in G.I. Joe but they were never so far out there that I couldn't sort of just kind of bring them home and make them a part of the G.I. Joe that I loved so that's the kind of G.I. Joe fan that I was and everything was pretty good between me and G.I. Joe up through 1986 when things started to get a little bit weird they introduced the cobra emperor Serpentor which was a character I didn't really like I didn't think he fit within G.I. Joe but I reluctantly accepted him but then in 1987 the G.I. Joe animated movie hit my memory of that time is a little bit fuzzy but the best I can kind of reconstruct it is I don't think I saw the animated movie in 1987 because I remember after seeing the animated movie I had a very immediate strong negative reaction and I essentially stopped buying G.I. Joe figures but I know that I had some 1988 G.I. Joe figures in my collection so I think I saw the 87 movie in 1988 I may have rented the tape or I may have seen it on TV I can't really remember the first time I saw it but I think it was in 1988 always had an uneasy relationship with G.I. Joe in the animated form it seemed like the G.I. Joe cartoon series was written for younger kids or maybe not younger kids but definitely kids who had a different vision of G.I. Joe than I did definitely not for the type of fan that I was the G.I. Joe comic book I think more closely resembled what I envisioned for G.I. Joe and I understood that you couldn't show a lot of violence and death and injury on children's television and it's not that I wanted to see a bunch of violence on TV it's not that but even at that age I understood that war has a human cost so when you're showing me these laser battles with people shooting laser guns all over the place and nobody ever gets hit and nobody ever gets hurt I knew you were bullshitting me but in a movie they're not constrained by that so I was hoping that in the G.I. Joe animated movie we would get a form of G.I. Joe that's animated but that's more honest and more mature instead what we got was snake people snake people or bug people or flying bat people I'm not really sure what they were supposed to be the concept is a little bit on incoherent but some kind of mutants from prehistory there were some good moments in the G.I. Joe animated movie and I don't want to imply that there weren't there were absolutely some good moments in that movie but the good moments are far outweighed by things that don't make any sense things that are just weird and things that that trash everything about G.I. Joe that they had been building up over the last several years they just took it in a completely different direction to me it seems like some executive somewhere looked at he man and saw that hey he man is making a lot of money kids are buying a lot of he man so instead of coming up with their own sort of knock off of he man or something like that they shoehorned these he man villains into G.I. Joe one of the worst things about that movie is what it did to Cobra commander when I was a kid and my friends who are not G.I. Joe fans saw Cobra commander in the cartoon or the toy or whatever they always wanted to know is he a snake man does he have a snake face behind that mask and I would always explain no he's not a snake man he's a regular person and that is something that's a lot scarier snake people are not real that's therefore not all that scary but what Cobra commander represented was something more tangible something that was evil in the real world at the time we were playing with G.I. Joe there were real terrorists hiding behind masks and doing horrific things high hijacking jets and blowing things up and so what Cobra commander represented was something more real and more terrifying than any snake man so what did the animated movie do it turned him into a snake man and then it turned him into an actual snake so on the one hand the movie completely trashed everything I liked about G.I. Joe and then it gave us Cobra law which was a purely fantasy element it was this ancient civilization of mutant people things and their society their technology was completely built on living organisms they didn't like human technology even though they were trying to steal a piece of human technology to carry out their nefarious plans which doesn't make any sense the whole thing's just nonsense I could talk more about what was good about the G.I. Joe animated movie more but that's not what this video was about when I first saw the movie I was crushed it wasn't just that the movie was not written for the type of fan that I was it almost seemed like it was written to reject the type of fan that I was it's almost like they intentionally wrote this thing to be repulsive to the type of fan that I was it's like they were trying to get rid of me when I saw the G.I. Joe animated movie I got one clear message and that message was this so G.I. Joe wasn't for me anymore they took it in a completely different direction maybe the people at Hasbro figured that fans like me we're getting a little bit too old we weren't buying enough toys so they were just gonna completely gear it in a totally different direction to attract different types of kids and as far as they were concerned I could just go jump in the lake I don't know if that's the message they were trying to send but that's the message I received and I received it loud and clear there's an interview out there on the internet of Buzz Dickson who was involved in producing and writing the G.I. Joe animated series in which he essentially disclaims the creation of Serpentor and Cobra Law the decision to take G.I. Joe in that direction came from Hasbro came from Hasbro executives the name Cobra Law was supposed to be a placeholder name and it was a takeoff of Shangri-La they were supposed to come up with a better name for it before the movie actually you know reached production but Hasbro decided they love the name so we're sticking with it we're gonna call it Cobra Law even though it's a ridiculous sounding name and that of course led to the battle cry that Cobra Law used in the movie I do not blame the creators for any of this the way G.I. Joe was developed there was one group of people that designed the characters and then there was a separate group of people that created the universes that these characters existed in in the cartoon and the comic book and then there was yet a third group of people the marketers at Hasbro that decided what was going to be in and what was going to be out now throughout the history of G.I. Joe in the 1980s most of the time those relationships worked really well to produce a really great product that kids loved but sometimes the ideas just did not mesh I want to be clear I don't just mean Cobra Law doesn't fit very well in the G.I. Joe universe it's not a very good concept all on its own it's incoherent the characters look a little bit goofy I would not have been interested in it even if it hadn't been shoehorned into G.I. Joe but a lot of kids liked it and that doesn't make it good a lot of people like those real housewives shows that doesn't make them good a lot of kids liking it doesn't make the concept anymore coherent it doesn't fix the unpainted details on the action figures it doesn't improve anything that's bad about them it just means a lot of people like something that wasn't very good that happens every day and if you liked it that's fine you don't even have to have a reason for liking it you can just like it because you like it you can like Nemesis enforcer because your favorite color is purple it doesn't matter you just like what you like and that's fine but one thing that really bugs me is all the excuses I hear for Cobra Law at least they were trying something new to give them a break trying something new you get no points for trying something new zero points the fact that it's new doesn't make it good every idea whether good or bad has been new at some point so you can't judge ideas based on that you have to judge ideas on their own merits G.I. Joe is not a documentary it doesn't have to be realistic it didn't have to be perfectly real lighten up well of course it doesn't have to be perfectly real in fact if you think about it it's entirely a fantasy even the somewhat realistic military stuff isn't completely realistic it's not how the military really works it's all a fantasy that's not the point the point is the fantasy world that was built for G.I. Joe looked very much like the real world so yes there were these fantasy elements from G.I. Joe but the characters walked around a world that looked very much like ours so when you throw in this entirely fantasy element that's totally out of the blue totally doesn't match anything else it does not enhance the fantasy it breaks it and it's not that I didn't like science fiction and fantasy I liked a lot of these other toy lines like Star Wars and Transformers and all of these and those each had their own fantasy world built for them so for instance if you were watching Star Wars and in the background you saw an F-14 fighter jet even if Star Wars is awesome even if the F-14 fighter jet is awesome if you put those things together it totally breaks the fantasy it pulls you right out of that fantasy world like if you had tried to put Smurfs in G.I. Joe it doesn't fit and neither does Cobra Law it's it's a children's toy got to look at it from a child's perspective it's for the children children children's toy children when this stuff came out I was one of the children and as a child I was a lot less merciful on these toys than I am now I'm all sunshine and rainbows now compared to how I saw these toys at the time I was really bitter at the time I'm not bitter anymore can't you tell I hate how this excuse is trotted out to explain away crap toys I don't know of any kid that likes playing with crap toys so I gave you a snake man that's half a snake and his tail is bendy but not enough so you can't stand him up you can't call him around it's a crap toy so looking at it from a child's perspective does not make a crap toy any better well it is shit but kids like playing with shit so it's for the kids when I was thinking about what I was going to put in this video there was one question that kind of stumped me and that is why did it matter to me the G.I. Joe animated series never defined the G.I. Joe universe for me the comic book did the G.I. Joe animated series always had weird things in it that I just thought were dumb and I just kind of ignored so why couldn't I ignore Cobra Law just like I ignore ignored everything else in the G.I. Joe cartoon the best answer I could come up with is by the time I saw this movie in 1988 I would have been 12 years old and that's getting a little bit old to be buying toys a lot of my friends had transitioned from buying and playing with toys to starting to be interested in girls and sports and things like that and I was still buying G.I. Joe toys because I really liked them at that age you're starting to get concerned about being cool and G.I. Joe just isn't cool anymore but I could still point to the fact that G.I. Joe was a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the other toys and things out there at the time for kids so there was still that there was still something more to G.I. Joe than just a children's toy but then when I saw this movie and when I saw what they did to G.I. Joe and when I knew that when my friends saw this I knew what they would think about it it was very disheartening I knew I couldn't make that claim anymore G.I. Joe was just for children what that meant for me is I was officially too old for this stuff the phase of my childhood in which I spent countless hours building these fantasy universes with these toys and watching cartoons and playing that was coming to an end and I knew it G.I. Joe was the last thing that I gave up from my early childhood but it was time for G.I. Joe to go it was time for me to transition into the teenage years and that was not an easy transition for me for other reasons not because of G.I. Joe but that break from G.I. Joe was a symbolic one it sticks with me in my mind as the beginning of not a very easy phase in my life so despite the fact that I got years of enjoyment out of G.I. Joe my last experience with G.I. Joe was a very negative one when I look at yojo.com and I look at which figures came out which years you can I can really tell when I watched that movie because anything that came out after I saw that movie in 1988 I didn't have any of it I didn't want any of it no that's not exactly true that's not exactly true there was one thing that I know I got from the 1989 G.I. Joe series and that was version two of rock and roll and I got it for nostalgic purposes I liked rock and roll way back in 1982 and they gave us a pretty cool update of rock and roll and I thought that was pretty neat I enjoyed that I got it for nostalgic purposes but not to play with it wasn't playing with toys at the time I just wanted to own rock and roll one more time that makes me wonder what might have happened if there hadn't been a Kogrelaw if there had not been a G.I. Joe animated movie or if it had been done differently if it had been geared more toward the type of fan that I was I know there are some G.I. Joe collectors that didn't stop collecting as a child and then like I did later pick it up again as an adult they made the transition from collecting as a child for the purpose of playing to collecting as a young adult and as an adult for the purpose of owning and collecting and displaying and I may have made that transition I was on that trajectory I was still enjoying these toys at the time I saw this movie so I might have made that transition it wasn't so much me that left G.I. Joe it was G.I. Joe that left me it was G.I. Joe that filed for divorce I just had to accept it when I got back into collecting as an adult I was going through a very difficult time in my life and I was looking for something that represented an earlier time when I was completely happy I was wanting to go back to a time in my life when I didn't have anything to worry about when life was good and G.I. Joe is what fit that bill nothing else really even came close transformers Star Wars weren't even considered it had to be G.I. Joe that's how important G.I. Joe was to my childhood but we have to look at all things with our eyes open nothing no matter how good it is is ever purely good there are good and bad things about everything and so I wanted to make this video to talk about something that I didn't love about G.I. Joe I might even say I hated it about G.I. Joe because I thought it needed to be said but and because I wanted to be honest about my feelings regarding this particular aspect of my hobby so now that I've said my piece I think it's time to go to something else I think it's time to look at something that I loved about G.I. Joe let's get back to the fun and we're gonna do that in next week's video I hope you'll join me I'll see you then thousand years ago the glory of Cobra la dominated this planet but an age of ice destroyed much of what we had built and with it began the time of the barbarians surprisingly they evolved if you ask me some of them did not evolve and gradually they master the technology