 Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here, and we're going to do another vintage vehicle unboxing and assembly. We've done a few of these lately, more than I ever thought I would, but I've just gotten really lucky in the last few months, finding vintage, boxed, and unassembled GI Joe vehicles. So, when I can find these at a good price, I'm going to put these together. I've got my window behind me, it's still daylight out there. It will probably be dark by the time I finish this, so I'm backlit right now, but that will not be the case by the time we finish putting this together. This time we are going to assemble the 1993 Cobra Invader from the Star Brigade subset. Now, I would not do this with a rare vehicle, something from earlier in the line, something that would probably be pretty expensive, but this is pretty common. There's not a great market for these. There are still plenty of them still in the box, so I don't think anything is really lost by taking this out. Plus, I got this at a price that was less than what I would have paid for a loose, complete example. So, I think this is fair to take out and put together. This box is not sealed. It was sealed when I got it, but I opened it up just to look at the contents inside, make sure everything was okay. There was some stuff rattling around in there. Some of the parts have popped off of the plastic tree. That's kind of to be expected with a vehicle this old, especially if it's been moved around and not stored very carefully. So, some of the bits kind of rattle around in there, but everything is there. Some of the parts in here are a bit fragile and it has some gold parts, and those may be susceptible to gold plastic syndrome. This could be the first assembly video where I break apart. I hope not, but if I do, I'll just glue it. I don't care that much. It's the invader. I have the tools that I will need to put it together. I have my clipboard so I can use that to cut things so I don't cut my table. So, let's do it. Let's unbox the invader and put it together. Alright, let's open it up. These 90s vehicles did this thing where they have a tray inside the box, a cardboard tray that has all of the pieces. So, there we go. I've got an instruction sheet, a sticker sheet. We've got a sealed part of canopy, and then we've got, let's see, that's part of the body. There's a gold piece that, honestly, it does feel kind of brittle. Yeah, these pieces, I don't know if they are. I don't know how something feels brittle, but I mean, if you touch these, they kind of do. They feel like they could break pretty easily. So, I'll try to use some caution with those, but they may be hopeless. They may be so brittle that they will snap under any pressure. We'll see. More gold parts, the legs. We've got, it looks like the seat for the cockpit. Missiles, because it does have a spring-loaded missile feature. We've got the spring-firing missile launcher. Some gold parts that are still on the tree. I don't know, it might not be hopeless. Maybe they will hold up. We've got an empty plastic tree that I believe the missiles were attached to, but they've all popped off. And one more with all the wires and hoses and stuff. So, those are the pieces. So, let's look at the instruction sheet and start putting them together. All right, let's look at the instructions. One thing I like about doing these assemblies is being the first person to ever put this toy together. I know that everything's really there. The stickers are all there. No parts have been swapped around. And sometimes when you get vintage toys, you just never know what a previous owner has done to them before you can really look at them and inspect them. So, this at the very least, I know where it's been. I know that everything's there and everything is as it should be. So, let's see. Step one is the cockpit assembly. We've got the hull. We have the pilot seat. And we are supposed to place this in here. Let's see how this goes. Line up front tab on the green cockpit. That's this bit. With arrow inside black hull, then fit side tabs into notches and hull. Okay, there's an arrow on here somewhere. Where is it? There's an arrow. I don't see an arrow. I found it. Sorry, I found it. It's right there. Where was it? Now I've lost it. Where was it? See, I saw the arrow and then I dropped the dang thing and now I can't find it again. Oh, there it is, there it is. Okay, I see it. Okay, so the front goes there in these little tabs. I got it. I got it. Okay, well that's easy enough. That's lined up. Alright, what next? Looks like they want us to assemble the canopy. And the green translucent pieces are in here. So let's open the factory sealed bag and pull these out. Okay. And with canopy locks facing up. Yeah. Fit the posts on the green canopy half onto the rear notches in the bronze colored hull top as shown. Okay, that goes that way. Oh, okay. Alright, I think I get it. So it kind of hooks under like that. Okay. Like so. That's an interesting way to do it. Except you've got to do it right. Put it on the correct side. Oh, yeah. I think this one's going to be easier than that AGP assembly. So that goes like this, I believe. Okay. And let's see. It comes together like so. And locks. Okay. Alright. Make sure the canopy locks line up. The canopy locks appear to line up. Yes, they do. Okay. So, next. Now we have to attempt to put this on. Let's see how does it go. We have some tabs there that that's supposed to line up with. Now this could be the first test of this plastic to see whether or not it's going to go on without snapping. Because I'm going to have to put a little bit of pressure on it. And if it's brittle, it could snap. So let's see. So far so good. Alright. One more tab to fit in. Come on now. It's trying. But it's not quite there. Oh, it's popping out. These canopies get in the way and I don't like them. They don't really even cover the whole top of the vehicle. It's not a very good canopy design if you ask me. And I know you didn't ask me, but I told you anyway. I have to assume the Pogo was just as much of a pain in the butt to assemble. These parts are all the same as the Pogo just in different colors. But it's done. It's assembled. And the canopy is staying on and it functions as it should. But that was not fun. Alright. What's the next part? Okay. It looks like we are supposed to take this piece and on it place this gun and these nobles. So I got to cut these off. This will be the first parts that I cut off of the plastic tree. Alright. This vehicle is new to me. Of course I was out of GI Joe long before 1993. And I think the Pogo was new to me as an adult collector too. In 87, that was kind of the tail end of my GI Joe collecting. We did still stick around for a little while. But I never got the Pogo. I just thought it was a goofy looking thing. So at that point, I wasn't trying to get everything. I was just getting the stuff that I liked. And I was doing a lot of customization at the time. So if I didn't like a figure or a vehicle, I just skipped it. Before that though, I really was trying to get everything. And I didn't get everything but I got a lot of it. And between me and my brother and our friend Sam, that was a friend of ours in our neighborhood, we had nearly everything from 1982 up to... I think 1986 was the last year we were really trying to collect everything related to GI Joe. We had almost everything except for the mail away stuff. We never got the mail away offers. None of us did. None of the kids in our neighborhood really sent away for the mail away stuff and I'm not really sure why. Maybe we just needed that immediate gratification of getting the toys in the store, I don't know. But at any rate, we did miss out on those. But yeah, we got loads of stuff. Most of the vehicles. Our friend Sam, he had a lot of the really big stuff. He had the USS flag, he had the Terror Drone. My brother and I had a lot of the medium and smaller vehicles and a ton of figures. Alright, that's all together. The gun, the thruster, nozzles, everything assembled there. So now, it looks like we have to snap this onto here. It doesn't say that it goes any particular way. But yeah, we'll just press it on. Yeah, oh, that was easy. Hey, that was easy. Awesome, something was easy. Great. So my brother, Eric, is almost two years younger than me. Not quite, but close. And in our neighborhood, we had a friend named Sam. He was about half a block away down the street. And during the summer times, we were at his house or he was over at our house every day. Let me make sure I do this right. And we had some fantastic GI Joe battles. We would put all of our toys together and just have these huge sprawling battles usually in the backyard, sometimes indoors. Yeah, that worked. Hey, and it didn't... Well, no, I take that back. Didn't work. Let's see, how is this supposed to go? Let's see. Alright, that slide's up there. Alright, now I have had to put the legs on the pogo before and it sucks. It's not a good... It's not well engineered. It just isn't. I'm sorry, whatever Hasbro guy designed this thing, but it sucks. And I'm really worried about breaking the tabs on this thing, trying to put this on. There's one. Alright, we got two more to go. So anyway, yeah, we would create these scenarios and play situations that we would put our Joe's in. And they tended to be really big. And once he got the USS flag, most of our missions tended to start out there. So we'd start out on the flag and we'd load up the killer whale and the Tomahawk and APC and just load up figures and we'd send them out on a mission. A mission during the summertime was often in the backyard. Sam's backyard since he had the flag. And then we'd send them out and they'd set up a base in some jungle where they were having to either fend off Cobra or invade a Cobra stronghold. Come on. Yeah, almost, I think we almost got it. Close, close, close. And these missions would tend to last usually several days until everything had been blown up or we had accomplished whatever objective we set out to do. Alright, those legs are on, good. And then next day we'd come up with something else. Okay, I've got to take some more parts off of the plastic trees. Let's see what it calls, what does it call for? It calls for, let's see, this big hose and the antenna, which is still on here, let's go ahead and cut that off. And I haven't seen Sam since we moved out of that neighborhood when I was about, I want to say, 14 years old and of course we were all kind of out of GI Joe by then. Although I did continue to read the comic books for a while after I had given up the toys, but ever since we moved I have not seen Sam and I can't seem to find him anywhere on social media. I don't know what happened to the guy. I'd love to catch up with him, see how he's doing. Maybe he would be surprised that I have a GI Joe channel on YouTube. Maybe not. But I think it would be really awesome to catch up with him. So that's one regret I have is not keeping in touch with Sam. Of course at the time in the era before social media, you couldn't just add somebody on Facebook, you could get a phone number but then people move and their phone numbers change. You lose phone numbers. So yeah, that kind of thing happens. All right, now how does this work? This connects to that, I see, I think I see. Okay, this goes here, all right, here and here. One thing that GI Joe vehicles did that I think is remarkable now is give us a lot of colors without paint. They rarely had paint applications on the vehicles. There are a few that they did, and the few that did were pretty cool, but most of them they just used different colored plastic for different parts and just by using different colored plastic they were able to really give us a lot of cool colors. And despite having no paint applications, they tended not to be too monochrome. It says to put the missiles on, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. Even though I think that's really kind of too early in the assembly stage to put the missiles on, it says to do it so I'm following the instructions. Now I've got to put the antenna on too. All right, these missiles work with the spring-loaded missile launcher. Let's see, there's an extra missile and I guess this one goes in the launcher, so we'll put the launcher on in a minute. Now we are supposed to put the antenna on. There's the antenna. And where was the slot for it? I just saw it. Where was it? I was just looking at it. There it is. Slot for the antenna. But yeah, G.I. Joe was a big part of our lives, especially in the summertime when we can get outdoors and we were just outdoors all the time. And our backyards became jungles. They became the whole countries that Cobra would invade. G.I. Joe would have to come to the rescue. And despite doing a lot of different play storylines, there were a few that we really didn't do. I didn't really do much with the spies, like chuckles. Never had a whole lot of use for chuckles. And the medics, like Doc, which I really like Doc now, but at the time just didn't use them. If I could travel back in time, I might suggest to myself some alternatives that might have been fun. But you know one thing that we never did, I don't think we ever did, was recreate scenes from the cartoon or comic book. And we watched the cartoon and we read the comic books, but we didn't see those as something to recreate. We just kind of made our own sort of alternate universe with the things that we wanted to happen and the characters that we cared about. But the comic book especially was a big influence on us because it had that kind of real military feel to it. It used military terminology. And man, we just ate that up. I mean, adding kind of a pseudo-realistic military flavor to our playtime just made it seem more real. And yeah, we loved that a lot. Okay, we've got, let's see. We've got three small ones and of these little green wires and one big one. And I've got to make sure these go in correctly. Insert curved end of small green propulsion tube into a hole on the left side of one landing leg. Bend tube and insert straight in into the hole as shown. Repeat with remaining small green tubes and landing legs. Okay, according to the instruction sheet, these green cords go into the holes and kind of in the knee of the legs. But man, I'll be dinged if they don't want to go. Get in there. I don't want to break the thing, but it's just got to go. It's got to go in. Yeah, I've looked at the instructions multiple times to confirm that this is the way I'm supposed to go and that is the way it's supposed to go. But the holes that they have it, they're showing it being placed in, too small. Okay, I got it in. I got it in. It was not easy. I don't like this. This is more frustrating than the HEP assembly. I don't like this at all. All right. I mean, it instructs you to bend the plastic, which to me doesn't seem like a great plan. I wouldn't like to do this on a new toy, let alone a vintage toy. Okay, that one's in. I'm having to use the needle nose pliers to get these wires in and I know it's not showing up very well on camera. I'm sorry, these wires are tiny. And plus I have to do it facing me. But that's just how it is. Let's see here. How is that? Okay, all right. Don't worry about it. Getting ahead of myself. This one goes in here. It fits easily enough into the hole. There. But getting it into the leg, as the instructions show, it's not easy at all. So it's, come on, come on. That's about done it. But yeah, that's a lot more pressure than I want to put on this toy. I don't like that one bit. Okay, one more. One more. Okay, this one, it just says to put it in the remaining hole, holes on the hole. So that's there. And then it'll have to go all the way around to this side and plug in there. It seems a bit of a stretch. These missiles are in the way. It instructs you to put the missiles on in step five, or at least some of the missiles. And this is too early, because they're in the way. If I can do this. Okay, all right. It's done. Wow. That was a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Now let's put the parts back on that fell off or had to take off. There's the tab for the antenna missiles. Okay, now we have to put the spring-loaded launcher on. Let's see. Fit green missile launcher into landing leg as shown. All the legs are the same. So I guess it doesn't matter which one you put it in. Which one do I want to put it in? Let's see. Let's put it on one. Let's put it on this one here. There. And then there's the missile that goes into it. Let's go ahead and put this in. There. Snaps in. Let's test fire it. There. Ooh, yeah. All right. That worked. Okay, now at last it's time to put the stickers on. I think this assembly is taking longer than the others. It's just not an easy vehicle to put together. And I'm sorry if that's boring for you, but I never know how these things are going to go until I get started. Okay. So there are the stickers. Let's orient this as it's shown. There is a rescue sticker with an arrow that actually goes on the glass canopy. Is that real? Okay, yes, real deal. Okay, let's pull this off. There are two of them. Let's see. But there's a ridge on that canopy, and it seems like a sticker should not go over that ridge. So I'm going to put it like this. It seems the right way to do it. These are paper stickers, not vinyl stickers, not my preference. Let's see. And then where does that go? Okay, we've got multiple of these Cobra Moon Strike stickers. And one of them is supposed to go on the canopy. Oh, no, no, no. It goes on here. Okay, all right. That makes more sense. So let's line it up. I've got to say I don't love it. I'll have plenty of comments about this vehicle when I review it. I don't intend to review it while I'm assembling it. This is supposed to just be an assembly video, but I can't help but notice certain things while I'm putting it together. One thing I have to notice is that this thing takes a lot of effort for quite a silly vehicle. I'll tell you, these paper stickers are not very forgiving if you don't lay them right the first time. Okay, all right. And one of those Cobra Moon Strike. So I guess this is allegedly Cobra's attacking the moon, which is fine, whatever. You know, if you're going to buy into the space stuff, you might as well buy into Cobra attacking the moon with a bunch of pogos. Okay, and then that one. Okay, we've got, what is this? It's just some kind of warning sticker that goes somewhere. Goes. Goes like right under. It goes there. These are stickers that are going on a vehicle that was designed for an entirely different set of stickers. So may not necessarily work very well. So, I mean, now you can see, sorry, I know you can't see these as I'm assembling them, so I apologize for that. So I got to say I have not greatly enjoyed this particular assembly. Now, I don't think the fun is totally worn out of them. If I were assembling a better vehicle, I think I would still enjoy it, but it's the Invader. Star Brigade. It's Cobra. It's goofy. It's bizarre. It's a reissue of a vehicle that was already pretty strange the first time around. And they found ways to make it even stranger. All right. Oh, I missed, did I miss something? I think I did. That's okay. Go back to it. Come on. Trying to get these stickers off without scratching the paper since they're not final stickers. It was there. So anyway, I always hoped that someday Sam would see one of these vehicles and recognize me and say hello. It hasn't happened yet, but you know, someday it could happen. By golly, there is one that's supposed to go on the canopy and that just doesn't look right. Okay. All right. One thing at a time. One thing at a time. Let's take off this vectored pod unit sticker. These stickers don't even want to come off the sticker sheet very well. I'm marring the stickers trying to get them off. I don't like that. There's been much about this assembly that I've not enjoyed, so I'm sorry about that. On next. Okay. The other rescue sticker, which looks to me like it should go right there. These rescue arrows are pointed at the connector for the canopy, which kind of makes sense. Okay. And this is going to go like this. Okay. I've got a couple stickers left over and I've got to figure out where they go. And I only see where one of them goes. It's like an extra sticker on here. All right. This one allegedly goes on the canopy. It looks like they want you to put one of these Cobra Moon Strike stickers directly on the clear canopy, but I'm just not going to do that. I don't like the look of that. I ain't going to do it. This one. I'm going to dismiss a lot of the way. It's going to go here. And I don't care if it's right. It looks better. It looks better than the way they're instructing it. So I'm doing it the way I think it should be done. But there's an extra sticker. I swear there's no place to put this. Well, I don't want to leave an extra sticker on the sticker sheet. It's one of these vectored pod unit stickers. And I'm going to put it there. Look. Look. See? Look at this. Look at this. It shows one, two of the vectored pod unit stickers on the instructions. But there are three on the sticker sheet. All right. That's okay. I'm going to just blame 1993. It's 1993's fault. 90's, it's all your fault. I'm putting it here because that seems like where it's supposed to go. All right. There. Now let's put this stuff back on that I had to take off. Put stickers on. And that's it. It's complete, such as it is, the 1993 Cobra Invader. Which is basically just the Pogo in different colors and with a spring loaded missile launcher. Yeah. There it is. That was the assembly of the Star Brigade Invader. See? It's dark out now. So I don't plan to get any more vehicles like this in the near future that I would feel comfortable taking out of the box and assembling. Not something I normally do. I just got kind of lucky the last few months and so we've done a few of these. But I don't know when I will do this again. But if I do it again, I'm trying to find something better than the Invader. But thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this unboxing and assembly video more than I did. This one was a lot more headache than a vehicle like this is worth quite frankly. And now I kind of wish I had just bought this thing loose and complete. But at least I do have the benefit of knowing that it's been assembled correctly by me. All the pieces are there, unbroken. The stickers are all applied as they're supposed to. So it's about as mint as you can get for a review of it. I have no plans to review this in the near future. But I will be back soon with more vintage GI Joe toy reviews. I hope to see you then. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.