 Hello everybody hooded cobra commander 788 here and this is a quick shot and we haven't done one of these for a while and I wanted to look at a figure that a lot of GI Joe fans and collectors consider to be a favorite. It is none other than the 1985 Cobra Elite Trooper the Crimson Guard. Haven't reviewed this yet. This figure is actually kind of difficult to complete at least to get it as complete as I need it for a review. Not so much the figure itself but it has a lot of variants including accessories variants and file card variants. It is almost complete and ready for review. I'm just missing one file card variant. I've got three. I need one more but I do have the figure complete and I have the backpack variant. That is one that's a little bit hard to find so that's ready to go. Looking at this figure you can see why it's a fan favorite. I mean look at all that red and on top of that red you've got black. You've got silver. This looks like a special figure. I think even if you didn't know this was a fan favorite one look at it and there's just an appeal to it and yeah I'm with the majority opinion that this figure is great. It came with a couple accessories. It came with a rifle with a bayonet and it came with a backpack. A couple variations on this backpack. It had the rarer hollow back backpack and then the more common filled in solid backpack and so yeah we've got both of those. I think they ended up filling in the backpack and making it solid because on the figure this hollow back you can actually see that it's hollow because it actually stands up above his shoulders. That doesn't look too good. So this looks perhaps a little bit better and so that's the more common one. This bright red uniform looks more to me like a ceremonial uniform, a dress uniform really than something someone would wear into battle. I've always thought so even as a kid but that red really stands out. Cobra is known to have more of these bright colors rather than the more traditional subdued military uniforms and even among the bright colors in Cobra this stands out with all the red and the black and the silver. There are some variations in the file cards. These two file cards are text variants and this one is just a little bit different because it doesn't have the black border around the portrait that the other file cards do. The one that I'm missing is just the gray back file card. It's pretty common. I just haven't tracked one down and bought one yet. When I finally do a full review on this figure I will show you each of these file cards and show you the differences. For a full review though I think I need to save this for a special occasion because I think this will be a special review. Completing a figure like this that has variants can be expensive and you can find yourself army building the figure without even intending to. The reason for that is that oftentimes you can't necessarily find the variation on its own sold separately a lot of times you find it paired with a figure and so for instance if you want to get the hollow back backpack sometimes you might not be able to find it on its own so you end up buying another figure that includes it. Sometimes though it's more cost effective to do it that way because sometimes the accessories themselves sold on their own can be as expensive or more expensive than the figure itself. That's what happened to me with these file card variants. It can be tricky to track down individually. A lot of sellers won't tell you which variant they have because a lot of sellers don't know because a lot of sellers don't care so you have to know which one you're looking for and just look closely and make sure you get the one you want. And often you don't find the file card for sale on its own you find it paired with a figure so you end up getting another figure. I don't mind army building this way. I don't usually intentionally army build figures but if I do come across multiples of an army builder type figure I will hold on to them because it does look nice to have a small army of crimson guard on a shelf. A lot of collectors do army build though and that drives up the price of these figures so yes it can be an expensive endeavor to complete a crimson guard and I've only recently taken up that expense but it's really close to being ready for a full review. But for now that was just a quick look at the 1985 Cobra Elite Trooper the Crimson Guard I hope you enjoyed it and if you did please do the things I usually like you to do like give the video a thumbs up on YouTube and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Please also look for me on Facebook and Twitter and support the channel on Patreon if you can and I have a website hcc788.com. I'm hard at work producing the next vintage GI Joe toy review I hope to see you all then. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.