 Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here and I'm back with another vintage GI Joe toy review. In my last video I said I wanted to do something bigger, well here it is, this is bigger. It's so big in fact that I only barely have room on my table to fit it in the frame of the camera. This is the 1983 GI Joe Combat Jet The Sky Striker. This is probably the most famous of all of the GI Joe vehicles. It was featured in all of GI Joe media. It had some really cool commercials for the toy. And if you know anything about GI Joe you probably know about this jet. As you might have noticed this is not perfect, there's some wear on some of the stickers and there's at least one broken part on this. I might have waited until I had a better example before doing this review video but I've wanted to review this for a long time so I just want to do it, I'm ready to do it now so please excuse the fact that it's not perfect. I think it's good enough to do this review and give you a good idea of what to expect from this toy. The box for the Sky Striker says this is an XP-14F Combat Jet. It was first available in 1983, it was also available in 1984 and 1985. It was discontinued in 1986 when it was replaced by the Conquest X-30 which was a combat jet like this but it was much smaller and it was a one-seater. The Sky Striker was worth five flag points and it came with a pilot, Ace. The Sky Striker is heavily based on the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, in fact so heavily based that it's nearly identical to the F-14 Tomcat. The F-14 was a US Navy aircraft that was in service from 1974 all the way to 2006. Now the F-14 was a Navy jet but in the GI Joe version it's an Air Force jet and Ace is an Air Force pilot. Most famously the F-14 was featured in the movie Top Gun with Tom Cruise but the Sky Striker predates the Top Gun movie by several years. Let's look at the parts and features of the Sky Striker starting with the canopy and unfortunately this is where I have to admit that my canopy is broken. The canopy should pop up with this little tab here and swing up like this but unfortunately the part that holds the canopy on at the back end is broken online and here again I could have waited until I had an unbroken specimen here but I'm just too excited to do this review so I hope you'll pardon me. This is a frequently broken part. For some reason I guess this clear plastic is somewhat fragile so you see a lot of these broken. You'll eventually get an unbroken one but for now it does fit on there but it doesn't pop up like it should. As you can see this Sky Striker like the F-14 that it's modeled after is a two-seater jet. It has a seat for the pilot and a back seat for the co-pilot. Now on the F-14s this back seat was occupied by the Rio or RIO Radar Intercept Officer. Let's take a look at these seats and they are identical and they're quite plain. They have a peg here that fit in the back of the action figure to help hold the action figure on the seat. It doesn't have any kind of seat belt. It doesn't really have any kind of decoration at all. It has a couple hooks back here that are intended to hold the parachute on. This one does not have the parachute. Some versions of the Sky Striker had two parachutes, one for each seat but some I think later versions had only one parachute and I only have one parachute so I'm kind of calling this complete even though really I'd rather have both parachutes. I only have a parachute on the back one and these hooks were meant to have a rubber band running between them to hold the parachute on. Now I've never had much success holding the parachute on that way so I've got the rubber band just kind of wrapped around this way. Let's take a look at the parachute itself and unfortunately the parachute is another problem with the Sky Strike that I have. This parachute is in terrible shape and it's in such bad shape I really hate to take it out but I'm going to just so that you can see what it looks like. I've seen parachutes in much better shape than this and it's a bit torn so it's not functional. A good parachute should be functional. You should be able to actually put the action figure in the seat and toss it up in the air and watch him float down but obviously that's not going to happen with this one. But I just wanted you to see the image on it. It's this really beautifully rendered eagle with the Sky Striker logo right here on there and I think that just looks really impressive. That's a nice looking parachute at least it would be if mine wasn't so crummy. The instructions do have a technique for folding up this parachute. I've never had that much luck with it. I just try to make it as compact as I can, wrap the string around it, the strings that serve as the parachute cords and I just rubber band it to the seat. Now I don't really display this with anybody in the back seat of this jet so I don't really mind the rubber band going around this way. The tip of the nose of the Sky Striker is made of kind of a rubbery material just to demonstrate how the pilot, Ace, fits into the jet. I'll demonstrate really quick. You just take the seat and put the back tag into the hole in his back. Make sure that he's in really good. He goes in straight legged. There's not really any room for him to bend his knees in here so you just put him in straight leg like that and make sure that the seat goes into the tabs that it's made for and there you go. Ace is piloting the Sky Striker. It has this really nice looking nose cannon here that blueprints refer to as an E41A1 Vulcan 50mm cannon and it's nice to have a good machine gun on your attack aircraft. One thing I'd like you to notice is that the machine gun is on the top of the nose of the Sky Striker. On the F-14 it was on the bottom but if you think about it, this wouldn't work because to put the machine gun here on the top, the body of the machine gun inside the housing of the aircraft would go right through the instrument panel. So it doesn't really make sense to have it up here. It should be down here at the bottom like a normal F-14. We have a pair of engine covers on here with these kind of raised tabs here. You lift those off and you can see a little bit of engine detail on there. There's another one on that side and in the back, a feature that I think is somewhat unique, we have removable engines and these removable engines have some detail on the inside. These engines just slide in and they don't snap in or anything. They're just kind of friction in like that. And now it's time to look at the missiles and there are many missiles on the bottom of this jet. So let's look at each one. There are three types of missiles. This smaller one, the blueprints call a SITE or Site-5 Sidewinder. This is a reasonable approximation of the real world AIM-9 Sidewinder short range air to air missile. This medium sized missile, the blueprints refer to as a SITE-3 Sparrow, which is supposed to approximate the real world AIM-7 Sparrow medium range radar homing missile. And this really large missile, the blueprints refer to as a SITE-32 Phoenix missile, which is supposed to approximate the real world AIM-54 Phoenix radar guided long range missile. All of the missiles use this kind of dumbbell shaped slot for the pegs that they go on. And they're all the same size, so they're interchangeable. You can even put the small missile on the slot for the big missile and vice versa. The Phoenix can actually fit on the slot for the Sidewinder. There's this large pod here in the middle that is not supposed to be removable, although you do see them removed sometimes. They're kind of glued on and they should stay on. This is often mistaken for a bomb, but this is actually a fuel tank that is not intended to be a bomb. The jet has these twin fins, one over each engine, and these are really nice looking, very fierce looking with these eagle emblems here to signify the Skystriker unit. The main feature of the Skystriker is that it was a sweet wing jet with retractable landing gear. We have rubber wheels on these landing gear and of course we have these white covers on the front one and then these little doors on the back ones. Now these are kind of important because these help with the function of the landing gear and this sweep wing design. Like the real F-14, the wings for the Skystriker would sweep backward using this mechanism. You can see it shows a diagram of the open wings on the back and the closed wings on the front and you essentially just move this switch forward to close the wings. And when you close the wings, the landing gear retracts. Let's show this from the bottom so you can see the landing gear in action. Sweep the wings out, the landing gear come down, sweep the wings forward, the landing gear retracts. These landing gear wheels are rubber, which is very nice, and they have printed on here Skystriker G.I. Joe. So that's a really nice detail. Can it fly? No! Now the Skystriker really is such a large jet that when you have the wings out, it takes up a lot of shell space. So I do see a lot of people display it with the wings in and just kind of resting like that. But I like to have the landing gear out so I just make extra space for it on the shelf so that I can have it the way I think it looks best with the landing gear down and the wings out. Taking a look at the inside of the cockpit, we get really no detail at all. We have some tabs here where the seats friction in front and back. And on the instrument panel, we get a few recessed circles and that's really it. No other detail at all, which I think is unfortunate. That's kind of a missed opportunity. The Skystriker really is an impressive toy, even looking back at it 30 years later. I never actually had the Skystriker as a kid, but I had a friend who had it, so I played with it all the time. But since I didn't get to own it and take it home with me now as an adult collector, I'm really thrilled to be able to have this in my collection, even though it's not in perfect condition. I just love having the thing. Let's take a look at the pilot that came with the Skystriker. This is Ace and let's start by taking a look at his accessory. And he came with only one, his helmet. The helmet was this clear plastic and it was painted on the back. So it looked like it had kind of a dome here on the front. It has a texture pattern on the top and it fits on his kind of flight suit ring that goes around his head there. This is kind of a unique accessory and I have to admit, even though I wasn't a big fan of Ace when I was a kid, I still like this helmet. I just think it's kind of neat. It looks like a space helmet. Let's look at Ace's articulation and Ace had the typical articulation for 1983 GI Joe action figures. He could turn his head from left to right, which is not quite as easy to do with other action figures because he does have this ring around his head that fits with the helmet. He can lift his arm up about so far and he can swing it all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow so he could move at the elbow about 90 degrees and he had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O ring that looped around the inside so he could move at the torso a little bit. He could move his legs apart about that far. He could move his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and he could bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's look at the sculpt and the color of Ace and of course most obviously Ace looks like an astronaut. He looks like a spaceman. He is not wearing a traditional fighter pilot suit and I think that is a problem that a lot of kids had back in 1983. He didn't look like a fighter pilot and I think that's why I didn't really care for Ace when I was a kid but I have warmed up to him a bit as an adult. I do think that this is a really nice sculpting. I think this is supposed to represent a pressure suit that is used by high altitude pilots flying jets that are like spy planes which is not bad. It's a reasonable approximation of a pressure suit but it still doesn't fit with the role of the sky striker as a combat jet. The sky striker is not some kind of high altitude spy plane or something like that or a space jet. It's a fighter jet and really Ace should be dressed as a fighter pilot. There is a lot of sculpted detail on Ace. You can see that the head sculpt is similar but not identical to the head sculpt. The sculpt on Ace's face has a bit more detail in the hair and a few more lines on the face. There are some details on this ring seal that goes with his helmet. You can see some kind of electronic panel on his back here. He has these poofy sleeves and these poofy legs that make him look a little bit like the Michelin man. I think that's one of the problems I had with this as a kid. I just thought that looked kind of strange. He has excellent use of color with some splashes of orange and gray against the off-white color. On his chest he has what looks like a sculpted knife and a pistol. So you wouldn't expect to see that on a pilot but that's kind of a nice detail. I suppose if he ever has to bail out he'll be armed. Let's take a look at Ace's file card and Ace's file card was not printed on the back of the box for the Sky Striker like a lot of other vehicle driver's file cards were. It was an insert inside the box for the Sky Striker. On the other side it's plain. Now at some point Hasbro released Ace as a mail away offer and those file cards had a red back but these that came with the Sky Striker had just a plain back. It says he's a fighter pilot codenamed Ace and it has a nice portrait of Ace that would have come from the front of the box. It says his file name is Brad J. Armbruster. His primary military specialty is fixed wing pilot single and multiple engine. Secondary military specialty intelligence operations. This may mean that he does fly spy planes. His birthplace is Providence, Rhode Island. His grade is 03 Captain US Air Force. This section says he doesn't fly than do anything else. During high school he worked after school and weekends to pay for flying lessons. Spent one year flying pipelines in Alaska and two years stunt flying for movies. Enlisted USAF at age 22. Duty most previous to G.I. Joe assignment. Senior instructor. USAF fighter weapons squadron the aggressors. Pilot combat training school and this actually is a real thing. The USAF does have a fighter weapons school with a squadron called the aggressors and the purpose of this squadron is to train pilots for combat. Qualified expert F5E, F15, F16 and XPF 14F. Of course that's the sky striker and these are other fighter jets. This bottom section says Ace has one major character flaw. Cut throat poker. A predilection for gambling would ordinarily disqualify an applicant for the G.I. Joe team. But in Armbruster's case you can hardly call it gambling since he never loses. That's why they call him Ace. To me this means Ace has two problems. First of all he's a gambling addict and second of all he's a cheater because it's not possible to never lose it poker. This statement that's why they call him Ace I think is a play on the term Ace as applied to a fighter pilot. A flying Ace is a fighter pilot who has shot down enemy fighters. When I was a kid I thought the character of Ace that I got from the file card was very meh. He was the pilot of the sky striker and that's pretty much all he did. When the sky striker wasn't in use he just sat on the cockpit. We didn't really use him for anything else. But Ace did have some very good moments, some very shining moments in the G.I. Joe media. In the comic book he had a whole issue dedicated to an air duel between him and Wild Weasel in the Cobra Rattler. And he also had some excellent moments in the G.I. Joe animated series. That was my review of the 1883 sky striker and its pilot Ace and his file card. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you're thinking of getting a sky striker I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it make sure you give it a thumbs up on Facebook and make sure you subscribe. I've got a lot of great new G.I. Joe toy reviews coming up and you do not want to miss them. Also make sure to like the Facebook page because you get updates there that you don't get anywhere else. As always if there's an 80s G.I. Joe toy you'd like for me to review make sure you leave a comment on this YouTube video and I will get to that review as soon as I'm able to. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Thanks bro.