 Hello everybody, Hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. It's time for this week's Vintage GI Joe Toy Review. But before we get started, I have a couple housekeeping items. First, I'm doing something special for the month of July. July will be Cobra Month. All Cobra, all month. I've got a great lineup for July. It's gonna be awesome. Are you excited? I'm excited! You should be excited! Second item. Just a reminder, you can request a Vintage GI Joe Toy to be reviewed on this channel. If there's something you'd like me to review and I haven't done it yet, just leave me a comment and let me know and I will get to all requests that are made. Now, it may take longer to get to some requests than to others, but I do try to get to them. It just may take me a little while. I've had a lot of new requests made and it's gonna take me a while to get to all those requests. But be patient with me, I am working on it. So with all that out of the way, let's get to this week's review video. Now lately, I've done a lot of figure reviews. I haven't done a lot of vehicles in the last few weeks and I think it's time to get back to reviewing a vehicle. I know everyone likes looking at the big vehicles that come with drivers. I do too, believe me. But I can't just review big vehicles because if I do, I'm gonna run out of vehicles to review. I can't neglect the smaller vehicles. I gotta look at them too and that's what we're gonna do this week. We're gonna look at the 1985 GI Joe Mini Tank, the Armadillo. This is the GI Joe Mini Tank, the Armadillo. It was first introduced in 1985. It was also sold in 1986. It was discontinued in 1987. It did not really have a replacement in 1987. There was a medium sized tank introduced in that year, the persuader. But the persuader was quite a bit bigger, so not really a replacement for this tank. In 1989, there was a Slaughter's Marauder's version of this Armadillo tank, but that had missile launchers instead of these guns. In 1988, the name Armadillo was reused for an action figure that was the driver of the Rolling Thunder vehicle. The Armadillo was worth two flag points and it did not come with an action figure. The Armadillo would be classified as a light tank, which means it is fast and lightly armored, similar to an armored car, except it has treads instead of wheels. These light tanks first appeared in World War I, but the modern usage of the light tanks has mostly been replaced by armored cars because they are lighter and faster. As far as the size class of the Armadillo, it's in the same class as the 1984 Skyhawk, and stylistically, they seem to share some of the same influences. The Armadillo takes its name from the Animal Armadillo, which is a small mammal that has armor plates on it, and that actually does kind of describe this vehicle. We do have real Armadillos in Oklahoma, so every once in a while I get to see an Armadillo in its natural habitat, which apparently is alongside the highway dead. Let's look at the parts and the features of the Armadillo starting with this turret, and the turret has these four guns, and the blueprints call these 60mm synchronized variable range cluster cannons. The turret does rotate, but it does not rotate all the way around. It has this sort of forward sloping design like this, and so when it turns, it wedges up against the side of the tank. It will not turn all the way around. It does have this roll bar behind it, but even if this roll bar is removed, the turret does not traverse all the way around. The guns in unison will elevate a bit. Inside the turret, there's a hole for the action figure. There's no seat in there. You just put the action figure through, and it goes right through into the body of the vehicle. In fact, you can see the axle for the back wheels in there. The inside of the turret also features a sticker control panel, and I like that. Not bad detail. It has some gauges and what looks like a radar screen there. Looks pretty good. The box art for the Armadillo shows it being driven by Dusty. I'm going to use my Dusty action figure to show you how to put the figure in. I find it goes better if you just put it in straight-legged like this. You don't have to bend the knees. I should probably move the arms up a little bit so they're not at his side. You just sort of slide them in there. He does go pretty deep down in there. As you can see, he's pretty well under cover if you sit him all the way down in there like that. It's very roomy in this turret. Lots of space for the action figure. He fits in very well. As you can see, as the turret spins, the figure kind of goes along with it, and that's kind of nice. I really like that. The Armadillo affords the driver a lot more cover than the 1982 Mobat tank did. The Mobat tank had the driver halfway up out of the tank. In the back, it has this bar. It's a sort of a roll bar thing here. These are sometimes missing on these Armadillo tanks. There aren't a lot of parts to this tank, so there's not a lot to be missing, but if there's anything that does tend to go missing, it's usually this bar. The tank without the bar still sort of looks complete if you're not familiar with the Armadillo. If you're wanting to get it complete, make sure you check and make sure it has this bar on it. More importantly, in the back, it has this platform with two foot pegs. This tank could carry two more action figures, making this potentially a three-person vehicle. That's pretty good for such a small vehicle. Again, following the artwork on the box that the Armadillo was sold in, I have Spirit and Alpine riding on this back platform. Now this roll bar would be for a person to hold onto while they're riding on the back of the Minitank, but it's much too thick to fit the hands of the action figures on. You definitely don't want to try that. You will snap the thumbs off of the action figures. It's really just for looks. I have noticed with a couple action figures on the back, the Minitank tends to tip backwards a little bit. Not too much. There doesn't seem to be any danger of the tank flipping over backwards. It's not that unbalanced. It will keep its feet on the ground. On either side, it has treads, and these are fake treads. They're not real treads. Just solid plastic, and it rolls on some wheels. Those wheels roll freely, and it does roll pretty well. It doesn't have a lot of features in the front. It mainly has just sculpted detail, but the sculpted details are pretty good. It looks like it has a winch here. Here I have to admit my example of the Armadillo is a little bit cruddy. It's got some stuff in here that I just cannot get out. I do wish I had one that was in slightly better shape, but this is not too bad. One of the most important details here on the front is this hole, this opening here for a fuel tank. Starting in 1985, some GI Joe vehicles had this fuel tank feature, and it was compatible with some fuel pumps that came on some GI Joe play sets, like the one that came with the USS Flag aircraft carrier. This refueling vehicle came with the aircraft carrier, and it had a couple of fuel nozzles with hoses. The nozzle would fit in the hole in the vehicle, and you could pretend to refuel your tank. I didn't really use this feature very much as a kid. Somehow, mysteriously, none of my vehicles ever seemed to run out of gas. Looking at the Armadillo overall, this really is a nice small vehicle, and in many ways it's nice because it's small. It's versatile, it was less expensive than a lot of the larger vehicles that came out in that era. For instance, the other tank that came out in 1985, the MBT Mahler, was a motorized tank and it was really big. Not everyone's parents could afford to buy those large vehicles, but you could pick up one of these smaller vehicles with your week's allowance. Here's a size comparison with the 1982 MOBAT tank. I do not have the 1985 Mahler tank, but the Mahler was very similar in size to the MOBAT, so it'd be about the same. You can see the Armadillo really is much smaller. It's green and very military looking. It's not based on a real world vehicle, but it is a very practical design. There's nothing unrealistic or too sci-fi about it. In 1985, GI Joe was still pretty grounded as a military toyline. They hadn't gone to the space age and alien yet, and I like this very much. This long sloping design makes the tank look very fast, and it's this feature of speed that was played up when the tank was first introduced in the GI Joe comic book. It was introduced in the same issue that also introduced a lot of new characters, such as Flint and Footloose. In the GI Joe comic book, Flint was the first driver of the Armadillo, and later in that same issue, Footloose drove the vehicle. After the Armadillo was introduced in the GI Joe comic book, it really wasn't used very much thereafter. It did seem to get used more often in the GI Joe animated series than it did in the comic book. These quad cannons look really hardcore, and I like these for the armament on this tank. I tend to like guns more than I like missiles on these vehicles, so this really suits me. With a simple vehicle, there are not a lot of parts to get lost or broken on this. It's about as simple as it gets, which in some respects is a good thing. It's easy to pick one of these up complete. And if you were a kid like me, who was eternally frustrated at losing or breaking parts on a vehicle, well, there just isn't much to lose or break on this. For that reason, this tank is really great for army building. You could very easily get a lot of these and make a whole army of them for relatively little expense. The simplicity of this vehicle is an upside, and it's kind of a downside too. It is a very simple vehicle. It doesn't have a lot of features. It was meant to be inexpensive. It doesn't even have a universal tow hook, which a lot of vehicles had, so you could tow other vehicles. That's something I really would have liked to see on that, and it seems like it could have been added without much additional expense. You really get what you pay for with this vehicle. It's made to be an inexpensive toy, and that's exactly what it is. It's made to be as simple and inexpensive as it could possibly be while still being functional as a toy. And I really don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. If I were to rank the armadillo among vehicles, I'd have to rank it somewhere in the middle. There were a lot of GI Joe vehicles that were just loaded with features and would have to be considered better than this vehicle. However, if I were to rank the armadillo only among small vehicles, it actually does pretty good. It holds up quite well. Even though it's simple, it has a nice, very military-looking design. And the fact that it's small meant that every kid could have a tank to go with their GI Joe's. And it actually looks like a tank. It's not some kind of futuristic sci-fi thing. And that's something that kids like me really wanted to see for their GI Joe's. That was my review of the 1985 armadillo mini tank. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you're thinking of getting one of these guys, I hope you found it informative. If you liked it, make sure you give it a thumbs up on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe. I've got a lot of great new GI Joe toy reviews coming up. You don't want to miss them. Also, I have a Facebook page. You'll want to like that because you get a lot of updates there and you don't get anywhere else. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week with another vintage GI Joe toy review. That's easy. But now it's gonna get real hard. Cobra Pirates, evil twin brothers. They are not the Crimson Guard. Introducing the leaders of the Crimson Guard. The evil twin brothers, Tomax and Seymour. And they're getting away in the Cobra Pirate. The Juzz and Staples. With the GI Joe mini tank. GI Joe. The Native American Hero. Cobra Pirates. Evil twin brothers sold together. Cobra Pirate, GI Joe mini tank. And Joe figures sold separately from Hasbro.