 This episode of HCC 788 brought to you in part by the Dicast Enterprise. Join us each week as we discuss the sexual proclivities of Commander William T. Riker. The bravado comedy of Lieutenant War. And the adorable monkey shines if one Wesley the sweater crusher. Or maybe we'll just talk about the golden girls. Or hairstyles. Or cartoons. That's equally likely. We also like G.I. Joe. There, we tied that in nicely. Well done everyone on that. By all our play sets and toys. Top tier glove, G.I. Joe. Great! I'm in hell! Swatter rising! Arch, arch! Wait a minute. Ready. Ready. Ready. Silence, kill. For Commander 788 here, it's time for another vintage G.I. Joe Battle Force 2000 review as we roll into the second week of Battle Force 2000 Month. This week we are looking at the 1987 Vector jet and the pilot Maverick. And yes, I did think about dressing up as Tom Cruise again. But I've already done that gag in the Sky Striker review and I gotta try to keep it fresh. Unlike most G.I. Joe vehicle drivers, Maverick was not packaged with the Vector. None of the Battle Force 2000 vehicle drivers were packaged with the vehicles they were intended to drive. And yes, I know I said that last week and I'll be saying that in all of the videos this week. There will be a lot of repetition in these Battle Force 2000 reviews, but there's no way around that. Even if you watch Battle Force 2000 Month from the beginning all the way through, so by the end, you've heard the same thing six times. You have to keep in mind that any video could be someone's first HCC 788 video. So this will be the first time they've heard it. Also, in every review this month, Joe Fan 82 will give us a preview of the upcoming G.I. Joe Con exclusive Battle Force 2000 figures. Hey guys, so after HCC reviews the Vintage Maverick, I'll be taking a look at the mock-up for this year's Joe Con exclusive figure. Thank you Joe Fan, don't forget to check out Joe Fan 82's YouTube channel. I like it, I think you'll like it too. We will also be looking at the gimmick for the first wave of Battle Force 2000 vehicles. Parts of the vehicles could be removed and then reassembled into the future fortress. So in each review, we will assemble part of the fortress and at the end of the month we will look at the complete fortress. With the preliminaries out of the way, HCC 788 presents the 1987 Battle Force 2000 Vector Jet and the Pilot Maverick. This is the 1987 Battle Force 2000 Vector Jet and Maverick, the Vector Pilot. These were each sold separately and they were available in 1987 and 1988. Maverick was available as a single-carded figure in 1987 and as a two-pack in 1988. He was packaged with his Battle Force 2000 teammate Blocker. There were some Battle Force 2000 toys released after 1988, for example DJ, the action figure and Pulverizer, the vehicle. But they had little to do with the core Battle Force 2000 team, which had already been discontinued by then. It's odd that they were put in Battle Force 2000 rather than just folded into the main GI Joe line. The mission of Battle Force 2000 was to field test experimental equipment for the main GI Joe team. But since GI Joe already had plenty of experimental vehicles and weapons, they didn't really need Battle Force 2000. Hasbro struggled to make this team relevant to GI Joe. They tried to shoehorn Battle Force 2000 into the GI Joe universe in two ways. First, by including them in the comic book series where Larry Hama courageously tried to make them fit. Second, they tried to set them up as the enemy of Destro's Iron Grenadiers and included the Battle Force 2000 logo on Iron Grenadiers packaging. Although the figure and the vehicle were never sold together, they will be reviewed together in this video. And we will set Maverick aside for now so we can look at the Vector. The Vector is a jet in white and the colors I think are pretty good. The orange canopies add a pop of color and the blue and the green balance the predominant white. I also like the name of the jet. A lot of GI Joe vehicles used acronyms, sometimes very strained acronyms. But Battle Force 2000 refrained from that and just gave their vehicles cool names. I like the shape of the jet from the front and from the top. But from the profile it looks like it has camel humps. I don't normally have boxes for vehicles, but I have a box for the Vector, so let's take a look at it. We have some box art here and this is not bad. I kind of like it. It is reminiscent of the box art for the Sky Striker. It says it is the Vector and then in parentheses jet. In case you are wondering what it is, it's a jet. Two battle units in one. Down here it says six vehicles combined to form Future Fortress. The Future Fortress was an added gimmick of this first wave of Battle Force 2000 vehicles. Later Battle Force 2000 vehicles were not part of the Fortress. In each review of Battle Force 2000 months we will assemble part of the Fortress and we will look at the completed Fortress at the end. We have already looked at the Dominator snow tanks contribution to the Future Fortress so this week we will look at how the Vector jet contributes to the Future Fortress. Looking at the back of the box we can see the Vector was worth three flag points and we have a photo of the vehicle here and it appears this was a prototype. There are some differences between the photograph and the vehicle that we got from the box. Among those differences we can see that the canopy for the battle turret is opaque rather than clear as we got in the production toy. Let's look at the parts and the features of the Vector jet and for this vehicle I have the blueprints which were printed on the backside of the instruction sheet and I will be referring to these blueprints for the description of some of the features on this vehicle. Right here in front directly under the nose we have what the blueprints call quick blast twin 7.62 millimeter coaxial machine guns. They are black and they are often missing. I had to get a couple different Vector jets just to find one that had these guns. So if you're thinking of getting a Vector make sure you check the underside and make sure it still has its guns here in the front. We have the orange canopy and this color is a bit loud but I don't mind this color with its overall color scheme. This is supposed to be a futuristic jet and there is something kind of space-agey about this color. The canopy opens to gain access to the cockpit and in the cockpit we have a pilot's seat. We have some molded-in details and instrument panels along the sides and we have a sticker instrument panel there in the front. I'll show you how to put the action figure in the cockpit. Maverick does not need his weapon for this so we'll set that aside. I find it best to bend the action figure's knees about so far. You just rest him in there and it's a surprisingly tight fit for such a spacious cockpit. It's a little bit narrow for his arms but you can fit him in there and close the canopy. There is no control stick in there for the pilot to control the vehicle and really the whole cockpit is a little bit too small. Probably the whole jet is slightly underscaled for three and three quarter inch figures. What that means is Maverick's feet rest right up against the control panel and that just does not look right. It looks like Maverick is supposed to control the jet with his feet. This is one instance when Quick Kick might have an advantage because he can push those buttons with his toes. Moving back from the cockpit we have the jet intakes and there we have stylized US military aircraft nationality insignia and although there is some artistic license with these they do look a lot like the US Air Force's low visibility markings. We have two removable engine covers. They are green and I think this is a good choice. This green color kind of breaks up the monotony of the white. There is engine detail in there. It is the same engine detail on both sides just reversed. This engine detail is clean and angular and circuit board like so it does kind of make it look futuristic. We have what the blueprints call wing-mounted vertical stabilizers. They are blue and that's another good color choice. We're not going real radical with the colors here. We just have a few blocks of other colors to balance out the white. Battle Force 2000 logos on both sides. Mounted on the stabilizers we have what the blueprints call wing-mounted aircraft pilot controlled or APC 20 millimeter cannons. They are in black. There is one on each side. They are fixed and forward-facing and counting the two guns on the chin of the plane. The vector has four forward-facing guns. Flipping the vector to the underside for a moment. Let's look at the landing gear. We have one front and two rear landing gear. They are in black plastic. They have plastic wheels. They are very small. The vector sits very low to the ground. So low that the rear stabilizers almost scrape the ground. They operate manually. You just push them up to close them and then pull them back down to open them up. They look pretty sturdy so I don't think you have to worry too much about breaking them. But they are very basic. These are no frills landing gear. Also on the underside we have what looks like was intended to be a fuel port. Finally, this is not compatible with standard GI Joe refueling nozzles. And that's a shame because the vector could land on the USS flag aircraft carrier for refueling. But the flag's fuel trailer could not be used for that purpose. We have four missiles. They are all the same. And the blueprints call these AIM-33 narrow sparrow missiles. And they fit on the jet with the usual dumbbell shaped peg and slot. These AIM-33 narrow sparrow missiles apparently take their name from the AIM-7 sparrow missile, which is a real world missile, but these don't look like the sparrow. A narrow sparrow does kind of have an authentic sound to it. It sounds like the kind of nickname military equipment is given sometimes. Rounding out our look at the underside of the vector we have the GI Joe logo, the Battle Force 2000 logo, and a very large US flag sticker. This is larger than the flag stickers we got with most GI Joe vehicles. In the back we have engine exhaust ports. They are in green plastic. They are squared off similar to the way the 1986 Conquest X-30 engines were. And I do like this. It may not be very aerodynamic, but it does look pretty cool. Finally, we get to this big gun pod in the back. And the blueprints call this round off pivoting surveillance slash ballistics pod. It pivots and the gun turret does elevate. It is blue on the bottom, but a different color blue from the stabilizers. And we have a clear orange canopy. This is the most futuristic part of this jet. It doesn't look anything like a contemporary fighter jet. It can be removed just by pulling it off. And we can open the canopy so we can take a look inside. The detail on the interior of this gun pod is mind-blowing. It has an impressive array of instruments, a texture pattern on the floorboard. It has this really nice looking gun with a couple of control sticks on it. The blueprints call these dual 7.62mm repeating auto load machine guns. They do elevate as we have seen. This is so well designed. This would be a good looking gun on any GI Joe vehicle. If you count each of these as separate machine guns, then this jet has a total of six guns. That's some impressive firepower. Using blocker to show how to put an action figure in this gun pod. He can bend his legs slightly, but he can fit in mostly straight legged. He just sits down in there like that. There's plenty of room. You can close the canopy without any trouble at all. It's very spacious in there. Without the gun pod, the main jet does look like it has something missing. But it does still function as a jet. Without the gun pod, it can also stand vertically on its stabilizers. Now let's see how the vector jet contributes to the formation of the future fortress. We've already seen that the outer shell for the Dominator snow tank splits apart to form the outer wall. So to add the part for the vector to the future fortress, you just take the gun pod and set it right there. And that's it. It doesn't attach to anything. It doesn't do anything. It just sits there. Even though we don't have the future fortress complete yet, we can already see some problems with it. We have two parts of the fortress here that don't really interact together. They just sit near each other. Let's look at Maverick, the pilot for the vector, who did not come with the vector. Hasbro, if you're listening, please never do that again. Was Maverick named after Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun? Of course he was. Hasbro was not above wearing their influences on their sleeve. Despite this, though, he doesn't look anything like Tom Cruise. The colors of the action figure match pretty closely with the colors of his aircraft. It's surprising they didn't give him contrasting colors, but I think it works well. Let's take a look at Maverick's accessories, starting with his weapon, and the carb contents call this a semi-automatic machine pistol. But it's a bizarre design. I guess it could be a machine pistol. It's in silver plastic. Since Battleforce 2000 is futuristic, it's surprising they didn't call this a laser gun. His other accessory is his helmet, which looks a little bit like a space helmet. Doesn't look much like a fighter pilot. It is blue. The design is okay, but it doesn't wow me. It fits on the figure on this ring around his neck, and it fits pretty tightly. It does have a nice window here, so you can see the action figure's eyes through the helmet. Let's take a look at the articulation on Maverick. He had the articulation that was standard by 1987, meaning he could turn his head from left to right, and look up and down. He could move his arm up at the shoulder, and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow, so he could move at the elbow about 90 degrees. 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. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far, he could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees, and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of Maverick, starting with his head. On his head, he has brown hair and kind of an 80's style haircut. The face sculpt is fine. It's not the best-looking face, and he bears zero resemblance to Tom Cruise. He has a white ring around his neck. The helmet fits over that. On his chest, he has a silver vest over a white flight suit. The silver's on the back as well. He has pointy shoulder pads, and this is just over-the-top sci-fi. He looks like riff-raff from Rocky Horror. On that silver vest, he has a green patch right in the center. On his arms, he has white sleeves, and he has blue gloves. And on his gloves, he has some molded-in circuitry or some kind of futuristic gadgets on them. Also, kind of on the shoulders as well, on the flight suit. On his left arm, he has a silver band that looks like it has some kind of canisters on them. On his waist, he has a silver belt that goes around to the back. It has a couple of pockets in the back. White pouches on the side, and then he has a silver codpiece. You just don't see people wearing codpieces nowadays. His legs are white, and they have more of that molded-in circuitry on them. A couple of blue pockets on his thighs. Then he has blue pouches above green boots. Let's take a look at Maverick's file card. And on his file card, it has his faction as Battleforce 2000 and GI Joe. It had a nice portrait of Maverick here that did not look very much like the action figure. This would have come from the artwork on the front of the card. It had his codename as Maverick, and he's the vector pilot. His file name is Thomas P. Kiley. His primary military specialty is pilot. He had no secondary military specialty. You hired him to fly planes, so that's all he's going to do is fly planes. His birthplace is Ida Grove, Iowa, and his grade is 03 Captain. This paragraph says, Maverick graduated at the top of his class from the Air Force Academy and promptly volunteered for every experimental program that came down the line. Consequently, he is one of the few pilots qualified to operate the entire range of multifunction, programmable keyboard controls, voice-actuated weapon systems, and open-loop, bio-cybernetic situations analysis computers. He has the physical strength to withstand massive G-forces, reflexes of a gymnast, and a clarity of eyesight that reads off the scale. This second paragraph says, He's a natural flyer. He can't remember a time when he wasn't flying. Honest. You see, his mom flew a crop duster all across the corn belt, an old Stearman biplane. This was back before daycare, right? She'd just strap him in, hand him a water gun and a jelly sandwich, and take off for a day of dusting bullworms. This old Stearman biplane is possibly referring to the Boeing Stearman Model 75, a biplane that first saw service in 1934. This file card reads as another best of the best of the best Joe's, although I do like the story about his childhood around planes. It paints a colorful picture. I've never met his mom, but I already like her. Now let's turn to Joefan82 for a look at the upcoming con-exclusive Maverick figure. Thanks, HCC. Here's the modern version of Maverick that we will be seeing at Joecon this year. Aside from the helmet, this looks like it is a direct repaint of the matte tracker figure, which was released in 2008. This most likely was done for budgetary reasons. Repainting a figure is a lot cheaper than designing a whole new sculpt, which would have been nice. They kept the white uniform and blue helmet, which is removable. However, the design of the armor for the chest and shoulders is considerably different than the original. The dark green has been replaced with gold on his chest and boots. He comes with a removable pistol and a retool of his semi-automatic machine pistol. This image doesn't show the head sculpt, but it's probably the same head sculpt we saw for the matte tracker figure. That's it for this preview of the new modern Maverick. Back to you, HCC. Thank you, Joefan82. Everyone, remember to check out his channel. Taking a look at the G.I. Joe media appearances for Maverick and the Vector, they made no appearances in the animated series. BattleForce 2000 was only animated for commercials. They did appear in the G.I. Joe comic book series. They first appeared along with most of BattleForce 2000 in issue number 68. He also appeared in issues 70 and 71, where a handful of Joes teamed up with the Dreadknocks to escape the fictional country of Sierra Gordo. That story focused more on Wild Bill, but it gave Maverick something to do outside of BattleForce 2000. Maverick and the Vector also appeared in Special Missions issue number 12. In that issue, the Joes perform at an air show, and the Vector is stolen by Firefly. In that issue, the Vector is shown to have vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. Looking at the Vector jet and Maverick overall, both the figure and the vehicle have strengths and weaknesses. Looking at the strengths of the Vector, it is a nice vehicle with a fair number of play features for the size. It's close to the Conquest X-30's size class, so I could see kids using it as some extra Joe air power, even if they didn't care about BattleForce 2000. And I think the colors work pretty well together. Among the Vector's weaknesses, it's a little too small for the shape they were trying to go for. It's a little undersized, so the cockpit creates a hump on the fuselage as does the gun turret in the back. So it doesn't have a sleek aerodynamic look. I also think the landing gear is way too small. I think it makes the jet feel kind of cheap. Looking at the strengths of Maverick, the colors closely match the colors of the vehicle. There was some coordination between vehicle and figure design. I think he looks the part of a futuristic pilot. He even edges into astronaut territory. Among his weaknesses, the helmet is big and plain and just doesn't look cool. The gun is unnecessary and the pointy shoulder pads are kind of comical. I'll have to call this another middle-tier BattleForce 2000 vehicle, and I will put Maverick in the middle tier, but only barely. I do like some of the sculpted details on the figure, and that's what saves it from the bottom tier. So why is this even in GI Joe? Usually when I ask that, it's because I'm wondering why some terrible toy was included in an otherwise great toy line. But in this case, I'm wondering why BattleForce 2000 wasn't its own separate toy line. As a kid, my friends and I did have some BattleForce 2000 items, definitely not all of them. But as I recall, we used to play with them separately from GI Joe, creating more space-age play scenarios with them. So far, we have looked at two middle-tier vehicles and two middle-tier figures. They're not great, but they're not the worst. We're not looking at ice cream soldier here. And they even have some strong points. They don't fit with the GI Joe aesthetic, and they were specifically designed not to. What Hasbro inadvertently created was not a sub-team for GI Joe, but the beginnings of a separate toy line. BattleForce 2000 would have been a decent stand-alone line. But as part of GI Joe, BattleForce 2000 gets lost among greatness. GI Joe just didn't need them. And maybe they didn't need GI Joe. Maybe it even would have grown and evolved into something great. Remember the humble beginnings of GI Joe in 1982? Now, I'm not saying BattleForce 2000 would have been the next mask or centurions or masters of the universe. But it had a head start, and if it had been allowed to flower, maybe something great eventually would have come from it. It makes you wonder what might have been if Hasbro had the courage to release these toys without the security blanket of the GI Joe logo. That was my review of Maverick and the Vector. I hope you enjoyed it. And even if you didn't, even if I didn't, we're still rolling into week three of BattleForce 2000 Months next week. If you like what you see, I ask you humbly to do a few things for me. Please, like this video on YouTube. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter. Support this channel on Patreon and share this video. And even if you don't do any of that, please, in general, be a good person. I'll see you next weekend. Until then, remember all the things you're supposed to remember. I don't know. I forget. The Protect America BattleForce 2000 creates the battle vehicles of the future. Nobody beats GI Joe's BattleForce 2000. SkySweep or Eliminator, Vindicator. Nobody beats GI Joe's BattleForce 2000. Dominator, Vector, and Marauder, they split and recombine into the awesome future fortress. Go, Joe! Nobody beats GI Joe, the real America. BattleForce 2000 figures and vehicles sold separately. Collect all six vehicles.