Cobra Commander (Once a Man)

Okay, when we said we wanted an "unmasked" Cobra Commander, we meant the comic one, not this. "A brilliant young nobleman came to my attention. Even though disfigured by a laboratory accident, he was my choice to go into the world to raise a mighty army, and to destroy the so-called 'human' civilization which had driven us into exile. You were my hope, Cobra Commander, and you failed me miserably!" As pointed out before, it was GI Joe cartoon writer Buzz Dixon who told Hasbro that suddenly having someone in the Cobra hierarchy above Cobra Commander made no sense unless the troops literally built a new leader or Cobra itself was secretly a front for an even more secret organization. Unfortunately for him, Hasbro loved both those ideas, so one became Serpentor and the other became Cobra-La. As punishment for his failings, Cobra Commander was forcibly exposed to degenerative spores that began devolving him, a test for what Cobra-La had planned for the entire world. Despite being one of the most iconic moments in all of '80s animation, there's never been a toy of this Cobra Commander scene before. This figure is not based on the good Classified figure, but on the Retro version that came with the HasLab HISS Tank - after all, they wanted him to be as close to the movie as possible. Upon being mutated, Cobra Commander began tearing at his uniform, so this toy uses the plain legs, then gives us a new, snakey upper body that's covered by the tattered remnants of his jacket. The exposed skin has large, angular scales mixed with smaller textured ones, and he's still wearing his black gloves. To be really true to the cartoon, his left hand should be bare, and the remaining glove should come up to his forearm rather than having a short cuff, but at some point you've gotta switch from "perfect re-creation" to "accurate vibe." The set includes two heads for Cobra Commander. The first is the one from the same source as the legs, just normal CC with his silver faceplate and blue helmet, nothing fancy. The second, however, shows us Cobra Commander after his mask has fallen off, a half-serpent hybrid with a mouth that runs all the way back to his jaw, a nose that's flattening into just slits, and bright blue eyes. Multiple bright blue eyes. We see Cobra Commander's origin in the film, and while he was originally a fairly average-looking dude (albeit one with pale blue skin), a brief exposure while experimenting with the degenerative spores made extra eyes randomly sprout on his face. So while the snake-mouth and scales are a new mutation for him, those asymmetrical little peepers were something he'd been dealing with for a while. It's also fun to remember there's an episode of the show where Destro comes into the room while Cobra Commander is having soup and sees him with his hood off, and CC mocks that it take a strong stomach to watch him eat; suggesting that Destro has known for years that his boss was a scarred dude with blue skin and multiple eyes, yet never said anything about it. (Doesn't explain, however, how you could see pink skin through the eyeholes in Cobra Commander's hood, not blue.) The remaining bits of Cobra Commander's uniform are the sort of vibrant blue you'd expect, though there are "dirty" paint apps on his ankles and the lower edge of his jacket that, it must be said, don't work too well. Especially on the upper body, it at first looks more like they were trying to paint skin than cloth. The red stripes on the outside of the pantlegs let you know when you have the legs lined up properly, and you can make out part of the Cobra logo hidden behind his lapel. His skin is a dirty yellow-green, lighter on the large scales than the small ones, and his lips are even lighter still, to the point where they almost look like teeth. If you take the jacket off, his back is painted with an elapid pattern to foreshadow his future. "Elapid" means cobra-like, and it's also the name for an entire classification of snakes whose fangs are always out, rather than folding away. Annoying, then, that while Cobra Commander does have fangs sculpted sticking down out of his mouth, they didn't get a paint app, and the two scales between them didn't, either, leaving a noticable gap on the lower lip. Articulation remains as good as ever. He has a barbell head, balljointed neck, swivel/hinge shoulders on pectoral hinges, swivel biceps, double-hinged elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, hinged chest, balljointed waist, hips that are a balljointed mounted on a hinge, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, swivel ankles, and swivel/​hinge feet. There's a visible gap between the neck and the body that makes it look like he's wearing a collar of some sort, but no, that's just the darkness of the greenish plastic. It seems like his mouth should be hinged, but no, it's a solid part of the head. The figure includes three pairs of hands, and the articulation is the same in all of them: a pair of fists, a pair with the trigger fingers crooked, a pointing right hand, and a clutching left hand. Those all swap with no trouble. Several of the accessories come from the same Retro figure as part of the sculpt. There's a dagger for the sheath on his left thigh, the silly kind of gun the original '80s toy had, and a slightly technological backpack the gun can store inside. To simulate the scene in the movie where his mask fell off and we for the first time saw his face, there's also a loose mask with scratches on the front and small tech details on the back. Neat! It would have been cool if the mask and helmet had just been separate pieces, so you could put one or both of them on the snake head, instead of having the whole thing be a second alternate head, but I guess that was not meant to be. He'd just look nice with a yellow snake face beneath a smooth blue helmet, you know? The notch in the top of the faceplate makes it feel like they were considering that approach at one point, but nixed it. The best accessory, however, is a pack-in second figure. Hasbro didn't just give us the half-snake Cobra Commander, they included the full version! It's only about 3¼" tall, or waist high on a normal figure, and isn't bendy or anything, just sculpted with the tail coiled so it can sit up as tall as possible. The only joints are swivels at the shoulders. Again, it looks like the mouth should be hinged, but it's not. This is definitely more a display piece or accessory than its own character. It's just a shame they took so long to make this figure, because if it had come out way closer to the start of the line, it would have helped move a few more units of that Series 1 Roadblock nobody wanted because he had the wrong kind of gun (because by the time he was carrying Cobra Commander around in the movie, he was wearing his vest, not his tank top). The front of this toy's packaging has a lenticular image that switches Cobra Commander between human, half-snake, and full snake. The art on them is good, but the effect is lacking; it's too hard to see a single solid image of any of them without the other two bleeding through. The stats on the back of Cobra Commander's packaging are Leader 4, Light Weapons 1, PsyOps 4, and Coercion 4, same as the first release. Considering what was happening to him at the time, it might have made more sense to do Environmental Specialist (because he knew his way around Cobra-La), Hand-to-Hand Combat (because he was now getting involved in skirmishes physically), Infiltration (because he knew the secret ways in and out of the base), and Animal Handling (since he was turning into a snake). This set was a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive this year, and was available on Hasbro Pulse after the show. For about 30 seconds (not an exaggeration, that's how long before it sold out). It was back in stock the next day, Tuesday, for a little over a minute, then popped in again a few hours later before selling out quickly once more. Fans were understandably frustrated: it looked like we were going to have another Zartan "nobody can get this figure" situation on our hands. I had the extremely good luck to happen to check the Pulse website at 3:30 AM that Thursday, and there he was, in stock and ready to order. Stayed in-stock for about an hour and a half, too, before enough fans were awake and online for the allotment to sell through. I can only imagine how pissed everyone else was the next morning when they learned they'd slept through an easy, hassle-free chance to get him. The toy is really cool, and unlike any Cobra Commander we've had before, and more people deserve a shot at him. -- 09/13/24

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