Happy Friday, everyone! Well, I’m working through the weekend so that sucks, but at least I can still enjoy spending a bit of my Friday talking about toys. The second wave of Super7’s GI JOE Ultimates has arrived, and I’m eager to start digging into it, but before I do I have one last figure from the first wave to look at. So let’s check out Cobra’s Battle Android Trooper, better known as BAT to his close friends.

Here’s the awesome packaging, which is pretty much the same as what we saw for Cobra Commander, complete with a cover sleeve and blue camo pattern. The window shows off all the goodies and you get a little blurb about the BAT on the back panel. It’s no secret that I loved the BATs when they were introduced to the Sunbow cartoon. After having to suffer through dozens of episodes of Cobra troopers ducking enemy fire, the cartoon finally had an enemy that could be shot, blown to bits, impaled, crushed, and violently dispatched in every other way imaginable because they are only robots. But the real reason I love them is because they just look so damn cool.

And here’s the BAT fresh off the assembly line and ready for action! The black matte jumpsuit coupled with the blinding canary yellow for the boots, belt, and epaulets is such a bizarre combination for a combat trooper, and yet it looks so sharp and iconic. The Ultimates BAT also features some crisp metallic silver paint for the tops of the boots, the gauntlets, and just some general pop all around the figure, and I can’t overstate how great this paint looks. There’s a brown pistol holster on his left hip, a pair of sculpted grenades hanging from his shoulder strap, and does anyone know what that silver thing strapped to his right leg is supposed to be? Because I sure don’t.

The BAT carries a rather large backpack, which serves to carry his interchangeable arm attachments, and we sure will come back to those in a bit. The backpack clips into square peg holes on the figure’s epaulets, and it works fairly well, but if you pick up the figure with your fingers touching the backpack, it will likely pop off. It’s not that big a deal when posing and displaying the figure, but this is a case where maybe a peg in the back might have been preferable. Especially since, I really never display my BATs without the backpack on.

The helmet is pretty spot on for the Sunbow animated BAT design. Yo get a smooth and rounded noggin with a rather prominent T-shaped red face shield. And that emotionless blank slate of a face is a big part of what makes these things so scary to me.

One of the more iconic design beats of the Cobra BAT is the clear shield over the exposed bank of circuits on display in the chest, and it is very well done here. You get a wall of sculpted gray mechanisms with some green, yellow, red, and blue wires and devices embedded in there. The clear plate can also be removed and we’ll get to the purpose of that peg hole in a bit when we look at the damage display options.

While BATs are essentially walking weapons themselves, they do come with two standard issue guns. The first is the pistol that can be stored in the aforementioned holster. It’s got that great pseudo sci-fi design that a lot of the Sunbow pistols had and he can hold it in either of his gun hands quite well.

And he also comes with this rifle, which also sports a decidedly sci-fi flavor to it. both of these weapons are cast all in black plastic and they have that minimalist approach to sculpted detail that lends itself so well to being a cartoon model.

And now we get to the swiss-army-knife nature of the BAT’s arm attachments. There are three extra attachments that store in the backpack, which include a pincer claw, a driller arm, which I think is actually meant to be a laser, and what I think is supposed to be a torch of some kind. These attachments can be swapped out to replace either hand and they pop off pretty easily. The BAT also comes with a bunch of different regular hands, which include relaxed, fists, and gun toting hands. If the BAT is using one of his special attachments, you can even store the displaced hand in the backpack.

And since the cartoon had so much fun blowing up and damaging the BATs, Super7 included a number of damage options. You get an blue electrical discharge effect part that can be plugged into the hole in the chest compartment. You also get a damaged head with more of the blue electro discharge effect. And for total cranial destruction, you get just a neck stump with electro discharge spitting out of the top. Just be prepared to have to work to get that neck stump out of the figure once you put it in, because there isn’t a lot to grab onto.

You also get a severed left arm, and I like to pop the chest effect part into the arm stump. Not too shabby! The colored wires coming out of the damaged arm are a nice touch.

I think it’s safe to say that I really love this figure, since I wound up buying three of them, and there may be a couple more in my future. I can display this trio with a variety of attachments or even have one blown up and another partially damaged. There are definitely a lots of cool options!

And that wraps up the first wave of Super7’s GI JOE Ultimates and I am absolutely smitten with this line. The initial character assortment was pretty good, and while I loved each of these four figures, I think the BAT may be the stand out for me. Sure, I’d argue we should have had a Cobra Trooper in the line first, but I dig these so much that I’m not going to complain. As I said earlier, I’m eager to dive in to the second wave, but I’m going to take care of some business over on the Silverhawks side of things before coming back to JOE Ultimates in a week or so.