GIJCC Eco Striker Joecon Attendee Exclusive

Every year at Joecon, The GI Joe Collector’s Club gives a free exclusive item to the registered attendees who get a box set. This year it was an Eco Striker!

For those that may not know what an Eco Striker is, it was a repainted Awe Striker released in 1992 for the Eco Warriors subset.

The Club’s Eco Striker is a light blue color with a yellow roll cage and front bumper bar.

 

The Eco Striker is made from repainting the GI Joe Retaliation Ninja Commando 4X4 (A repaint of an Awe Striker with some newly sculpted parts itself) The Eco Striker didn’t make any changes to the Ninja Commando 4X4 mold, it just got some new colors.

 

The tampos on the Eco striker faithfully reproduce the vintage stickers with a few minor tweeks like using Eco Force rather than Eco Warriors and changing the black print on the side stickers to white so that you can read the letter easier.

However, there was one sticker missing………the “Don’t Litter” sticker! (which I don’t blame them for not using)

 

Since this Eco Striker uses the most recent version of the Awe Striker mold there are some changes between it and the vintage Awe Striker. The first will be the new parts like the armored roll cage, front bumper bar and grappling hook cannon. There are also no antennas anymore, which I’m happy about as they tend to get bent, broken and chewed by pets way too often.

 

It’s hard to tell in the picture above, but you can see in this next picture that the shade of blue is slightly darker on the Club’s Eco Striker while the original was more of a turquoise color, also the engine is a darker grey.

 

The dashboard and steering wheel are now blue rather than the grey and black color scheme they originally had. Also since the original Eco Striker came out before the mold was altered for the Stargate All-Terrain Cruiser, you can see the changes made to the Dashboard mold over the years. (The Mold had the steering wheel moved to the center for the 1 seat Stargate mold and later that hole was filled in when the steering wheel was returned to it’s original location on the 2001 Special Collectors Edition Awe Striker)

 

The Eco Striker can fit modern figures well in the seats and on the side running boards since the footpegs were slimmed down in 2008 for the 25th Anniversary figures.

 

So. why do you need the Eco Striker? Well if you have any of the Eco Force figures from this years convention set, they need a vehicle (or if you’re like me and have a 30th Airtight that needs a ride) I know people are tired of the Awe Striker mold as we have gotten it a total of  10 times since 1985 (US Release, even more if you count international versions) For me, this was a must have! I love the Awe Striker and liked the extra armored bits from the Ninja Commando 4X4 even more so I was already hoping the club would repaint it as the Eco Striker. My only critique would be that I would have liked them to paint the headlights green like the original one, but I can overlook that small detail.