Zombie Viper

by KansasBrawler

Ah, zombies…they’re pretty much everywhere anymore. I’ll admit, I wasn’t terribly into the genre until I read World War Z. Now, I can’t get enough of them (save the movie they made out of the aforementioned World War Z which looks to have stripped out all the tension and ideas of morality in the face of a world-wide epidemic in favor of Brad Pitt) and that definitely extends to the 30th Anniversary Zombie-Viper. Hasbro really let their designers off their leash with this guy and even if you’re not a fan of zombies in your Joe line (even though they’ve been there since Eco-Warriors), you really should give this figure a chance. Just like a real zombie in a nice, safe-looking room, he just might surprise you.

The base of the Zombie-Viper comes from the Pursuit of Cobra Shock Trooper and it’s a really great choice. It’s a nice, non-descript mold that still looks pretty military. Honestly, I’d love to see Hasbro release the Zombie-Viper but with non-zombified parts since I think it would be a really cool Cobra Technician, you know the guys that do the grunt work around the base but are still trained to fight. However, once you get past the main body, you see just how much work Hasbro’s design team put in on this guy. His lower arms, lower legs and head are all new since it’d be pretty hard to make a zombie trooper of any type with existing tooling. The detailing on these pieces is incredible. The Hasbro designers did a great job at making this guy look dead without looking too gory so it could be sold on store shelves, though the paint scheme really does help tone down the gore factor as well.  The articulation is spot on and the Zombie-Viper also gets balljointed wrists so you can have him in the typical zombie outstretched, clawing hands pose. Going even further, Hasbro posed each hand differently so it really sells that these Zombie-Vipers are just grasping madly at whatever is passing them. They could have just made two hands exactly the same, but they didn’t and I really appreciate it. His bare feet also look very realistic and again, Hasbro went the extra mile and posed each foot differently as opposed to making them look the same. I find myself really liking the slightly mangled look of his right foot. It continues with the idea that zombies don’t feel anything and will keep shambling on even if with what normal people would consider injuries. Both his arms and legs also have exposed musculature from where skin has rotted off, however, on mine, the paintjob really doesn’t do a good job at bringing those details out. The head is where Hasbro really spent some time making these guys look nasty. The front, back and both sides of the head are all rotted out to varying degrees, with skin having sloughed off revealing bare muscle beneath. The sunken eyes look sinister yet vacant, which is exactly what you’re looking for in a good zombie head sculpt and he’s even missing a tooth in his upper jaw which is a nice detail to have added. On the top of his head, you can see that the decay has gone even deeper because not only has the flesh rotted off, but so has the muscle. You can see the cranial sutures on the top of his head and that’s just incredible.

Accessorizing a figure like the Zombie-Viper is a tough thing to do since zombies aren’t known for carrying rifles or anything like that into battle. However, with a little ingenuity, Hasbro gave us some absolutely awesome pieces that fit with the idea of a weaponized zombie. First of all, the Zombie-Viper gets a brand new piece of webgear. To me, it looks like a restraint harness, something Dr. Mindbender would definitely want when dealing with zombified soldiers. However, it looks like the Zombie-Viper broke loose and ripped itself free from its holding cell. On the back of the webgear are four ports which its accessory of a Compound Z canister can attach to. The Compound Z canister attaches to both the harness and the back of the helmet and is how Cobra turns its unsuspecting victims into zombies. My only complaint here is that when Hasbro first showed this figure off at Joe Con, he had three  canisters. Each canister could also attach to the helmet because there are three holes in back of the helmet as well. The helmet is a nice piece and looks appropriately sci-fi with a large glass front and a metal piece running across the base for its rebreather. I do think the original three canister configuration looked a lot cooler. I wound up with an extra Zombie-Viper because the only way I could get the rest of his casemates was to order another full case online so one Zombie-Viper is wearing a helmet and has two Compound Z bulbs in its helmet and the other is helmetless. I really think even if Hasbro had only been able to get us two, it would have made the figure look a lot cooler. (Just a side note, the photos of my Zombie-Viper were taken before I randomly wound up with two in my collection so that’s why the helmet only has one bulb attached to it.) The Zombie-Viper’s final accessory is something outside the box for Hasbro and I love it. Drawing a page from games like Resident Evil, the Zombie-Vipers have mutated. After a certain amount of exposure to Compound Z, their limbs begin to change and so you can swap out the Zombie-Viper’s lower arms with a second set of monstrous, tentacle arms. A lot of larger-scale lines have done interchangeable heads and arms for a while, but this is the first foray into that territory for Hasbro and I really find myself liking it. I’ll freely admit, I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the “mutated zombie” angle, but after having had the figure for a while, I also have to admit, the mutated arms look really cool. What sold them for me was the attention to detail. Even though they’re mutated, both arms have the same basic structure as human hands, just elongated and with tentacles for fingers. Once I realized that, I could accept it and really do like having the option to have the Zombie-Viper on display in both configurations on my display shelf.

To make the Zombie-Viper a little more palatable for store shelves, the Hasbro team really went out of its way to cut out the gore. The uniform is a nice, pale shade of green and it’s something I can see as a cheap, disposable jumpsuit that Cobra would buy for its workers or test subjects. The skin is painted gray and that works for me as a zombie color. However, the highlight color used for the gory bits is a vibrant blue. In universe it makes sense. The Compound Z canisters that came with the Hazard Viper are a similar color so it’s not blood or tissue we’re necessarily seeing, but rather Compound Z dripping from their open wounds. Unfortunately, the application of the blue is pretty hit or miss. While I was reviewing the Zombie-Viper, I noticed that on his legs and arms you have spots of exposed muscle like you do on the face. However, on the face that got accented with a nearly perfectly placed application of that blue but on the limbs they just put a stripe on that area. Honestly, until I was looking at it, I’d just assumed it was something like a glowing blue vein, which is pretty impressive, but I wish they’d done a better job at getting the blue to match up with the places it was meant to go. I also find myself a little disappointed that his hair isn’t colored. Yes, I’m sure that was done to dehumanize the Zombie-Viper but they went to the trouble of sculpting it and I really would have liked to have seen him get a hair color of some sort. Heck, cheap easy variant, Hasbro—blonde, brown, and black-haired Zombie-Vipers. I’m sure some collectors out there would have scoured the market for multiple Zombie-Vipers just to get a different hair color…in fact, I’m not much of an army builder, but I wouldn’t have minded in the least if there had been hair color options for the Zombie-Viper. I really do like the paint scheme Hasbro used here and it did allow Hasbro to release something this gory for the mass market by simply making it look completely inhuman. However, there’s a part of me that wouldn’t have minded a gorier version as well. The Zombie-Viper came out shortly before JoeCustoms did its annual “Customs Celebration” that year and one of the activities is creating “Virtual Con Sets” where you part out the figures for a con set based around a theme. I used Zombie-Vipers vs. Mega-Marines for a theme involving Cobra experiments gone wrong and got a lot of positive feedback for the idea of using Zombie-Vipers as a troop builder in a con set but with a more realistic and gory paint job since you could get away with it there.

When I first saw the references to Compound Z on the Hazard Viper file card, I was a little unimpressed. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Hasbro jumping on the zombie bandwagon just because it was hot (though, admittedly, that’s better than using sparkly vampires). However, much like the  original Toxo-Zombie, they managed to find a way to make the concept fit into the Joe mythos. Hasbro being willing to do that rather than just say “Suddenly…zombies!” made me a little more confident in the concept. After seeing the nearly flawless execution, I was sold. I’ve always enjoyed the science fiction aspects of G.I. Joe, and honestly,  considering Cobra has a man running around who is the amalgamation of the DNA of all of history’s greatest conquerors, is branching into bio-warfare and accidentally creating a zombie virus any more of a stretch? I don’t think so and if a figure is well-executed, I’m more than willing to stretch the realms of believability in my Joe universe. I’ve never been a strictly-military Joe guy anyway, so if you can find a logical way to bring in zombies, then bring it on as long as it gets me a good figure too. Hasbro really killed it on the execution of this figure in my opinion, and even if you’re not a fan of the concept of Zombie-Vipers, remember, they existed in the ARAH line too and give this guy a shot…I’m pretty sure you won’t be disappointed.