Agent Helix

Height: 10cm to top of head.

Articulation: 22 points total- ball-jointed neck; 5 points each arm: universal joint shoulder, universal-joint elbow, forearm swivel; mid-torso ball joint; 5 points each leg: ball-joint hip, double-joint knee, universal joint ankle.

Colors: Molded black, gray, silvery gray, yellow, fleshtone, and transparent blue. Painted black, yellow, light tan, silver, and fleshtone.

Accessories: 10mm autopistol x2, rifle, knife, Missile Launcher w/missile, stand.

Author: RAC

(more...)

Agent Helix is a Covert Operations Officer with advanced martial arts training and expert marksmanship. An olympic-class gymnast, her distinctive "Whirlwind Attack" is an overpowering combination of kicks and firepower.

As I've mentioned before, one of Hasbro's traits that I consider extremely positive is that they use everything. Obscure characters from other countries, background "generics" you only see once- and more recently, video game characters. Helix is one of these, created by software developer Double Helix (hmm...) for the Rise of Cobra videogame. Though all that I've heard about the game is middling-to-negative, the reaction to the Agent Helix figure has been universally positive.
...well, except for her hair.


The Figure

You can spot a non-movie Rise of Cobra figure from a mile away: they're the ones with color. With a bit of bright yellow to break up RoC's sea of gray and black and muted urban camouflage, Helix's outfit looks like a good middle ground between Real American Hero's love of "neon" and Hollywood's preoccupation with black leather and vinyl. (Probably why she wound up in both the RoC game and the RAH comics.) While at first I thought the figure had a quasi-"Chainmail Bikini" effect going on, it occurs to me that most of the black parts are not armor so much as braces- as a martial artist/gymnast/refugee-from-a-John-Woo-movie, these things could be extremely helpful. So with this eye, the fetishy-looking parts of the outfit come into focus as something less fetishy: she's wearing a back brace, knee pads and a kidney belt because she expects to be doing a lot of moving and fighting.

Now if I could just come up with an adequate explanation to make the hair look good.

The hair is the weak point of the design to me- I've never been big on two-tone streaked hair in real life, particularly when those tones are very blonde and very black. I just think it looks dumb and tacky. And on the figure, this streaking isn't executed very well. The sloppiness of the lighter paint doesn't help, and since Hasbro's not going to do a super-detailed paintjob on the hair of a figure this small what you end up with is what looks like a black-haired woman who has just been hit directly in the hair with a custard pie. This is doubly a pity since Helix- not being based on a real person -has one of the better female face sculpts in the entire line.

The short hair helps neck range- swivel is unrestricted, and she can look up a bit more than Pilot Scarlett could. The arms are the standard jointing for modern Joes, and it's all used very effectively to boot. The shoulders get close to 180 degrees, and the elbow can close to a tight 45 degree angle. The forearm swivels aren't quite at the wrist, since her sleeves don't reach there either- they left room for that tiny, mysterious bandage. The gray stripes on the sleeves are positioned what I consider sideways; the elbows move straight out to the sides when the stripes on the upper and lower arms align. It's a minor thing but I still wish they hadn't done that.

The kidney belt makes for a great, natural place to put the torso joint. It swivels perfectly and can lean forward a bit- just enough to be noticeable. It doesn't really move any further back from the default position, because Helix appears to be sculpted with her back arched to begin with. The hip joints work very well; she can sit without difficulty and come within mere degrees of a full split. However, this is the second figure I've run into with one weak hip joint, and in Helix's case you can't really blame that on mold degradation, so this may be a flaw of the metal ball-joint system GI Joe figures still use. The pouches on her belt are nice and flexible, and pose no difficulty getting out of the way of her legs. The knees get the maximum range physically possible, folding into a perfect U with calf touching thigh. Her ankles are just as good in both directions, and she will balance leaning into her step in a variety of low stances. The articulation here is very close to the most you could ever get out of these joints.


Accessories

-Pistols

If you stripped these handguns of the extraneous techy bits around the barrel and the extended magazines, they'd look perfectly normal. I almost think I'd prefer normal ones, but that's not important. The guns are extremely thin- I don't think it's clear how thin until you look straight down the barrel. They fit in her hands well, though as is usually the case not quite as firmly as I'd really like. I'd really like my GI Joes to have an iron grip on the tiny accessories so they don't get lost, you know?

-Rifle

Behold: the Heckler and Koch G11, the most boring-looking rifle in the entire world! It's a rectangle with a handgrip, a sight, and a barrel. It fits securely in either hand, but the back end of the rectangle is just a bit too long for her to get a really good two-handed grip on the weapon.

-Knife

The same blunt-edged knife as Crimson Neo-Viper, and still lacking in paint. She holds it better in either hand than she does her favored pistols, and the angle of her grip looks very natural and right. Odd that it struck me, but there are more than a few toys that hold their weapons perfectly perpendicular to the arm, and that's not how real people hold real weapons at all.

-Missile Launcher

Okay, here's where I get a little self-contradictory: I actually like this weapon for being mostly rectangular. While Crimson Neo-Viper's Missile Launcher looks like a bloated, out-of-scale rifle of some sort this looks more like some kind of rocket launcher to me. And I like that. We're still facing the rubber handgrip problem, which doesn't make this particularly easy to hold. Not to mention that it's still huge relative to the figures. (Particularly Helix- she's kinda slender.) And the satellite dish-thing that attaches to the missile? Forget it- looks dumb, drags down the missile. But without it, the missile fires a solid ten feet. It's a good missile launcher, and on appearance I'd use it before CNV's in a heartbeat. It's also, as always, optional, so you can ignore it if you're so inclined.

-Stand

Same deal as CNV's stand, except with the new GI Joe logos on the reverse side of the dogtag. Not bad at all.


Closing Remarks

I can see why most GI Joe collectors seem to like this figure. Really, the attempt at an unusual hairstyle is the worst thing I can say about the toy. It's exemplary in articulation, and the accessories are all usable, even the big missile launcher. And she definitely stands out from the rest of the movie characters, which for me is a plus. Agent Helix is Excellent.

-RAC