what does it accelerate?

I've purchased a lot of GI Joes in the last couple of months. Thanks to prices that are 30-40% cheaper than this summer, I bought all the figures I wanted for a tidy price of $5-6 each. One of those was this fellow here, Duke in the Delta-6 Accelerator Suit.

A lot of GI Joe fans who saw these in the trailers didn't like them, and matters weren't helped any when, on the DVD/Blu-Ray special features, the director of the film Stephen Sommers basically admitted to putting the Delta-6 suit in the film to satisfy his own ambitions from a failed 25 year old script about a super suit that did pretty much exactly what these suits did in the Joe flick. I really liked the idea of such a suit, especially growing up as a fan of the old Sunbow GI Joe cartoon. I was glad to see some tech for the Joes that wasn't another damn box with a beam emitter.

This 3.75" figure recreates the look of that suit fairly well. Hasbro are kings of this scale, and there's lots of sculpted detail here. The paint is, well, modern Hasbro. They never really paint anything as well as they should, skimping on one thing or another that would make every figure absolutely awesome. The suit in the film was black and silver, and this is mostly black with some silver detailing, but not near as much as the Ripcord in the Accelerator suit figure, which this body is borrowed from. I wonder what it would look like if the silver on this figure was given the same silver treatment as Destro's head from the movie line.

The articulation is also modern Hasbro, and that's a compliment this time. The figure moves in all the places you'd expect a modern GI Joe to move, and does so without any trouble or impediment. The accessories include a helmet, two weapons to attach to his or Ripcord's arms, a rifle, and a stupid big missile launcher that I threw in a storage bag and forgot about, just like all the other stupid big guns that came with figures in this line.

This is one of those figures that's not from the first three waves, so it isn't exactly an easy find. Keep looking, true believer, or just buy it here. Hasbro's own site is three dollars more expensive per figure than Wal-Mart, where I bought all of my Joes lately (at $5 each) but it beats fruitless searches at retail. It's one of my favorite figures from this line, and I'd recommend picking it up if you find it. Unless of course you hate the accelerator suit.