got my grubby little mitts on this today!...lots of pics!

[The Baron]

Have a gold star.

[Red Laser]

Where is it?

[Dave Tree]

The Palitoy designers must of taken a leaf out of the Hasbro designers book when it came to building this thing, the detail & moulding of this, & the rest of the same years vehicles, are miles ahead of the early non Joe repainted vehicles.

The Sealion completely outclasses anything Hasbro were producing by this point in my view. It, along with the Roboskull are my favourite Action Force vehicles. Although the original AF vehicles may be bulky and cumbersome by comparison, they were pioneering the asthetic. By the time of the Sealion, the teams and scale were established. That said though, the same conceptual team responsible for the AF3, AF7 etc also envisaged the beginnings of the Sealion (the team were not employees of Palitoy, but rather one of their retained design consultancies), but it's final appearance is actually more a culmination of several concepts chosen by Palitoy combined into one.

The engineering though and the tooling are second to none, with the assembly neatly hiding split lines, joints and clips. It's incredibly slick and a work of art as far as toy design goes.

The staggering and saddest part though is that this was potentially the standard of things to come, but with funding cut off in 1984, further projects were effectivley shelved in favor of importing more of the Joe product.

Dave.

[The Baron]

Where is it?

What?

[Red Laser]

Where is it?

What?

The gold star.

[The Baron]

Oh for...

I don't give out gold stars for pedantry, I was being sarcastic.

[Red Laser]

Ohhhhhh...........please? I wasn't being pedantic though.

[The Baron]

Actually, you were.

No.

[SteveD]

I'm 99% sure they came unapplied, the piece in the archives must have been disassembled for the shoot. I think SteveD provided the sticker sheet scan, so he'd know.

Interesting to note that the instructions depict two guns and two aeriels in the top left corner, that's definitely an error.

I'm not entirely sure about that Baron - mine seems to have a spare gun, and I've also struggled to decide where it goes. It's mine from when i was young too, so highly unlikely I picked up a spare.

My Sealion is sadly on its way to it's new owner now ( ) but I'm 99% certain that it came totally sticker free, and that the decals then needed to be added. Perhaps the Mystery New Owner may be good enough to check and let us know?

[scoobydie]

Not sure if this helps, but I had this slip of paper in with my Sealion box.

And there are no stickers on the vehicle, this is the later version with the jointed driver (gone now)