In 2014 at the Dallas GI Joe Convention I brought a diorama entry called Save the Endangered Pygmy Rhino. You can read about it here.

For 2024, Greg Brown asked me if we could revive the set to commemorate that original diorama, sold as a boxed set with cover art, the works.

So I set to work. Greg got some of the same Rhino, and got an outfit made. I updated a few pieces since the designs were old and imperfect. But nothing major had to be done.

The one thing we didn’t do was cut the horn off the rhino. My original set was intended as a conservation effort. Remove the rhino’s horn and put a prosthetic in place so poachers would have no reason to kill the rhino. The prosthetic included solar chargers, GPS and cameras to track poachers.

It wasn’t practical to cut the horns off these toy rhinos, so instead I created a tracking cuff that could be attached to the rhino’s horn. I used rhinestones as camera lenses.

The result was sold at the GI Joe show in 2024.

Here you see the final product.

As in the original Dallas Diorama, the set includes a tranquilizing bazooka with four tranq darts; a box to store the darts; an aerial surveillance drone; a drone charger/launcher/backpack; a control tablet; and two Rhino Horn Tracker cuffs.

For this set I used a larger drone than the one Cotswold has been offering for many years. This drone is the original design, and original scale. The backpack charger needed some small improvements, including my new harness. It also uses a shiny blue card-stock printed solar panel. The ammo box had improvements made too.

The box now has a vertical sliding holder to fit 2 Rhino Horn Tracker cuffs. You pull up on the rod and it brings up the trackers.

I had to make some revisions to the comic, since the whole story has changed. I updated the safari outfit, but also had to redraw parts that referred to the cutting off of the horn and replacing it with a prosthetic. Instead I show them just attaching the new tracking cuff. I also updated it with the Huxter Labs logo since that didn’t exist when I first made this comic. The original was an Adventure Team theme, for the 50th of GI Joe.