The Tyco Dagger is the US/Western version of the original Japanese Taiyo Dagger, with the benefit of Tyco's improved style and artistry in their packaging and box art.
How does it work?
If you look closely at the photos and artistry, you can see on the side of the vehicle a range from red, orange, then yellow. Along this range is a lever with various notches, allowing you to set the vehicle in the mode that you prefer.
- Speed Zone
- Stunt Zone
- Extreme Wheelie Zone
Moving the lever back and forth actually moves the entire battery pack, since that's the heaviest part of the car, allowing you to adjust the vehicles center of gravity rather ingeniously.
With the pack fully back, the car will raise up on it's rear wheels anytime you move forward, and lever fully forward it will tend to stay flat on the ground. Allowing kids to experiment with this provides much of the fun factor.
Design and Features
Functionally, it's a unique stunt dragster that was fun for its raw acceleration and its adjustable wheelie system. While it's not to everyone's taste, personally these mid-90s Tyco boxes with the incredible artwork and open-window boxes are amongst the most desirable RC collectors items I can think of.
Like the Taiyo version, the Tyco Dagger was engineered with a single-minded focus on grabbing the attention of children back, even momentarily, from the video game consoles which had consumed much of their market, and which would ultimately lead to the demise of both Taiyo RC and Tyco RC.
Conclusion
Whatever you think of the Dagger and the other outlandish designs of this era, you have to admit that they obviously put everything they had into these last few models, and many of them were very successful - particularly the Rebound 4x4, Triple Wheels, and the Python and Fire Power, with all four being translated to Tyco and marketed in the USA.
Based on the number of Tyco Dagger and Taiyo Dagger models still around today, both used and new-in-box, it seems the Dagger was successful enough to be produced in large quantities, and also spawned a sort-of successor, the Dagger SC which is a shortened version of this original.
