When the kids who were obsessed with Duke, Snake Eyes, and Scarlett watch G.I. Joe as adults,
they probably notice some things. From the stuff that’s even better than you remember,
to the episodes that are just too weird, here are the things only adults notice in G.I. Joe.
The opening credits of every episode of G.I. Joe describe Cobra as "a
ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world."
But when you go back to the show as an adult, it's easy to see them as a little less "terrorist" and
a little more "corporate America." Sure, they occasionally pull off schemes like building a
machine that will literally burn up all the money in the world or stashing nuclear missiles at fast
food restaurants, but structurally speaking, they really have more in common with Amazon than ISIS.
That mostly comes through in the comics, where we learn that Cobra Commander got his start
basically running a pyramid scheme, and lured potential sleeper agents into joining his cause
by offering competitive salaries and even health insurance, complete with a dental plan.
Of course, the dentistry had to be done by Dr. Mindbender, whose standard uniform of cape,
giant metal codpiece, and zero shirts might make you reconsider getting treatment for all
but the most painful toothaches, but benefits are benefits, folks. The cartoon, however,
follows along, and the glimpses that we get of Cobra Corporate show that
they actually treat their employees way better than the good guys do.
Take "The Viper Is Coming," for instance, an episode based on the classic playground
joke of receiving an ominous phone call informing you that "the viper is coming," -
"Hello?"
"Mr. Barbeque, this is The Viper."
"The Viper?"
...only for a friendly, heavily accented maintenance man to show up to "vipe the vindows."
While the Joes scramble around trying to locate the mysterious "Viper," they wind
up uncovering a secret Cobra facility at the South Pole devoted entirely to recreation.
Cobra's soldiers are allowed to swim and play table tennis in the Cobra Commander Gymnasium,
grab a meal at the Destro Dining Room, and even catch a performance by a dance
company called the Cobra Cuties. It's so thoroughly pleasant that it's kind
of easy to see why so many people could get past the whole "overthrow America" thing.
Referring to Cobra as in any way realistic is a pretty huge stretch,
but there's one aspect of the organization that seems pretty authentic: They're always broke.
It makes sense that they would be, too. HISS Tanks and Weather Dominators don't come cheap.
"5 BILLION?
By the serpent Gods of the Netherworld, how do you expect me to raise 5 billion dollars?!"
The thing is, you never really see Mumm-Ra or the Decepticons having to figure out their budgets.
With Cobra, it's what they're doing most of the time. Sinister plots like the attempted
robbery of Fort Knox are all about securing funding for other, even more improbable plots.
By the time the show gets to the latter half of its second season,
things are getting so dire for Cobra that they're forced to have a straight-up telethon
where they beg for donations from the rest of the international terrorist community.
When you're watching Destro having to put on a cheap tuxedo and awkwardly beg
vaguely offensive stereotypes for charity, you know things have gotten pretty rough.
Speaking of Cobra's increasingly improbable fundraising tactics,
one of their more audacious schemes came when they attempted to steal the entire state of Alaska.
It happens in the appropriately titled episode "The Great Alaskan Land Rush," which revolves
around Cobra discovering an obscure provision in William Seward's purchase of Alaska from Russia
in 1867. The big idea is that whoever has the state seal of Alaska is the state's true owner,
so Cobra gets their hands on a passable fake and then declares
ownership of the state. As a kid, when your entire life is governed by seemingly
arbitrary rules about nap time and chores, this makes perfect sense.
"Who the Sam Hill are you?"
"The new owner of Alaska hockey puck! Get away from my desk!"
As an adult, however, this doesn't seem like a well-considered plan.
You may already know this from the entirety of history, but claiming ownership of a massive
chunk of land that has been considered to be part of another country for 120 years is slightly
more difficult than just showing up with a fancy teacup. No matter how nice your accessories are,
that tends to prompt things like massive direct military action that goes a lot further than just
sending four dudes with laser guns to chase you around the tundra for 20 minutes.
Believe it or not, the attempt to Ocean's Eleven Alaska is not
Cobra's most ridiculous plot. That dubious honor would likely go to "Cold Slither,"
the episode about a band named Cold Slither and their hit song..."Cold Slither."
For the kids in the audience, this might seem like one of Cobra's more deviously
subtle plans for world domination. The bad guys disguise the Dreadnoks as a hair metal band and
use an evil supercomputer to lace their music with mind-controlling subliminal messages that
hypnotize their listeners into absolute obedience to Cobra. On paper, this is a pretty good plan,
and it even works on a couple of the ridiculously loyal, eternally patriotic Joes, who become
mindless zombies after about four seconds of listening to it, leaving the rest of the
team to puzzle through the mystery of why they've suddenly got a handful of traitors on their hands.
"And they just kept saying Cold Slither, Cold Slither, Cold Slither!"
"Sounds like Cobra stuff to me!"
Once you grow up and revisit the episode, however, the plot isn't quite as covert as it seemed the
first time around. For one thing, the Dreadnoks already kind of look like a hair metal band,
so dressing them up as a slightly different hair metal band is not the best disguise. Second,
and probably more importantly, "Cold Slither" is about as subliminal as a brick to the head.
The actual, explicit lyrics of the song include,
"We're Cold Slither, you'll be joining us soon / A band of vipers playing our tune,"
Freedom of expression is obviously very important, but if Taylor Swift dropped
a hot new track about how listeners should swear loyalty to a terrorist organization,
it probably wouldn't get a whole lot of radio play.
At heart, G.I. Joe is a franchise based around a sort of sci-fi
military aesthetic. For the most part, all of the Joes' playset-ready equipment are all based
on real-world counterparts. Cobra, on the other hand, gets a little weirder with it,
but at the end of the day, everything tends to line up with the real world.
Well, until they start fighting ghosts and monsters, that is.
Yeah, it turns out that in the world of G.I. Joe, the supernatural is a 100 percent real problem
that the United States military has to address. It's not even in some secret Area 51 sort of way,
either - it happens all the time. Cobra summons ghosts to fight their battles for them, the Joes
straight-up have to fight Set, the falcon-headed Egyptian god of fire, and Destro literally has
gigantic, shambling, Lovecraftian horror in the basement of his ancestral home that his family
has been worshiping through human sacrifice for centuries. And that's before you get to the movie
and the twist that Cobra Commander was a snake-man from a hidden society of actual monsters.
If you go back and watch an episode of a show like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,
you probably wouldn't be surprised to find that it's almost unbearably simple
and padded out with recycled shots of characters just running around for no reason. After all,
it's another one of those toy commercial cartoons, and since those things only had to be good enough
to get kids interested in action figures, they were all kind of simplistic and bad, right?
Wrong. Well, not about Masters of the Universe. That thing is pretty atrocious.
"Ready Boys?"
"Ready!"
"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"
G.I. Joe, on the other hand, could be shockingly smart and well-crafted, especially for a show that
was mostly built around the simplistic premise of good guys fighting bad guys.
"Never tell anyone you're home alone and never give anyone your address."
"I'll say Mom can't come to the phone!"
"Smart thinking!"
"Now I know!"
Just look at "Cobra's Candidate," an episode where introducing a new
action figure is a secondary to teaching children that politicians are lying to you.
The premise seems simple enough. Thanks to his hawkish, 'law and order' platform,
mayoral candidate Robert Harper has become a target for Cobra, with the Commander's
minions intimidating voters and demanding that they support his bleeding heart, soft-on-crime
opponent. G.I. Joe has been tasked with protecting him, which seems like a pretty standard setup.
Except that it actually turns out that it's Harper himself who's in bed with Cobra,
and the "attacks" are just a tactic to get sympathy from voters and make him
seem like he's capable of dealing with a crisis that doesn't exist,
all while profiting from fear. Sure, it's a fantastical story, but as adults, we're pretty
impressed by the show illustrating how democracy can be twisted by the ruthless and power hungry.
"Welcome aboard Mr. Harper,
I'm not sure you can vote for yourself in jail - we'll have to ask a judge."
Not all of G.I. Joe's adult-oriented details have to do with goofy quirks - some of them
are downright horrifying, like the two-part saga of "There's No Place Like Springfield",
which contains some pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel.
The episode was heavily inspired by the surreal 1966 British series The Prisoner,
in which a former spy is confined to a mysterious island called "The Village,"
where he's psychologically tortured in elaborate,
occasionally dreamlike scenarios in an effort to break him and discover his secrets. You know,
exactly the sort of thing you'd want to adapt into a 22-minute toy commercial.
In G.I. Joe's version, scripted by famously offbeat comic book writer Steve Gerber,
Shipwreck wakes up after a mission to find himself as an older man who's been retired from the Joes
for years, but has no memory of the intervening time. He's confronted with both a family that he
doesn't remember having and other retired Joes, some of whom blame him for Lady Jaye's death.
While he suspects something is wrong with the whole scenario, it isn't until he watches people
melt into puddles of goo in front of him that viewers learn the whole thing is a plot by Cobra
to make him give up classified information by putting him in a village full of "synthoids
[SIN-thoyds]." Eventually he makes it through okay, but the episode left plenty of viewers
thinking about it and discovering new layers to the psychodrama as they grew to adulthood.
The extensive cast of G.I. Joe is explicitly designed to be large and inclusive enough so
that every kid can have their favorite character. The big reason for this is, of course, to sell
more action figures, but it has the pleasant side effect of giving the show a level of diversity
that's still pretty impressive over 30 years later - even though everybody's favorite is Snake Eyes.
With all these characters, almost every Joe gets some kind of spotlight over the course
of the series, from Lady Jaye being swept up in the Gothic horror of Destro's basement
to the genuinely disturbing implications of Low-Light's abusive childhood.
However, a few characters don't come off that great. For proof,
check out "The Most Dangerous Thing in the World," where the producers clearly decided
that Dial-Tone and Lifeline were not and would never be anyone's favorite characters,
and that they could go ahead and do an entire episode about how much they sucked at their jobs.
As part of an attempt to destroy the Joes' morale, Cobra hacks into their personnel system,
picks the three worst candidates for leadership, and promotes them all to the rank of colonel.
Lifeline, a pacifist who comes off like a whiny parody written by someone who
truly hates nonviolence, doesn't want the job -
"Oh no, this is terrible!"
"What's wrong? Been transferred?"
"No, worse! I've been promoted!"
...and Dial-Tone, who's basically a human radio, wants the job but is terrible at it. So the entire
episode is about them screwing up so disastrously that everyone almost dies multiple times. Weirdly
enough, while he seems like he got the worst of it when we watched while we were kids,
Shipwreck - who had neither the ability nor the desire and is therefore the perfect
millennial hero - comes off in retrospect as the coolest person on the entire team.
With the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it seems like everyone's trying
to build a sprawling, interconnected franchise that spans multiple genres as a unified whole. The
DC characters have had mixed results with a film franchise and a weirdly complicated TV universe,
and while they started with a premise as simple as "Frankenstein and Dracula know each other,"
Universal has failed to launch their monstrous version twice.
The thing is, G.I. Joe was knocking that stuff out back in '85.
See, there's a character named Hector Ramirez, a TV journalist who once
interviewed Cobra Commander and popped up in a few episodes, usually for the sake of exposition.
"Good evening! Tonight's big story - is one of America's elite GI Joe team a traitor?!"
The thing is, Ramirez also showed up in The Transformers and on Jem and the Holograms,
meaning that those shows all take place in the same Hasbro universe.
But wait, it gets weirder. Inhumanoids, a show about giant subterranean monsters
who rise up from an underground kingdom to destroy the world, also features Ramirez,
and one of the characters on the show is implied to be a Joe named Brad Armbruster
who changed his codename from Ace to Sabre Jet when he got into the monster-fighting business.
It doesn't stop there. COPS, a show about super-police dealing with the scourge of cyborg
gangsters and fighting crime in a future time is set in the same universe, too. Dig deep enough,
and there's probably a connection between the cast of My Little Pony somewhere in there, also.
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