Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Ready, Aim, Animate

2025-Feb-17

What we will be talking about on the blog today might be the most childish subject yet. That level was already low, with sophomoric thuds like Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man. Movies that have no reason worth mentioning decades later other than my personal musings about how they affected me when I was a very passive yet absorbing audience between birth and preteen years.

Today what will be discussed is the 1986 animated feature film GI Joe: The Movie. The nearly ninety minute cinematic production that was not released to movie theaters. That fact would have made no difference to me. I did not know who GI Joe was until several years after the movie was released. That was not for a lack of trying though. It was a film I had seen only glimpses of on TV. Or possibly on a recorded VHS cassette at a friend’s house. Exactly how I do not remember. What I do remember is knowing I never saw the whole thing and knew it sounded like it was awesome.

By the time I was making an earnest effort to wake up early on Saturday mornings to watch the full gamut of cartoons available to me (especially the ones that lend themselves well to really cool toys) GI Joe was already out of print. So to speak. GI Joe had its heyday around the time I was born. What I experienced through toys, animated shorts, and even a few Marvel comics, in the early 90s was an aftershock to a much larger sensation from a decade prior. Was GI Joe one of the actual Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood schedule? I can not rightly remember. To me it was an agglomeration of media, with the toys being the standouts.

As I recall, GI Joe was one of the few toy lines that I went hard on collecting. Most other toy lines I had just one member as part of my cast of toys. There would only be one Ninja Turtle, or one Thundercat, but there was usually a bunch of GI Joes. I watched more Ninja Turtles and Thundercats on TV. Much more compared to GI Joe. Yet that was not reflected in my toy choices.

Despite what I watched was an already finished cheaply made second volume of GI Joe cartoons (with a smattering of the original 80s ones), nothing about the series felt dated. The slight step into the future the GI Joe world had in the 1980s was close enough to something that would have been produced in the early 90s. Series like Space Ghost, Birdman, or the ones about the stone age family that had bizarre megafauna pets such as a rhino-caterpillar that would shoot projectiles from its horn. The Herculoids is what they were called, if you want to look that up yourself.

Those series were smudged with the crudeness of pre-1980s animation, which I do not think was believable enough for something other than slapstick comedy. GI Joe and most cartoons made for kids after the mid 1980s passed my standards of pleasing animated techniques. That is not to say there are no examples of quality animation before the 1980s. What my untrained child’s eye could discern was cheapness in the animation made for regular TV programming targeted for children. After cartoons started to become broadcast on television rather than presented as shorts between full length features in movie theaters, they became more centered on a children audience. Along with that, producers must have felt they could animate on the cheap with the kids not caring.

I was not one of the swilling masses willing to accept the tripe Hanna Barbera, and the like, was offering. Sometimes Huckleberry Hound or some other starkly cheap stuff would be good for a quick laugh. Not when it came to non-comedy. Even young Fred wanted top notch animation when the content was a purely visual spectacle. Contemporary Fred is of the same opinion.

That is what spurred me to write a blog post about a non-theatrical animated feature geared for children, released before my childhood. It had way better animation than what I was expecting! GI Joe show was often the victim of either forced schedules or budget cuts. As a child even I could notice which episodes were the rushed cheap ones. When I clicked on the YouTube link for the entire movie on a whim, I was expecting to garner enjoyment from mocking the cheap and/or rushed production. That was immediately not the case.

The first three-minutes of the movie are of the utmost quality. Frames full of heavy shifts in movement. Complicated action scenes that change in perspective. Huge numbers of moving parts. This was cinematic anime good, and was consistent all the way through. Everything you could want in a cartoon production! Well, everything young Fred could want.

Adult Fred, who finally came around to watching this movie decades after learning of it, found himself curious about the pulp fiction world building the script brought forth in the last half. It answers the big question as to why Cobra, the globe-trotting terrorist organization with divisions of trained soldiers in their employ, exists at all! I had expected the plot to be a long episode, with Cobra doing their thing. Executing some bold plan that holds the world hostage until the GI Joe team can settle their hash. Instead we get the genesis for the series itself.

Turns out Cobra is spawned by a pre-human civilization that descended from reptiles. This reptile kingdom used biological technology, improving their standard of living by engineering the processes of living creatures to serve their purposes rather than synthetic tools. This lizard people kingdom saw early man spring forth from the mammals of their time, using tools instead of other creatures. I suppose I trailed off, but this lizard kingdom was ushered into an underground existence while humanity flourished- somehow. Cobra Commander was an emissary sent by this underground empire of reptiles. Oh and the lizard society seems to be led by a humanoid looking scientist that creates these humanoids to go out to the surface world to start their global conquest.

Serpentor was the leader at the beginning of the movie. As a kid I was never sure who that guy was. He did not show up too often in my childhood viewings. To be honest I was a little upset whenever the leader of Cobra was a dude in a snake costume. Cobra Commander gave the show the last shred of realism. Keeping all the villains human kept the show as a proxy for the real world in my child brain. To the young me, GI Joe was supposed to be a sensationalized example of the US military fighting ‘the bad guys’, who are other humans with military equipment. Having an ancient snake guy was a twist into the fantastic I already had plenty of in other cartoons.

A standout memory I have of catching some of this movie on a television broadcast was the subplot of Cobra Commander devolving into Snake while he and Road Block are stuck together on a cross country trek. I remember being moved by the voice actor’s wilting voice as he tried to remind himself he once was a man, not a snake. Still lands on me today. It was nice to see Cobra Commander get his comeuppance on the stentorian talking Serpentor.

The stellar animation is what pulled me into the movie. This Lovecraftian level of design for the second half is what kept me going. I have had the privilege of seeing so many of the shows and movies I heard about as a kid but never got a chance to watch.The magic of the internet has made finding old media a routine task. It has also shown me that a lot of what I was missing was not that great. Or worse, it would have been great to young me. Old me has moved past when he could enjoy it. GI Joe broke that mold and held me all the way to the credits.

I wanted to see Sergeant Slaughter wrestle the stygian ubermensch that the evil scientist created to be his enforcer. I wanted to see tanks fight giant centipedes in stadium sized caverns that lead to mushroom forests populated with trees that suck blood. This movie went hard on the serialized pulp adventures. This movie was watching the height of the Cold War defense industry output fight insectoid kaijus.

Not all of the movie was a rose garden. Snake Eyes, or ninjas at all, hardly make any appearance; let alone any impact to the story. Almost every GI Joe hero is one of the square jawed white dudes with a side part haircut. With names like Hawk, Duke, or Flint. I had trouble staying aware of who was who among those boring names and bland designs. That was a complaint I had as a kid as well. I was more partial to the characters with more flamboyant uniforms and names. Beachhead. Tunnel Rat. Road Block was kinda generic, but as the only black dude, he was easy to stand out in the crowd.

The more glamorous variety among Cobra made them more appealing to me. I have the vague idea that toy executives as well knew this, and that is why the 90s GI Joe went more in the techo-war approach with specialist Joes rather than a bevy of Robert Redford looking Col. Blocks. The 90s had ninjas, underwater, chemical, or whatever special types of war fighters, not just John Wayne stand-ins.

I liked GI Joe as a choose your own soldier part of being an army working together. The stuff going on around that idea was just window dressing for what I got out of GI Joe. There was not a longing inside me for a reason as to why Cobra was making trouble. I was cool with the status quo that GI Joe are the ‘good guys’ who are a diverse group of skilled professionals that work well as a team, who fight an equally diverse set of ‘bad guys’ that are just as skilled but somehow find themselves on the losing side. Usually because they do not work as well as a team as the Joes do. Probably because Cobra are the bad guys, and thus have some flaw that thwarts them at every turn. Also non-American accents.