From Cringe to Canon: ‘G.I. Joe’ Writer Buzz Dixon Is Finally at Peace With That Movie

Behold, the Cobra-La Corpus — a comprehensive dissection of G.I. Joe's most insidious adversaries. Considered divisive upon their introduction in 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie, the consensus around the secretive serpentine sect has evolved. From condemnation to celebration, let this unspooling body of work tell the tale.

I was likely five years old when I first saw G.I. Joe: The Movie, likely sometime in 1989, which was likely rented from the small video selection at Kroger's after mom finished grocery shopping. I thought I knew what I was getting into when that rented VHS tape clunked into the VCR. Good vs. evil! Laser blasts! Maybe some funny animals! Definitely lots of snappy patter!

What I got ... was Pythona. Emissary of Cobra-La. Herald of Golobulus. Assassin. High Priestess. Bad ass. In the most dazzling action sequence of the show's animated run (opening credits excluded), this lone, alien, cloaked figure blitzes a Cobra Terror Drome, meeting oncoming fire with ... eels? Clams?? Facehuggers??? This mysterious creature cuts through Cobra's rank and file without breaking a sweat (which, I imagine, would just be another weapon at her disposal).

Five-year-old me was not even sure he was allowed to see this. Never mind all the violence, including what may be considered the first kills in the show's animated history — was this lady naked? Considering my age at the time, Pythona's late '80s animated peers, my continued adoration of the character well into adulthood, and all the hindsight in the world ... Pythona might be the first diva that I ever worshipped.

This is the energy that I brought to my chat with Buzz Dixon, one of the most important names in the entire G.I. Joe universe. As a writer on Season 1 and writer/story editor of Season 2 and the feature film, there are very few people with a more sizable impact on the franchise. Was I nervous? Probably! But like Zarana in a blonde wig and sun dress, I managed to maintain my cool long enough to score the info I needed ("Duke took the film from my camera, but not from the Zoom folder on my work desktop computer").

What follows is a lengthy conversation with a true master of his craft, whose affability belies his deep well of knowledge. Our conversation touched everything from Lawrence of Arabia and old Hollywood, to the works of James Hilton, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, and also Alien. That's what it took to write G.I. Joe, a voracious appetite for literature and pop culture and the ability to channel all of that ... into a cartoon about a sci-fi army's war against a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.

This is one of those interviews that, without realizing it, I waited not only my whole career, but my whole life to conduct. With G.I. Joe: The Movie finally getting its long overdue flowers, what better time to strike?

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Brett White: I think the fans have really come around to a lot of the Cobra-La elements. And as someone who's always loved them, I wanted to give them a give them a spotlight.

Buzz Dixon: Thank you for that. For a long time, because of shortcomings in the animation, because of changes in the script and stuff like that, I wasn't happy with G.I. Joe: The Movie. But a few years ago, it finally had its official world premiere at the Hollywood Egyptian Theatre, a double feature with the Transformers movie, and I got to see it with fans. And I realized a lot of the stuff I had been cringing at over the decades was stuff that people liked. So I have come around and have made my peace with my past, so to speak, and I'm embracing the movie now.

I was born in 1984, so I say that I'm amongst a micro-generation of G.I. Joe fans. There are the ones who were, like, 10 when the movie came out. And then there are the ones who were really young when the movie came out. I grew up going to the grocery store video rental section, getting a pizza, every Friday night. My mom finally being like, "You rent this all the time, I'll just buy it." My generation is now of an age where we can actually speak up. It's a really well-done movie, and Pythona is a huge part of that for me, specifically because of that opening scene. People always say the opening credits are the best G.I. Joe has ever been.

Yeah, Larry Houston went nuts with that. And you got to give Larry credit: he gave the movie a high energy opening. Has nothing to do with the rest of the film, but it was a high energy opening, and it was just what the audience wanted. That's Larry. I have to give all the credit to Larry on that one.

The bar is set so high with that opening credit sequence, and then it oges right into Pythona's one-woman raid on the Terror Drome. It's one of the coolest character introductions in all of G.I. Joe. Where did the character come from?

Well, we have to backtrack a bit to the start of the second season of G.I. Joe, and Steve Gerber had moved on. I was now the story editor of G.I. Joe. Initially we only had 25 episodes to do and I had come up with an idea for a story I was going to call "The Most Dangerous Man in the World," which was going to be my take on the origin of Cobra. It was basically about the Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche of Cobra who Cobra Commander had kept locked up because Cobra Commander had gone so far afield from what this guy had espoused. And I did a treatment. I sent it in. It got approved by [executive producers] Tom [Griffin] and Joe [Bacal], and then it went over to Hasbro. And Hasbro sent back a note that said, "Great. Go to script. Just make sure you include the the Cobra emperor."

I said, "The Cobra who?"

And they said, "The Cobra emperor."

And I said, "Well, who's the Cobra emperor?"

And they said, "He's the guy who runs Cobra."

And I said, "No, he's not. We've spent an entire season establishing Cobra Commander as the supreme commander of Cobra. If you had asked us to, we could have planted little hints that there might have been somebody above him, but we just can't introduce this character without explaining where he comes from." So they thought about it, and they said, "Okay, come up with a couple of ideas."

And my advice to all writers is: if somebody asks you to come up with a couple of ideas, only come up with the one you want to do. Because I came up with two possible explanations for the origin of the character that eventually became Serpentor. One was that Dr. Mindbender creates him out of the DNA of all of these military leaders in the past, and the other was that there was some super secret organization behind Cobra that we had not known about until now. And I sent these into Hasbro, and Hasbro gets back to me and says, "Great, do it." And I said, "Do which one?" They said, "Both of them."

So we did "Arise, Serpentor, Arise" as the Dr. Mindbender/DNA portion of the story. And about that time, they were also planning to get into production on the G.I. Joe movie, the Transformer movie, My Little Pony movie, and Ron Friedman had written a script for the G.I. Joe movie. [Editor's Note: Ron Friedman passed away a month after this interview.]

And Ron — let me preface this by saying Ron is a wonderful writer. He's great person, individually. I know him. He's a really nice, wonderful guy, but he had not been involved in the daily writing and story editing and he was not quite aware of how G.I. Joe had evolved after he did his first initial mini series. So he wrote a script. Sunbow sent me the script and said, "Come out to New York and talk to us and tell us what you think about the script." So I read the script on the airplane going to New York, and when I get there, they said, "What did you think of the script?" And I said, "Well, to be brutally honest, I think we'd be better off putting it aside and just starting brand new, afresh." And they all breathed a sigh of relief, and they said, "Good, that's what we were thinking, too." So no offense to Ron, but it just didn't connect with what they needed.

So they asked if I could come up with a story, and they remembered that we had alluded to some secret organization behind Cobra. So I went back and I came up with this plot that involved a secret, snake-based civilization somewhere. They had been secretly manipulating world events and had sent Cobra Commander out into the world to conquer the world. He failed, now they're going to replace him with Cobra Emperor Serpentor. And I forget why, but for some reason we decided Antarctica wouldn't be the place for this secret base. And I thought, "It's been a while since anybody's had a secret base in the Himalayas. Let's do that." And as a placeholder name, I came up with Cobra-La because I knew their legal department went over everything with a fine tooth comb. We had changed the name on Serpentor at least four or five, maybe six times before they finally locked in on Serpentor. At one point they were calling him "King Cobra," which is the name of a malt liquor. And when they changed his name to King Cobra I kept my mouth shut because I'm going, "Yeah, I really want to have a character in this show named after a malt liquor." But they caught that at the last moment. So I figured, of course they're going to say, "You can't use Cobra-La," because it's a reference to Shangri-La from James Hilton's Lost Horizon, only the most famous lost civilization novel in history. And they like Cobra-La. And I said, "No, no, it's a placeholder name. Don't use that. Please don't use that." "And they said, "Nah, we love it." They went ahead with it.

And that led to other problems further down the line in the movie. I had that battle cry; I was trying to emulate the Bedouin women from Lawrence of Arabia and Dick Gautier, wonderful actor, did a great job as Serpentor, his voice was four octaves too low for that. So he does it, "Cobra, la, la, la, la" — no, no. I begged him during the recording session. I said, "Give me five minutes. I'll come up with a better battle cry." And they said, "No, we like it, go ahead."

So we ended up jettisoning almost everything from Ron's script. The only thing that remained was Nemesis Enforcer, the winged guy. Everybody agreed that was a cool looking character, and we thought he'd be a good addition to the movie. So Hasbro told me the characters that they were wanting to introduce, you know, Sgt. Slaughter's — I forget. They weren't called Misfits. The Renegades, right? The Misfits were Jem. That would have been an interesting movie, though, if we had thrown in The Misfits. The Renegades. They had the new guys that they tossed in, including a very blatant Miami Vice cop, which I'm going, "Come on guys, it's G.I. Joe."

Yes, Chuckles. And they also cast Don Johnson as the voice of Falcon.

Yeah, whom I never met, by the way. Don Johnson recorded his dialogue separately in Florida. Everybody else recorded it in Los Angeles.

So we jettisoned everything from Ron's script except Nemesis Enforcer. I was trying to introduce all these new characters, and they were saying, "Downplay the old characters because we're cycling them out of the product line. We're not going to be doing Duke anymore." And I said, "We've had a military combat show for three years now, counting the mini series. We have never killed anybody. This is a movie. Let's just acknowledge people get killed. And if you're going to drop Duke from the product line, let him go out a hero." They loved it. They loved it so much, they told the guys doing the Transformers movie to kill off Optimus Prime. And the problem was the G.I. Joe fans were typically 10 to 12 years of age. They were intellectually mature enough to realize people can get killed in combat. They would have been heartbroken, but they would have recognized it as something that could happen. Transformer fans were nine and below, and they weren't ready for that. And so when the Transformer movie came out, everybody freaked out in the theater. Parents were complaining, and the word came down, "You can't kill off Duke." And they very clumsily added in a couple of off camera lines to indicate he was in a coma and that he had recovered. No, I killed that sucker dead.

He had a snake thrown into his chest.

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much it.

So Hasbro was introducing the Rawhides and the Renegades, and they had a three-pack with Nemesis Enforcer, Golobulus, and the Royal Guard.

Where was Pythona? Was she intended to have an action figure? I can't think of many other top-tier Joe characters who don't get an action figure.

The intent was just to introduce new Joe characters in the movie — which, parenthetically, Hasbro learned the hard way: you don't introduce new characters as your lead characters in a movie. They can be supporting characters, but people coming to a movie theater are coming to see the characters they've been watching on TV. They have not come to see brand new characters. And that was one of the things that I thought weak in the movie, that we spent too much time with these supporting characters when we should have been focused on, you know, Duke and the others.

It was decided that we were going to wipe Cobra-La out at the end of it. For a long time, G.I. Joe: The Movie — in fact it might still be — is considered an alternate timeline story. It's not officially canon. It's something that happened, but now we don't acknowledge it. And they were saying, "We're not going to do the toys based on any of the characters, Nemesis Enforcer in particular." Just the size of the wings they thought would be too expensive to make. And so they said, "Just do whatever you want with the [Cobra-La] characters. We're not going to make toys off of them." So I created characters with no thought of how you were going to actually turn these things into toys, what they would look like, or anything like that. I just focused on making them as interesting as I could for the movie.

When you saw that Hasbro changed their mind and was making Cobra-La figures, did you wonder why Pythona wasn't in the three-pack?

Those were uniform size characters. They wouldn't have to retool the manufacturing process. Pythona could probably have fit in that size and cost, but then people would say, "Well, why Pythona? Why not Golobulus? Why not the others?" And since those characters were wiped out in the movie, they just opted not to do the rest.

Golobulus originally was envisioned as this kind of Charles Laughton, Nero type figure — this huge, fat, seemingly flabby guy who's always carried around on a litter and he's being fed mice and things like that. He's just typical, you know, degenerate Roman Emperor stuff. And in the end, when he finally deigns to fight Sgt. Slaughter, you think the Sarge is going to beat him up easily. All of a sudden it's revealed, no, Golobulus is physically the most dangerous of them all. He is just doing these blinding fast moves. His bulk is so much that when he hits the Sarge, he just sends Sarge flying. But I wrote a scene where he comes at the Sarge like a ballerina on his tippy toes, you know, just to mock the Sarge and Hasbro thought, "We don't like that." So we got rid of the Charles Laughton version. And I forget who created the look of Golobulus. This is another one of those cases where, if they had given me five minutes, I would have come up with a better character name, because he obviously doesn't look like a glob.

Wow, no, I never connected Golobulus to "glob."

But in any case, they came up with this character design, and I thought, "Okay, well, you know, it's not bad. We'll run with that."

I wanted to know about Big Lob, the other major character from the movie who didn't get a figure. Was he intended to be an action figure as well?

He was intended to be an action figure. I think the fact that size-wise, he was so different from all the others that it would have been at the time a production challenge. It would have made him more expensive than the other characters.

Where did Pythona come from? What purpose did she serve for you?

I wanted to get the movie off to a fast start, and I wanted to lay at least one of the plot lines out early so that the audience would know what's at stake. And clearly, the plot line is Cobra Commander has screwed up one time too many, and they have finally decided to get rid of him. Cobra Commander is desperate to keep his position, because, although the audience doesn't know it yet, he knows full well who has been funding Cobra, who's behind all this. Serpentor isn't even aware of it. He is not aware that Cobra-La even exists, even though Cobra-La implanted the thoughts into Dr. Mindbender to create him. So I figured we've gotta have a character who is outlandish, but in a good way, who is going to catch people's attention, who represents a kind of threat we have not seen before in G.I. Joe. The acid from the fingernails, I swiped that from Alien to give her something to do besides shooting a gun.

All of her weapons are starfish and clams.

I'm a fan of Larry Niven and he had, in one of his stories he created these things called booster trees. And booster trees are basically organic, solid fuel rockets, and they have been scattered throughout the galaxy to grow on planets so that if you ever crash land on a planet and you need to get back into orbit, you can just chop down a couple of booster trees, strap them to your spaceship and launch yourself into orbit. And before that, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, one group of aliens are completely organic. They're launching attacks at Earth using giant insect-like monsters. And I thought, "Well, let's do that. Everything else in G.I. Joe is really high tech. Let's do the opposite. Let's do something completely organic, completely biological."

That's where I got the idea of how we were going to mutate Cobra Commander. We had made allusions in the past, on the few times people would see him with his mask off, they would always go, you know, [winces]. We couldn't do anything explicitly gruesome, but I thought if you've got a bunch of eyeballs all over your face, that ought to produce a few nightmares.

Yeah, as a kid, that was really terrifying.

So I came up with the idea of Cobra Commander mutating, the eyes popping out, and as a result, they basically expel him from Cobra-La, send him out into the world to form Cobra.

I've read your script for the movie, and it very explicitly says that Pythona kills a Cobra Trooper, she chucks him off of a walkway outside the Terror Drome. In the movie, we just hear his scream and see the sound wave go flat. This showed just how dangerous she was, that we're now operating on a different level.

When I was writing G.I. Joe and when I was story editing it, I always tried to work in some reference to casualties. Hasbro never realized that when you talk about casualties, you're talking about injured and dead. And so I would try to have someone remark, "We suffered 10% casualties," or something like that, figuring the older kids would recognize some low-ranking Joe who doesn't have a code name yet got killed. We had to do stuff like people ejecting at the last minute, but I think many of the kids watching the TV show figured out that there's people getting killed in these stories, they're just not openly saying it. I thought, if we're going to do a movie, we need to acknowledge that.

How closely were you working with the storyboard artists?

You have to understand, when we were doing the series — the analogy I give is, it's like you're in a train station and there is a slow moving freight train going by, and every time a box car passes with an open door, you have to throw something inside. If you can throw something good inside, wonderful. But something has to go inside, you know. And we were, typically on all the series we were doing, we were running very close to the edge. I mean, we had the fastest turnaround of script to animation of any studio I ever worked at. Typically it would take a month and a half just to see the first bits of animation on something. We were having complete episodes in six weeks. And so I would be writing this stuff, and I would be sending it off, and they would be sending me storyboards back, and I would go through the storyboards just to make sure they didn't make any egregious mistakes.

I can give you an example, and it's my fault but it's a good example. I wrote a scene where the Dreadnoks are standing in the middle of a runway, and it's basically Zartan and Buzzer arguing with each other, and then Ripper joins in the argument. And I write in the script, "Ripper sticks his oar in the water," meaning he decides to join the argument. Storyboard comes back, all of a sudden there is a creek running across the airfield and he's got an oar in his hand, and he literally sticks it in the water. And I send the note back, I said, "Sorry, guys. I know you're doing these things fast. It was not meant to be taken literally." And so they took it out. But that was about all the interaction I had with the storyboard department. It's a tribute to Larry that he was doing such a great job. That one scene is the only one that pops to mind.

With all the new Joes, you're getting their name and design. But with Cobra-La, with Pythona, you're creating her from nothing. How did she get the look that she has?

I'm trying to remember how I envisioned her. I mean, I clearly wanted her to have a sleek female form.

It says your your script, "sexy, beautiful, exotic and deadly, High Priestess of Cobra-La."

No pun intended here: it's a bunch of buzz words. It's just like, guys, do your best. And when they came back, my initial reaction wasn't, "Yes, they got it." But I looked at it and went, "Well, you know we got to get rolling on this thing. I can live with this."

I mean if this had been a more typical animated feature, there would have been six months to a year of pre-production development, you know, going over the script, going over the characters, hammering everything out. There's a classic review of the first English translation of Don Quixote, and basically the person reviewing it thought the guy did not do a good job translating the Spanish to English. And he says, "It has all the energy of a hasty production and a full measure of the faults." So I could live with what they designed. If we had sat down around the table with some sketch pads and we just kicked ideas back and forth for an hour. We might have had something different. I could live with it.

I think it's such a striking design that the mix of pink and purple and the pale green skin. There was no chance to overthink it.

Exactly. That's the the virtue of it is that you're getting raw ideas fired off right away. You didn't have time to overthink it. I gotta tell you, I have seen so many animation projects gutted because they start strong in the studio, but by the time they finally get on screen, they have gone through so many hands and been overthought so badly that they they lose what appeal they had. I can't say I was disappointed. It's just whatever I had in mind at the time, that wasn't it. But at the same time, I realized it works. You know, don't create needless problems.

What's so fascinating about this franchise is that every character almost has three separate versions. There's the action figure and the file card, then there are the Larry Hama comics, and then there's the Sunbow cartoon.

It starts with Larry Hama. Hasbro would come up with a character design. They would send it to Larry. Larry would come up with these short bio sheets. What you saw on the back of the card was at best a third, maybe a half, of what Larry had written. And we were lucky to get the full bio sheets from Hasbro to use in our series bible, so that we knew who the characters were, what their personalities were, things like that. So in terms of characters for anything outside of Cobra-La, Larry gets the credit for it. Larry was the one who created the backstory and personas that went along with them. We got the character bio cards. We we were sent copies of the comic book, and we never referenced it. And if you ask Larry, he'll tell you he was aware of the TV show and he never watched it, and that's because independently we were aware we can't sync this up.

It's two completely different production schedules.

Not even so much production scheduling, just the concept, the stories, what was acceptable, things like that. Larry's occupies a different timeline than G.I. Joe the animated series occupies.

Over the past year, I've done at least two full watches of the 100 G.I. Joe episodes, if you count the movie as the final five episodes. I don't know if it's because you're bingeing the whole thing, but the movie actually has a kind of beautiful finality to it. Right before the movie, there's "Into Your Tent I Will Silently Creep," where Cobra Commander tries to found The Coil. Before that, you have "In the Presence of Mine Enemies," which has Dr. Mindbender's crazy genetic monsters. Before that is "Sins of Our Fathers," where it's revealed that underneath Destro's castle is a huge dragon worm. It feels like there's a ramp up towards a serpent society in the Himalayas who uses organic weaponry.

I am glad you read it that way. I will take credit for it, but the truth is, any idea that could stand on its own two feet for more than 30 seconds got turned into an episode. The one with Destro's castle, I know that [Steve Gerber] had just read Robert Howard's — oh geez, it wasn't a Conan story. It's the one where the guy fights the giant worm [1932's "Worms of the Earth"]. But they had just read that, and they thought, "Hey, that would be a cool story. And, yeah, throw in a little Lovecraftian stuff and go ahead and do it." The island one, that was The Island of Doctor Moreau.

That reminds me of my favorite gag from your script that didn't make it into the movie. Tomax and Xamot learn what Cobra-La's plan is and they're like, "Wait a second, we're finance bros and they want a society without money."

Then a little bit later they're trying to sell digital watches to Cobra-La guards in exchange for pearls. And then at the very end, Shipwreck comments during the final fight, "You know what the weirdest thing is? These guys have digital watches!" That is hilarious, and it makes me want an unedited version of the movie.

I tried to work stuff like that in. I think that got cut for time reasons which breaks my heart. But what are you going to do? I've had shows where scenes that I really liked got replaced by something much shorter because we're five minutes over. Something's got to come out.

Are you aware of the current G.I. Joe comics, the Energon Universe? They've really taken your idea of Cobra-La and run with it, the idea of organic versus metal.

I found out a long time ago that for my own mental well being, when I finish a project, I put it down and I walk away. I've had my fun playing with the toys. Now it's somebody else's turn to play with the toys. It is not my privilege to tell that person how they should play with the toys. When I'm done, I am done. I do not follow it. I do not see what other people are doing. I do not comment on what they have done, if I think it's a good idea or a bad idea.

I found out just over the last few weeks that there have been at least two official releases of the mutant Cobra Commander. And now Pythona, and nobody bothered to say, "Hey Buzz, would you like a sample to put up on your shelf?" It's one of the things I find irritating about a lot of the business mentality in show business. But that's beside the point. I did a novelization of "The Most Dangerous Man in the World" for Kindle Worlds when that was viable. Amazon has since shut down the Kindle Worlds project, so I've been trying to find somebody — Skybound is the third company I've tried contacting, and say, "Hey, would you be interested in looking at this?" The pitch would be it's the classic G.I. Joe episode you didn't get to see.

That's something every Joe fan wants to see.

The Cobra-La Corpus continues with Tim Seeley, the writer who resurrected Cobra-La in 2007's G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers: Black Horizon comic series, Wed. Dec 24 ...

The Cobra-La Corpus

• I: Hasbro’s Lenny Panzica on Bringing Cobra-La to G.I. Joe Classified: “Snake People, Crab Armor, Let’s Go”
• II: "Can I Have Pythona?" — How One Email Changed Skybound's Energon Universe
• III: From Cringe to Canon: 'G.I. Joe' Writer Buzz Dixon Is Finally at Peace With That Movie
• IV: Tim Seeley (Dec. 24)
• V: CLASSIFIED (Dec. 27)
• VI: CLASSIFIED (Dec. 30)
• VII: The Complete History of Cobra-La (Jan. 1, 2026)

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