Dumb Cobra is at it again

Yesterday, I woke up to the surprising news that America had bombed Venezuela and kidnapped and arrested its president. This was a surprise to me, like it was to 99.999% of America because Donald Trump and his gutless band of idiotic, cheapskate grifters know they couldn't bring this shit to Congress first, which is what you do if you want to not be a war criminal or if you have people on staff smart enough to come up with a plausible enough lie that your followers can step in line without deploying an ounce of critical thinking. This is about oil and money, period. They aren't trying to hide it. That's what happens when sociopaths who've enjoyed a lifetime without consequences spend a decade breaking every law and norm they can in broad daylight and still getting away with it.

I'm not keen on World War III. I'm more worried about the fact that I don't have health insurance and all of my meds are going to be up in a month or so, and I have about $200 to my name at the moment so I can't afford a trip to a new psychiatrist and I can't afford to get more prescriptions filled. But ain't that America! Yes, please, government — focus on "running Venezuela." They can give it exactly as much attention and care as they're giving America, which is none.

To take my mind off of this, I watched two episodes of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: "Battle for the Train of Gold" and "Operation Mind Menace." Those episodes follow Cobra's plan to steal all the gold in Fort Knox by loading it into a huge, kickass-looking cobra-themed train; and Cobra turning the mental powers of ordinary citizens (like telekinesis, which means ... pulling the Easter Island heads out of the ground and puppeteering their massive bodies) into weapons of death. I keep thinking that the absolutely go-directly-to-the-Hague actions of America's real military should override the actions of America's 1980s syndicated afternoon cartoon toy-tie-in military ... but they don't for me. And that's because I have a brain capable of parsing reality. I can think critically. I'm not bragging. I'm admitting that I have basic cognitive abilities. Only a moron brags about acing so many cognitive tests.

I can see that bombing a country overnight and kidnapping its leader, with zero oversight, just so you can get access to oil and your billionaire co-conspirators can turn a profit, is a COBRA SCHEME. And G.I. Joe fans who are excitedly sharing memes of these war crimes just because their favorite helicopters got to go out for a li'l spin (or worse: they think Donald Trump is anything other than a weeks-old McDonald's bag, bleached from baking on a dashboard, soaked through with grease in a shape aggressively reminiscent of Hitler) — you're admitting that you don't have critical thinking skills. That you're easily bamboozled. That you are stuck in 1980s cartoon land where America was unquestionably good.

If you eagerly cheer for the terrorist actions of IRL Cobra (which, sadly, has none of the panache), then G.I. Joe is not for you. But what do I know? I'm only of the same mind as the vast majority of people responsible for creating G.I. Joe. I'm also not dumb enough to be tricked by Dumb Cobra into thinking that all of this has any moral merit whatsoever.

And seriously — can you picture literally any member of G.I. Joe responding to this ...

... with a "Yo Joe"?

So, that brings me to a draft that's been sitting in WordPress titled "1162 words about gi joe being silly," which has sat unpublished for over half a year. This was the original intro to one of my G.I. Joe recaps, one I felt compelled to write because I was diving into that ridiculous cartoon in the wake of a completely different war-crime-ish scheme of the administration's. I thought it was just too much at the time, from a word count POV, but I didn't want to delete it. I guess it was meant to be published right now, in light of even worse war crimes.

So, here's all this, which is still applicable today. And to any Joe fan out there high five-ing over the murder of innocent civilians because those good ol' Delta Force boys got to see some action — knowing is half the battle. Please, put up a fucking fight.

I intended for this recap series to be a fun lark, to rip down memory lane while laying flat in the front of a H.A.V.O.C. That is what I aim for this recap series to be, but the real world has a way of ... ruining everything? If you want to just get to the fun stuff, skip down to this episode's credits and pop off. Otherwise — as Duke would say two-thirds of the way through G.I. Joe: The Movie were he not gurgling blood, "I've got something to get off my chest." Actually, I guess he would say "out of my chest," but whatever.

America bombed Iran. I am not here to offer any insight or commentary on that, because I'm extremely unqualified to weigh in beyond saying that war is bad, the president is a fascist grease pig who should be impeached again, and wow can we not send another generation to die overseas? Cool.

Now, being someone with a diagnosed and medicated anxiety problem, you better believe I've spent the last few days coming up with an arsenal of accusations from imagined haters that could be lobbed my way for writing about G.I. Joe right now. I get it. I get it so much that it regularly ruins my evenings and weekends. G.I. Joe is viewed — by devoted super-fans and complete outsiders alike — as military propaganda [positive] [or negative]. That's what a lot of fans love about it. They love all the weaponry and vehicles because they're either analogous to or inspired by real stuff. They love the chain of command and figuring out how the Joes, with their detailed service histories provided by Vietnam veteran Larry Hama, would fit into the real world. The realistic depiction of the military is the selling point for a lot of fans — so much so that Joepedia even has a list of the most realistic episodes of this cartoon.

Mind you, that list includes an episode where Cobra holds a telethon to raise money to create a computer virus to blow up the computers inside Interpol HQ, and another one where Cobra hides nuclear missiles in the signs of a nationwide fast food chain. Coming up with a list of the most realistic G.I. Joe episodes is like making a playlist of the most depressing Carly Rae Jepsen songs: it's a short list of things that don't meet the criteria. In my opinion.

Anyway — G.I. Joe was labeled as pro-war fun for kids in the '80s and '90s, a label that I sincerely think was an overreaction and complete misinterpretation of the text. But that reputation persisted, and the franchise shifted and expanded in the 21st century to fulfill that rep. As the kids of the '80s and early '90s grew up, so did G.I. Joe. There were edgier cartoons (G.I. Joe: Resolute), edgier comics (ask a Joe fan what good ol' Chuckles has gotten up to in the comics), and movies so focused on being modern and edgy that they circled back around to being fully ridiculous ( ... accelerator suits). The fact that G.I. Joe: Retaliation — the best of a bad bunch of movies — replaced the "Yo Joe" battlecry with "oorah" is all of this in a nutshell. It's taking something unique to G.I. Joe, something that's a little silly, a little fun, a little unrealistic, a little purple — and slathering it in camo so that it can't possibly stand out from our actual, literal world. Some fans love that.

Dot dot dot, that's not my G.I. Joe. And I left G.I. Joe behind for nearly 25 years. I remember buying Image/Devil's Due's G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1 in October 2001 and being like, "Hmm ... this isn't ... fun." I dipped my toe back in in 2009 when I discovered Hasbro's 25th anniversary line, specifically because it gave me the chance to own new figures of the 1980s characters. I read some of the initial IDW comics, but they were too focused on "realism," whatever that means in this franchise. None of this stuck, and the mental filing cabinets I have filled with Joe info remained locked. The reason I'm back, hard, is threefold:

1. X-Men and Star Wars have been real hit-or-miss (mostly miss) over the last few years, Andor and X-Men '97 aside.
2. My life went to hell, my dad died, I turned 40, and then the world went further into hell — all in 2024. Excuse me, I would like to retreat back to my childhood, please.
3. Skybound's Energon Universe comics, which features a brand-new shared continuity between the Transformers and G.I. Joe, is the first time that I actually feel seen as a fan by this franchise in 25 years. The Energon Universe is big, sci-fi action with colorful characters and yet it retains a lot of that "realism" that a lot of other fans love. Tonally, it's exactly where the Sunbow cartoon would be right now.

So, 800-ish words later, how do I — a queer, progressive pop culture critic — justify promoting a franchise that is seen as jingoistic propaganda for a country that is currently descending into actual fascism? Because I'm about to write about a supermodel-turned-mechanic yeeting a canister of radioactive crystals over a security fence by way of Tokyo Drift-ing a multi-purpose attack vehicle (or V.A.M.P.), with the help of a wolf named Timber.

As I wrote in the very first recap, I see G.I. Joe as a subversive, satirical, anti-fascist science-fiction franchise grounded in a sincere appreciation of character and devotion to diversity. I don't see this cartoon — primarily written by liberals with explicit anti-fascist messaging — as pro-war propaganda. I grew up on this show. All my cousins grew up on this show. If I'd had friends in elementary school, I could probably cite them too. (That's another article) None of us were brainwashed. The conflicts on this show are absurd. These conflicts do not resemble actual war in any way; in fact, this show was called pro-war by critics and decried by others for making light of war. (That is another article)

I love this show and franchise because the characters are incredibly well-developed, the action sequences are dazzling, the scripts are frequently hilarious and sometimes feminist and frequently unintentionally (?) queer-coded — and there needs to be more coverage of this franchise that talks about all of that stuff instead of, like, which Joe is in command if Beach Head and Capt. Grid-Iron are on duty. And as America becomes more fascist, I want to write about a show that's about humiliating fascists in spectacular ways.

But above all else, this show makes me feel like I'm a kid again, and not a nearly 41-year-old, broke and broken TV critic who spends 1,000 words of a G.I. Joe recap justifying to himself why he wants to write a G.I. Joe recap.

So. All that being said. Are we ready to have fun watching the Joes try to catch a massive, prehistoric meteorite with giant nets?