G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Season 1, Episode 2
"The Pyramid of Darkness Part 2: Rendezvous in the City of the Dead"
Original Airdate: September 17, 1985
Writer: Ron Friedman
Director: John Gibbs, Terry Lennon
Cast: Neil Ross, Frank Welker, Bill Morey, Bill Ratner, Mary McDonald-Lewis, Hal Rayle, Arthur Burghardt, Will Ryan, Kene Holliday, Pat Fraley
G.I. Joe's inaugural week as daily appointment viewing continues with the 12th of 15 overstuffed episodes designed to introduce every single character and contraption released in the toy line's first four years. And somehow, every one of the storylines being juggled by screenwriter Ron Friedman feels the need to include even more stuff — stuff that was never rendered in plastic by Hasbro. Let's get into it!
As is always the case, last episode's cliffhanger (an undercover Shipwreck and Snake Eyes get caught by a security robot, triggering the obligatory jail bars and buzzsaws) is immediately resolved. It turns out Polly — Shipwreck's sidekick/pet parrot — has the exact right intonation for the passphrase, "Cobra Commander, the great snake rules forever!" The MVPs of this episode are absolutely Polly and Snake Eyes' wolf, Timber.
Now past security, these undercover Joes see what Cobra's up to. This is a Control Cube factory. Shipwreck plants a tracking device on one of the finished cubes only to be spotted by a floor supervisor who accurately clocks that these two Snakelings are walking around with animals. Shipwreck — who is actually really good at being a spy, despite also being Popeye Nicholson — leans in and tricks the supervisor into believing that the bird and wolf are Destro's pets. "Hitler had a canary," Shipwreck says, which is so in character, hilarious, actually convincing, and a bit surprising — y'know, hearing the name "Hitler" in a cartoon. Also: apparently "Hitler's canary" was a nickname for Denmark and not an actual canary. History lesson!
After sneaking past security and the floor supervisor, this kooky quartet find the chief engineer's office, which is a dark, empty, red room. Shipwreck immediately spots a laserdisc that contains all the information the Joes could possibly need about these Control Cubes. How does Shipwreck 1. find this so quickly and 2. know the contents of the disc just by looking at it? Before you can ponder those questions, the pets quickly take out two theoretically highly-trained Cobra Officers with ease. Just go along with it!
Now Snake Eyes and Shipwreck have a mission: get that disc to the Joes. This being an '80s cartoon, their escape absolutely involves a high speed handcar chase down the railroad tracks. Man, handcars absolutely had an outsized impact on '80s cartoons, didn't they? '80s cartoons really had me convinced that my life would involve a handcar at some point. Handcars, buzzsaws, quicksand — I mean, this episode has two out of three.
The handcar chase leads our heroes to a subway station in presumably Enterprise City (that is, after all, where those water robots initially captured Snake Eyes and Shipwreck). Our heroes ditch the Snakeling drag and take to the streets, where they're immediately clocked by a Cobra agent in a fedora and trench coat.
Meanwhile — the Joes, having survived the complete destruction of their HQ last episode, are now holding down the fort on the high seas. Baby, they're on the USS Flagg [1985 retail: $109.95], the most extreme toy of the 1980s — 7.5" of ... flat plastic!
Let's hit pause and talk about the Flagg. Personally, the Flagg came and went in stores before I even got into G.I. Joe. No one I knew had it, and because the internet didn't exist, I'm not even sure I knew it existed until I was an adult. So, I have no personal nostalgia for this thing, which is why [whisper] I kinda don't get it. It's essentially a long, gray table with a giant "99" painted on it. But I'm sure I'd feel differently if I had been born four years earlier. I did love big playsets, like my Ghostbusters Firehouse and the '92 G.I. Joe HQ.
The Flagg was obviously a big deal when it hit stores in Fall 1985, just a month after it's onscreen debut. It was maybe even too big a deal, as the inventory control manager for a Kentucky Toys "R" Us told the Boone County Recorder on Dec. 5, 1985: "This year's item, Rivera says, is 'for the kid who has everything.' It's an aircraft carrier, the 'U.S.S. Flagg.' Rivera says it costs $100 and is too large to display in the store." Reporter Mike Ward adds, "For that money, I'd expect it to have planes that really fly." lol
Of course kids went nuts for the Flagg, and newspapers were flooded with letters to Santa begging for this massive machine of war. Yeah, in the '80s, local newspapers printed pages and pages of letters to Santa! This one really got me:
Wherever you are, Todd Romanowski, I hope you got your Flagg and you're still trying to be a good boy — I mean, a good man.
Ads for the Flagg were all over newspapers, too, and I just think these illustrations are too cool to not include here.
After Christmas, Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Tom Anderson provided a first-hand account from a parent who had their home invaded by Hasbro's aircraft carrier:
"My 10-year-old son's grandparents gave him what must have been the ultimate challenge for this year's Christmas Eve assemblers. It's the USS Flagg aircraft carrier, the latest in the GI Joe series of war machines. Assembled, the Flagg is over 7 feet long. There are hundreds of pieces and a detailed, pages-long list of assembly instructions that would make a shipwright seasick. My 10-year-old had it assembled before I could have figured out how to get it out of the box."
The Flagg's debut here, kind of a big deal. And I'm glad that they didn't include Admiral Ledger with the Flagg (more on Keel-Haul in Stray Blasts), because he is a misogynist asshole in this cartoon. The first thing he says is that he does not like having women on his ship because of superstition. As Lady Jaye looks him square in the eyes and says, "Women aren't bad luck at sea." Ledger counters with, "Old Navy is just what I am" — and he's right: your character is as threadbare as the "vintage" X-Men tee that I bought for $5.
Fortunately, Ron Friedman intended Ledger to be a misogynist asshole, G.I. Joe — a progressive cartoon — comes down against Ledger. When the Joes pick up Shipwreck's signal, the one tracking that Cosmic — I mean, Control Cube, they learn that it's headed for The Devil's Playground. (That's the name of a real location in the Mojave Desert, but uh, it bears little resemblance to where Flint and Lady Jaye are headed.) In a deft bit of writing, Friedman has Ledger say that the Devil's Playground is no place for a woman, yadda yadda yadda. Flint looks at Lady Jaye with a coy look on his face (this animation!) and says, y'know, they do need someone to stay behind and guard the Flagg. Lady Jaye shuts that shit down fast, saying, "And I'm sure you'll find the right man for the job."
And as the Joes run towards adventure, Flint stays behind a millisecond to tell Ledger, "She's not just a lady, Admiral Ledger. She's my teammate."
Flint and Lady Jaye are one of the very, very, very few straight couples that I am invested in, and it's moments like this that do it for me. The way Flint doesn't come to Jaye's defense, but rather sets it up for Jaye to spike the ball right in Ledger's face. Then, after Jaye did the thing, Flint rubs Ledger's face in it. A great moment.
We actually learn that there are multiple Cubes going in many different directions. One is going to the Devil's Playground, which is where LJ and Flint are headed. Another is going to the "Mountain of Glass" (also a nickname for California's Obsidian Dome), where Alpine and Bazooka are headed. And another is traveling to the City of the Dead, which this episode is named after despite it not appearing at all. That group includes Footloose, Airtight, and Roadblock.
This marks the first speaking appearance and first appearance of Footloose and Airtight, respectively, and their character games are established right away: Airtight is a bit Threepio-ish, a little annoying, particular, and full of facts. Footloose is a free spirited surfer dude. This is directly in conversation with Larry Hama's filecards for each character. Airtight's characterization required a little more interpretation from Friedman, as Hama described him as "the kid who could hold his breath the longest. He was also the kid who had the largest collection of plastic dinosaurs on the block. He was a weird kid who grew up to be an even stranger adult."
Footloose's filecard includes one of my favorite sentences on any filecard: "He was going for his degree in Phys. Ed. on a state scholarship when he suddenly dropped out, moved to the coast, and became quite weird for about three years. He was standing on the boardwalk in Venice pondering something cosmic when the utter pointlessness of his existence hit him between the eyes like a runaway freight train." Okay, that was two sentences, but man — imagine being hired to write these episodes and being handed that filecard. What a gift.
Meanwhile, at the Devil's Playground — Destro gets hot pink goop (lava?) splashed on his chrome dome and asks for a sander so he can sand it off.
Jaye and Flint sneak in, getting splashed (this can't be lava then). Flint jokes that pink is Jaye's color, to which Jaye responds, "Don't laugh, ya bum." There is such chemistry between Bill Ratner and Mary McDonald-Lewis! And Destro ultimately clocks said chemistry and fires upon it, sending my fave couple tumbling into the pink lava goop.
And lastly — OUTER SPACE, where the Dreadnoks have taken over the Joes' Delta satellite with the help of the Fatal Fluffies. These eight-foot-tall monsters now have whips and a very modest vocabulary. Dusty and Mutt come up with a plan, after Dusty improvises a country-western ditty about doing your work to "a boogie woogie beat." The plan: use gravity as a weapon. Mutt signals to the greenshirts to hold onto something, and Dusty performs a screeching, psychotic breakdown that would make Isabella Adjani take notice. He needs gravity!
This is, by the way, a star-making turn for Dusty, similar to Roadblock's hero's journey in "Revenge of Cobra." Dusty actually fills a void that I didn't notice before now: he's kind of a Luke Skywalker/Han Solo hybrid. He comes across as young and relatable, but he's also rakishly reckless. He gets a little backstory, too, when Mutt drops one of Dusty's unique filecard traits: he was previously a refrigerator repairman. Dusty's southern accent is curious, though, as he's supposed to be from Las Vegas. Maybe he picked it up while doing basic at Fort Bliss in Texas.
Dusty flips the switch, dropping the Fluffies and the Dreadnoks to the ground, hard. Dusty races to the drop (elevator shaft?) that leads to the control room, with Mutt turning the gravity back on in time for Dusty to make a soft, gravity-less landing a few stories down. That's when he finds Zartan at the controls and learns of Cobra's Control Cube plan. Now, how to relay that back to the Joes? Why, do some splicin'! When the Fluffies are distracted, he reroutes Cobra's video signal so that it will play for Zartan and also the Joes, thus informing the Joes of the missions to the Mountain of Glass, City of Dead, and Playground of Devil.
PERSONNEL REPORT
First Appearance: Airtight, Admiral Ledger
First Line of Dialogue: Footloose, Airtight, Admiral Ledger
I'll add here that, Flint and Lady Jaye's dynamic is the best in the Sunbow cartoons; it's, as far as I can recall, non-existent in the DiC era, despite both of them being among the few classic Joes to appear in those seasons. In the comics, Flint is ... how can I put this? A jerk. He sucks. Hama put Jaye and Flint together, but he gave them a rather combustible dynamic that came across more Archie and Edith than Han and Leia.
STRAY BLASTS
In addition to advertising every G.I. Joe toy known to man at the time, this storyline includes so many original ideas. The Snakeling uniform, Fatal Fluffies, those water robots from the last episode, this new scarface Cobra spy, and Admiral Ledger never received toys from Hasbro — which tracks, because it was very, very rare for ideas to flow from the comic and cartoon to Hasbro (Baroness being the most notable exception).
As for Admiral Ledger, he's a stand-in for Keel-Haul, the actual figure that came with the USS Flagg. Now, I'm glad they swapped him out, because I would not want Keel-Haul to be portrayed this way. Because Keel-Haul is sexy. I mean, lord. He's also notable for being a G.I. Joe figure indirectly inspired by an actual gay man: Hasbro CEO Stephen D. Hassenfeld. Sculptor/figure designer Ron Rudat wanted him to look like Clark Gable or Hassenfeld, and thus Keel-Haul was created.
And yes, G.I. Joe was shepherded to toy shelves and '80s super stardom by a gay man who was taken from us way too early by the AIDS crisis. This does not get talked about enough, so, I'm talking about it.
... AND COBRA-LA IS WEIRD?
Thanks to Half the Battle, Yo Joe!, 3D Joes, Joe Guide, and Joepedia for all of their research.
Until next time, reading is half the battle!
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