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.
G.I. Joe fans really should've seen all this coming — and you can trace all of this back to Super7 securing the license to make G.I. Joe toys back in 2021. Just as a brand, Super7 is damn near fearless. Name another toy company that's going to make action figures of just-shy-of-forgotten '80s cartoons, early '00s garage rock revivalists, and — oh yeah — Peanuts. But hey — if you want to cure your post-holiday blues with some retail therapy, go fill your cart with cart Mechagodzilla, Cookie Monster, and Meg White.
It's this go-for-broke, all-in attitude with which Super7 approaches the G.I. Joe brand — a brand that was kinda mired in a realism rut back when these two met. Super7's immediate appreciation for and celebration of the '80s Sunbow cartoon (see: the Cobra Escape Pack) and even the iconic memes it generated changed everything. It resurfaced parts of the brand that had been rudely shoved in a shoebox and figuratively slid underneath the fandom's bed. Who decided that Baroness doesn't wear green Gloria Steinem glasses? Or that Cobra's day-workers aren't called Snakelings? Or that javelins aren't practical in modern combat? Super7 said yes to all of those ideas — and also made more than a few of them glow in the dark. So yeah, obviously Super7 was going to get to Cobra-La and all of the unexploited IP left in G.I. Joe: The Movie. And after teasing us with figures of Serpentor and the mutated Cobra "Once a Man" Commander, Super7 went all-in with figures for the Royal Guard and the first-ever O-ring Pythona figure.
Pop Heist actually talked to Super7 founder Brian Flynn the day before the company unveiled Pythona to the world. That half of the interview, focusing primarily on the business side of the ReAction+ line, is well worth a read. But considering Super7's seismic impact upon G.I. Joe, the Cobra-La Corpus would not feel complete without Flynn's inclusion. So here is the other half of that interview, one focusing on Flynn's own experience with the 1987 G.I. Joe movie and the origin of the ReAction+ line.
This interview has been edited for clarity and content
Brett White: Did you see G.I. Joe: The Movie in '87?
Brian Flynn: I didn't see it in '87 because in '87 I would have been a junior in high school. So I was firmly into my skateboarding and punk rock, the only things that matter. Even to a degree, girls were a distraction. Like, I'm cool with having a girlfriend, but if you want me to come over every day and give up skateboarding time, sorry. That's not gonna happen.
So I imagine you first saw the movie as an adult.
Yeah, I saw it on VHS later on, one of those college afternoons, rent something weird from Blockbuster kind of thing. Like, "There's a G.I. Joe movie? No way. All right, whatever. It's pretty cool." You're in college and you're dealing with irony. I think it was summer of '91 when I was a sophomore in college. That's when I started going back to wanting my old toys again. So you're talking about a movie that only came out four years before I started going into nostalgia-driven toy collecting. And that's a little earlier than a lot of people, so I came back to it rather quickly. I didn't see it a bit a bunch of times after that.
My theory is that we're experiencing a generational shift in regards to the 1987 movie. I think me and Josh Williamson are very close in age, and were very young when we first saw it. But if you were 10 and above in 1987, you probably watched the movie and were like, "Get all these snake people out of my G.I. Joe. This is ridiculous."
Is it like Star Wars people and Ewoks?
I think so, yeah.
It's this really interesting thing of, like, when does it stop being your version? Like, "Oh, Ewoks suck." I wasn't in love with Ewoks, but I didn't hate them. Whereas Josh [Herbolsheimer, Super7 VP of Design], who's five years younger than me, six years, was like, "Ewoks were the coolest thing ever." And when the [Star Wars] prequels came out, I was not a big fan of them. But there were kids that are people that I know now who are like, "No, those are my fucking Star Wars movies. Fucking awesome." if you were a kid, they probably were fucking awesome. And I think the thing that's interesting within fandom is that for so many people, it's not okay that somebody had a different experience with the fandom than you did. What are you talking about? Like, it's crazy. It makes no sense at all to me, especially within the worlds of toy collecting. It's like, all right, nothing we're doing is cool anyways, and now you want to stratify it.
Did Super7's vision always involve making O-ring figures?
When we first were approaching Hasbro about it, we pitched to relaunch the O-ring line. Their answer to us at that time was very straightforward, which was like, "We make O-ring figures. That's what Hasbro does. We don't need you to do what we can do. What you guys have, your unique personality, is ReAction figures, and that's not something we typically do."
We're the first company to really make G.I. Joe that wasn't Hasbro. They let us in to do what we were known for, not what they were known for. So it's like, do I want to make no G.I. Joe toys, or do I want to make 5POA? Well, I still like 5POA. It's not the ultimate form factor for G.I. Joe, but I still like it. So we started there, because that's what they allowed us to do. We were able to go back to them a couple years later and say, "Look: Over the last three-plus years we have released 96 SKUs in ReAction, right? You guys have done 14 O-ring figures in that same time frame; seven of them came with the Skystriker. These four came with vehicle two-packs, and these three came with vehicle two-packs. You're not actually making O-ring figures. I think we've proven that we can do the brand justice. Let us move into O-ring." And they finally relented and said, "Okay, we'll let you go do that."
We try to stay away from what you already have. That's why it was like, no, Cobra-La is really important for us.
You had to reinvent the wheel a little with the ReAction+ O-ring figures. I imagine when you're designing these new versions, you're probably not looking at what Hasbro did in the '80s.
Yes, deliberately avoiding what they did. You don't need me to remake what you already have. I need to give you something that you don't have, something that is going to be additive to your collection, not duplicative to your collection. We really focus on that. So if somebody's like, "Where's the all-black Snake Eyes?" It's like, "eBay is your friend."
I love how faithful this line is to the source material, which is something I've always wanted. When I was a kid, I got my Jinx figure and wrapped a tiny G.I. Joe logo decal around her thigh, because her figure didn't have that and that was how she looked in the movie. So when I saw that the new ReAction+ Jinx had that GI Joe logo around her thigh, I was like, "They get it."
And we did the different head and everything. Here's the Jinx you needed, not the Jinx you got to a degree. That's probably the most direct — but for the most part, we try to stay away from what you already have. That's why it was like, no, Cobra-La is really important for us.
So when you're approaching Pythona and Big Lob — two characters that people have wanted in this scale, in this style, for almost 40 years — you don't have previous versions to compare or live up to. You're starting at the ground floor. Okay, both of them have convention exclusive figures that are incredibly rare and go for $400, which I don't count —
— And they don't look like how you want them to look.
When we were talking about this, the amount of time that we spent arguing internally about whether the rivets are silver or painted is mind boggling. And in the end, my opinion is that they have to be unpainted — even though, technically, once you get to, like, year three [of the '80s toyline], they start getting painted. That's because when you see it, and you see that rivet, it takes you back to your childhood right away. So if you can't see the rivet, if all of a sudden the rivet is painted — in Pythona's case, purple — it doesn't feel as much like a vintage figure, even though that's technically accurate. So a lot of it is really getting to the psychology of how you remember these toys and making sure they live up to that.
Pythona and Big Lob, their body molds are so different from anything the line had done up to 1987. Big Lob is a tall, skinny dude, and all G.I. Joes are kind of chunky.
Especially in the beginning, they were reusing tooling and swapping. We have the luxury at this point that we don't have to live within those limitations. So it's always that fine line between what does your brain remember it being like versus what it actually was, and we have to play that game all the time. So these figures, in a lot of ways, are better than what they were, but they can't be too detailed, because then they don't feel accurate to what they are. Because when you go back and look without the lens of nostalgia on them, you're like, "Oh, these are kind of chunky."
It's sort of like if you go back to Star Wars, those first Star Wars figures are patently atrocious, quite frankly. It's like, don't sculpt R2-D2, just stick a sticker on it. But how you remember it is different. Forty years later of toy manufacturing, everybody's expectations are much higher, whether they know it or not. So if you actually make it really accurate to the old figures, people are like, "This is shit."
So it's finding that fine line. In this case, this Big Lob is going to be taller, because he should be, and you expect that scale differential now as an adult that you would not have gotten back in the day.
This stuff is supposed to be fun. I think G.I. Joe: The Movie was maligned for so long because it's so over-the-top and fun.
And I think the movie is being reappraised. You have enough companies now that have the license, and they're exploring all that there is… Once we sort of cracked open that idea that you could go back to the comics, and you could go back to the cartoons, and you could go to all those things, I think that's where you saw a lot of the other companies come in — not necessarily following our lead, but that was stuff that they had wanted to do but didn't have access to. Now Hasbro might be more open to it, then all of a sudden, all these other people could start playing with that content as well.
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: Super7's Brian Flynn is Creating the G.I. Joes You Always Wanted: "Cobra-La Is Really Important for Us"
- V: CLASSIFIED
- VI: CLASSIFIED
- VII: The Complete History of Cobra-La (Jan. 5, 2026)
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