Battle for the Train of Gold

Cobra seizes the Bureau of Engraving in Washington while the Joes keep watch, but all Major Bludd takes away is cassette A-4, a guide to the gold depository at Fort Knox. Duke's team arrives at the fort over General Stack's objections, only to find that Zartan has replaced the general, cleared the vault of defenders and is using an old tunnel into it. Duke, Scarlett and Snake Eyes are captured and the gold is loaded onto the Cobra Bullet, a train bound for the coast and a waiting fleet of submarines.

Gung-Ho leads the rest of the team after it on thoroughbreds borrowed from Thunder's friend Murphy. A brawl in the gold car ends when Buzzer's chainsaw cuts the pressure regulator and the Bullet wrecks. The gold is saved, Stack apologises, and Gung-Ho finishes sprawled on the pavement.

Voice talents, as credited on this episode's closing titles. The Sunbow credit crawl lists the company of voice actors and does not assign roles, so no role attributions are given here.

Liz Aubrey Jackson Beck Michael Bell Gregg Berger Arthur Burghardt Corey Burton Darlene Carr Francois Chau Peter Cullen Christian Czingland Pat Fraley Barbara Goodson Dave Hall Johnny Haymer Zack Hoffman Kene Holliday Michael Horton John Hostetter Buster Jones Stan Jones Jimmy Keegan Christopher Latta Hap Lawrence Pat Lentz Loren Lester Ketty Lester Mary McDonald Lewis Morgan Lofting Mona Marshall Bill Morey Rob Paulsen Bill Ratner Hal Rayle Neil Ross Dan Roth Will Ryan Marilyn Schreffler John Stephenson B.J. Ward Lee Weaver Frank Welker Michael Yama Keone Young

"Everything you ever wanted to know about the gold depository at Fort Knox. Including how to get in!" -- The A-4 cassette

"Anybody get the license number of that cruise missile?" -- Duke

"Yeah, if you can call a broken head all right." -- Duke

"Whether you need us or not, you've got us." -- Duke

"And by this time tomorrow, your country will be dead broke." -- Zartan

"Empty as a poor man's wallet." -- Gung-Ho

"No. Can't eat 'em, can't drink 'em, can't spend 'em." -- A Dreadnok

"Horses? We're gonna catch a bullet train with horses?"

"We should've took a bus."

"I'd rather have my horses back, General." -- Murphy

Transcribed from the episode's closed-caption subtitle track and converted from capitals to sentence case. Speakers are named only where the track or the picture makes them clear.

The Joes spend the opening of this episode guarding a room full of money, and nobody on the team believes in the job. Wild Bill has flown the all-clear over Washington and Duke is posing as a guard in the printing plant. When he asks Scarlett whether twenty million dollars a day through the presses might interest Cobra, the answer he gets is that anyone who has seen one sheet of thousand-dollar bills has pretty much seen them all. Cover Girl, Thunder, Gung-Ho and Mutt report in from outside, each finding nothing. It is a lazy, affectionate roll call, and it exists to be torn up, because Cobra is not after the money.

What Cobra wants is a cassette. Major Bludd's squadron seizes the plant, Duke and Scarlett fight it out under laser fire, past a time bomb. The prize that leaves in Bludd's gauntlet is tape A-4, which he plays for the Commander and Destro in the throne room: everything anyone could want to know about the gold depository at Fort Knox, including how to get in. [1] The Commander gloats that the Joes thought he was after a few million grubby American dollars, and the line works because it is accurate; the team has spent the opening defending the wrong thing.

The Joes guard the front of everything while Cobra works from the plans, and Fort Knox gives that idea its best scene. General Stack, bristling at the convoy, walks Duke through the vault and points out that the walls are titanium alloy, twenty feet thick, and that G.I. Joe's services are therefore not needed. The wall is real and it never matters, because the way in is an old tunnel and the way to clear the vault is to replace the man in charge. We hear Stack start on his thirty years of service and the gross insubordination he has never seen, and then a voice tells him not to make a sound. A few scenes later a General Stack is ordering his troops out of the vault and explaining, with a sly smile, that he is setting a trap for the Joes. Zartan in a borrowed uniform is a good use of him. Nobody doubts an obstructive general, so Stack's pomposity becomes the cover story and Zartan only has to be rude. [2]

The middle belongs to the animals. Junkyard picks up a scent in the emptied vault, hauls Mutt off down the tunnel, and Mutt decides afterward that the bump on his head was worth it. The tunnel leads to the Cobra Bullet, which Zartan has described as armed, armored and good for two hundred miles an hour, and the Joes have no wheels. Thunder knows a man named Murphy with thoroughbreds, and the show commits to the premise completely: riders are thrown, one protests that he did not join the horse cavalry, and somebody wishes aloud they had taken a bus! It is the broadest comedy the episode attempts and the right kind of silly, the kind that lets a special-mission force look fallible without anyone losing the thread.

Where the episode sags is the finish. The cavalry reaches the train, Cover Girl and the others brawl with Cobra troopers in the gold car, and the Bullet is brought down when the chainsaw in Buzzer's hands goes through the pressure regulator and the gauge swings into the red. The horses only buy the Joes a seat at the fight, and the wreck is Cobra's own doing. The prisoner thread is thinner still: Scarlett cries out for Snake Eyes as the first prisoner is brought forward, and a few seconds later he is hanging beneath the moving car, so the threat is dispensed with in a cut.

Still, the tidy half of the plan, the cassette, the fake general and the tunnel, pays off long before the silly half does. The last gag, in which Murphy wants his horses back and Gung-Ho is left sprawled on the pavement, is a fine place to stop!

1 ^ The episode never says where the intercepted Cobra radio message of the opening came from, or whether Cobra meant the Joes to hear it. If it was bait, they spent their first minutes guarding the decoy, which would fit everything after it, but nobody says so on screen.

2 ^ Stack addresses Duke as Sergeant Hauser at 7:08 and again at 20:53, the only two places the name turns up. The real Stack is muffled and silenced at 8:11; the false one springs his trap at 8:56.

1. Episode-order oddity: this one carries production number 600-08 and [Money to Burn](/cartoons/1985/episodes/money-to-burn/) carries 600-14, so the train of gold was made first, yet Money to Burn aired on October 14 and this one two days later.
2. Gloating over the stolen gold, Cobra promises that "by this time tomorrow, your country will be dead broke," and Scarlett puts the stakes at $60 billion in the Fort Knox gold. A fan guide points out that the US was not on a gold standard in the 1980s, so losing the vault would not have ruined anyone.
3. The episode ends with "Happy trails, Gung-Ho!" as he rides off on horseback, which the fan guide reads as a nod to the sign-off song of The Roy Rogers Show. The same words, "Happy trails!", are tossed off by a character making a quick exit in [Hearts and Cannons](/cartoons/1985/episodes/hearts-and-cannons/).
4. A tour guide at the Bureau of Engraving is explaining that bills of all denominations are printed there when a nun rips off her habit to reveal a Cobra agent. The Joe fan guide spots the pun on "denomination."
5. The false General Stack is Zartan in disguise, and the real Stack later calls Duke "Sergeant Hauser." Hauser is Duke's surname: it also appears in "Cobra Claws Are Coming to Town" and in a computer file in "Worlds Without End, Part I" that gives his full name as Conrad S. Hauser. Zartan's talent for disguise also drives [The Funhouse](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-funhouse/), where he impersonates Dr. Hibbentrope.
6. The laser cutting sounds on the Cobra Bullet are lifted from the lightsabers of Star Wars, according to the Joe fan guide.
7. The Joes chase the train on horses lent by Thunder's old friend Spencer Murphy, and Junkyard sniffs out the tunnel to the train. No other episode of the season visits Fort Knox.
8. A shot of the Joes riding right to left in pursuit of the Cobra Bullet is used twice, fans note.