Bazooka Saw a Sea Serpent

Bazooka sees a Cobra flight pod eaten by a sea serpent while camping with Alpine and Cutter, and nobody believes him until the Joes rescue a family whose boat was bitten in the night. The creature is a biomechanical machine that Cobra forced its inventor, Professor Braxton, to turn into a weapon, and Tomax and Xamot are using it to extort the shipping lines.

When Cobra Commander's control of it collapses, the serpent swallows his yacht along with Lady Jaye and Quick Kick, who meet Braxton inside. His sabotage backfires and the serpent grows by eating, heading for New York harbor. Duke's forces cannot dent it. Braxton starts an internal disruption, Bazooka blasts it from its back, and the Joes and the prisoners walk out through its jaws.

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

"A Cobra Trubble Bubble eaten by a sea serpent!" -- Bazooka

"Eaten? By a sea serpent? Give me a break, bubble-gum brain."

"You're the best eyewitness we've had so far." -- Duke

"You lost control and went over budget."

"He's in complete control." -- Tomax and Xamot

"They get a break every two hours 'round the clock."

"Cobra Commander has been swallowed by his own stupidity."

"Wrong! It's lookin' for a snack!" -- Alpine

"Let me get a shot of the prize catch!" -- Alpine

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.

Nobody in this episode is in control of anything, and the script is quietly delighted about it. Cobra Commander announces that he is in complete control of his serpent shortly before it eats his yacht. A Joe missile fails to crack a tooth. Professor Braxton's one clever sabotage destroys an override circuit instead, so the creature can never stop eating. Mary Skrenes hangs a monster story on the distance between the person who says the thing is handled and the machine that disagrees. Then she lets that distance be funny!

It starts, sensibly, with the one man who is right being told he is wrong. Bazooka sees a Cobra pod eaten by something enormous and is laughed at by his fishing companions, who have fair grounds, since his evidence is a snapped line and a bucket of small fish. The episode plays this as ordinary teasing and then does something kinder with it. The best eyewitness the Joes find is a boy named Jimmy, whose family boat was bitten in the night, and it is Jimmy who asks Bazooka outright whether he really saw a sea serpent. "Uh-huh." Everyone else, Duke included, files the sea serpent under comedy, and the boy is the one who asks it as a real question.

The Cobra side is where the writing sharpens. Tomax and Xamot often speak in unison. Their finest moment is a piece of corporate deadpan: when the Commander insists he is in complete control, a fight breaks out around him and they hand the sentence back to him as a verdict [1]. It sits inside a larger joke about the serpent as a business. The Twins run a protection racket from a yacht club table, demanding payment into numbered Swiss accounts on the first of every month, and the monster is the capital project they declined to fund. The Commander's complaint that they "foolishly failed to invest" in it, answered with "you lost control and went over budget," is boardroom comedy, in a cartoon about a robot sea monster.

The serpent's interior is the better invention. The sailors it has swallowed are put to work in a sorting room under a computerised voice that keeps asking "Will you work?", and the labour system comes with a clause: they get a break every two hours, round the clock. The coffee break then becomes a password. Someone relays a message from the professor, "be cool," and its meaning is coffee break, whereupon the sorting room falls asleep and starts to snore. Later, with the serpent in trouble, the sleepers keep murmuring the same two words while one of the walking characters wonders aloud how anyone can sleep when they are all doomed. Braxton, who calls the creature "she" and "her" and talks about his "engineering masterpiece" [2], has found the one weakness a coercive system cannot patch. It has to let its workers rest.

The weaker half is the harbor. The Joes arrive in numbers with a plan, and the dialogue promptly tells us none of it works: "That missile didn't even crack a tooth!" A running gag about the Mauler stuck in traffic is set up with some care: Duke asks for it by name and Thunder reports in from a jam. Then the Mauler is never mentioned again after "Where the blazes is that blasted Mauler?" The finish, a blast from Bazooka on the serpent's back, lands after Braxton has already begun an internal disruption, and the episode still hands the credit to Bazooka.

Still, the ending lands where it should. The Joes and the rescued prisoners gather on a platform inside the serpent's jaws, someone says "Was nothin', sir," and Alpine asks everyone to say "cheese dip." For a Halloween-week monster story it spends its attention on the villains' org chart rather than the monster, which we think is the right call, and funnier. Cobra loses to its own management, and the Cobra crowd on the couch are the ones who say so out loud.

1 ^ The exchange runs from 7:34 to 7:57, and the captions credit the Twins' unison delivery to "Both". They speak together again at 12:36, and at 12:46 one of them asks "Agreed?" after the plan to let the Joes wear themselves out before moving in.

2 ^ Duke and Alpine, who know the thing only as a threat, say "it" and "the thing". The Commander calls it "my serpent". Braxton is the one who keeps saying "she" and "her".

1. Fans on the Joe wiki say the Enforcer Elements, the metal tentacles that guard the serpent's insides, look a lot like the defenses of Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. That film came out in 1986, months after this episode aired on Halloween 1985.
2. The Joe wiki says Quick Kick sings "I'm the Barber of Seville" while freeing Lady Jaye from the tentacles, a moment it calls memorable, and a fan guide suggests the tune comes from Rossini's comic opera. Quick Kick's first appearance in the season is in [Chaos in the Sea of Lost Souls](/cartoons/1985/episodes/chaos-in-the-sea-of-lost-souls/).
3. The inventor Professor Braxton is said to look strikingly like Steven Spielberg, a Joe wiki trivia item.
4. The serpent's computer keeps asking the people it swallows "Will you work?" and the workers in its sorting room get a break "every two hours 'round the clock." Their "Coffee break" mumbling is office satire in robot form.
5. In the opening, Bazooka spots a Cobra Trubble Bubble being eaten by the serpent and the others answer "Give me a break, bubble-gum brain." Later a Cobra voice says that Braxton "was a mere appetizer" for the monster, and one fan guide wonders whether the pilot of the eaten craft was a failed test subject.
6. Per the fan guide, Duke snaps "Can the comedy, Alpine" when the joking gets out of hand. The phrase gets reused: "Can the comedy, soldier" comes up in [The Gods Below](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-gods-below/) and "Can the comedy, Torpedo" in "Cobra Stops the World."
7. Thunder's Mauler is late for the New York harbor fight: "Where's the Mauler, Thunder?" gets the answer "Oh, I'm stuck in traffic!" The Mauler also turns up in [Hearts and Cannons](/cartoons/1985/episodes/hearts-and-cannons/) a couple of weeks later.
8. Fans spotted a goof on the island: while Shipwreck climbs the tree, his shirt is white.
9. On home video, the episode was the second of three on volume 12 of the FHE commercial tape series, per a fan guide.