Cobra Claws Are Coming to Town

On Christmas Eve a Joe jeep towing the Happy Holiday Wagon, piled with donated toys, is strafed by a Cobra Rattler that then turns away for no visible reason. At the half-empty base the skeleton crew sit down to Roadblock's dinner while Mutt wanders off to mope in the hangar, where he finds a Trojan rocking horse full of Cobra troopers. Cobra takes the base with snake robots and gas, hangs the Joes in a meat locker, and uses Destro's reducer/enlarger to steal their weapons and vehicles for an attack on Keystone City. Zartan, disguised as Duke, broadcasts a martial law message to frame the team.

The Joes get loose, climb into Cobra's own aircraft and chase the raiders, with Shipwreck's parrot Polly shrunk and enlarged along the way. Duke, handcuffed, wrestles Cobra Commander in a SkyStriker cockpit, and the episode ends in the snow with a giant Polly handing over the key.

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

"Button your beak, bird, or there's a feather duster in your future."

"Place looks awfully deserted, Duke." -- Cover Girl

"This time of year always makes me sad." -- Mutt

"A Trojan rocking horse. We've been snookered."

"We're tired of serving our country. It's time the country started serving us!" -- Zartan, disguised as Duke

"Right you are. But try telling it to the folks in Keystone City." -- Zartan, in his own voice

"Dad, aren't those the G.I. Joes? I thought they were heroes." -- A boy in Keystone City

"Well, I ain't nobody." -- Wild Bill

"It is Christmas, Junkyard. You know, all of a sudden, I don't feel bad anymore." -- Mutt

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.

A present is a promise that the box holds what the wrapping says, and nearly everything in this episode breaks that promise one way or another. The Happy Holiday Wagon is stacked with toys for a children's hospital and carries a Trojan horse's worth of Cobra troopers through the front door. Cobra Commander's gift to his hanging prisoners is the key to their handcuffs, dangled just out of reach. Shipwreck's parrot is shrunk to the size of a fly by a ray gun that Destro calls a decade of research, and the attack on Keystone City runs on borrowed Joe equipment. Story by Roy and Dann Thomas, script by Carla and Gerry Conway, and the clever part is that the only honest present is held back until the closing minute.

The set-up is neat. Duke tells Cover Girl that nobody gets through the automatic defense grid even with the team on leave. A few scenes later the grid is a curtain of red laser bars in the hangar, and the donated toys are piled in the same dim room. The Joes wheel the wagon in themselves, but they have been helped to it. A Rattler pilot who signs off with "Happy holidays from Wild Weasel" strafes the jeep and then breaks away, and the Joes agree not to look a gift horse in the mouth [1]. We know how that goes!

What makes the episode worth a rewatch is that the person who finds the trap is the one who walked out of the party. Mutt leaves the dinner table because the season makes him sad: his parents made such a fuss over the holidays that they never had time for him, and he never got to trim the tree or hang up a stocking. So he is alone with Junkyard in the hangar when the horse opens. The sadness that sends him out of the room is what sounds the alarm, and the script is wise enough not to underline it.

The Cobra half is more pointed than it needs to be. Zartan, wearing Duke's face, reads out a speech announcing that the Joes are tired of serving their country and want the country to start serving them. Then he drops into his own voice to say that the folks in Keystone City are the ones to tell. The speech has a second life there, where a boy sees the Joe vehicles on the road and asks his father whether those are not the G.I. Joes, and the father says he thought they were heroes too. It is the best moment in the episode and it is a single exchange on a snowy street. A children's cartoon asks viewers to believe in the team every week, and for a few seconds this one lets two civilians doubt it out loud.

The closing key answers all that. Cobra Commander's key is a taunt, hung up where the prisoners can watch it. Polly's key, tied with a red bow and held in a giant talon, is the same joke told with the other hand, and Duke's reply is "Aw, you shouldn't have". The episode has been about presents that cannot be trusted, and it ends on one that can, handed over by the bird who is told to button her beak in the opening minutes.

The weakness is the middle. Shipwreck says "I got it!" on his hook, and the next time we see the prisoners they are standing in the control room telling Destro not to mail the invitations to his victory party [2]. The escape from a meat locker, the one stretch of the plot that is really a puzzle, happens between scenes. A short cartoon slot has to drop something, and a Christmas episode would rather spend its time on a dog and a parrot. It is a defensible choice, but it leaves the Joes liberated by editing rather than by anything they do.

We would still take a giant parrot holding a key over a tidy escape any Christmas! Its last line, "Ah, bah humbug," is a little rude, and earned.

1 ^ The Rattler pilot radios at 2:15 that Firefly's mission is accomplished, which tells us the strafing run was never meant to stop the wagon.

2 ^ Cobra Commander hangs the handcuff key out of reach at 12:05 and Cover Girl is free in the control room telling Destro off at 12:37; the subtitle track gives nothing about the escape in between.

1. The Christmas episode aired on November 7, 1985, seven weeks before the holiday. A fan guide says it was reportedly called "No Table Left Unturned" at some point.
2. The Joes realize the toy-laden holiday wagon was a Trojan horse: "A Trojan rocking horse. We've been snookered." As one fan guide points out, the earlier "not look a gift horse in the mouth" line is the setup.
3. Zartan, disguised as Duke, introduces himself on the broadcast as "Sergeant Duke Hauser". The rank wobbles across the run: in [Jungle Trap](/cartoons/1985/episodes/jungle-trap/) Duke is "First Sergeant Hauser", and [Worlds Without End, Part I](/cartoons/1985/episodes/worlds-without-end-part-i/) has a file reading "Hauser, Conrad S."
4. When Mutt wanders off to mope, Junkyard gives up his turkey leg to keep him company. A fan site rates it one of the series' best moments of sincere emotion and reports the USA Network rerun cut the 56-second scene entirely.
5. Sunbow's own episode synopsis gets two things wrong, according to a fan guide: it lists Scrap Iron, who never appears, and it puts the fight at Joe headquarters when the battle is actually fought over a nearby town.
6. A character reads a tabloid with the headline "Martians land in Hoboken", which one fan guide says is a send-up of the Star and the National Enquirer. "Newark, I could believe," he grumbles, "but Hoboken?"
7. Polly the parrot is shrunk and enlarged by Destro's reducer/enlarger, which has "a 2-way switch". Her squawks get plenty of pun mileage: "Tote that teddy! Lift that train!" and "Snowball's chance." Polly also appears with Shipwreck in [The Further Adventures of G.I. Joe](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-further-adventures-of-g-i-joe/).
8. The final line, a muttered "Bah humbug", nods to Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and a fan guide gives it to Shipwreck.