Cobra Soundwaves

Cobra Commander lures a Joe flight into a canyon where Destro's new ultrasonic weapon shakes their jets apart. Ace, Roadblock and Gung-Ho bail out and are caged and hauled to Cobra's base, where Cobra Commander leaves them to a robot crab in an arena. Meanwhile the Commander explains his real aim: to wreck the oil fields that supply a third of the free world's energy. Scarlett, flown by Wild Bill, goes looking for the missing trio while Sheik Ali wishes her luck.

The captives get past the crab with a hunk of wood and a trick with its infrared sensors, escape through a cave-in and drop into an underground river. Reunited with Scarlett, they join Flint's defence of the oil fields, then glide in on hang gliders the weapon cannot harm. Destro and the Commander quarrel, the Commander falls over a cliff, and Scarlett saves Sheik Ali from being dragged off. A banquet closes the episode.

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

"Those shock waves, they're tearing our planes apart!" -- Ace

"Nobody likes to retreat, Gung-Ho, but their numbers got us beat."

"Now I know what a tuna feels like!"

"You have grown too cautious, Destro, which is why I, not you, am Cobra Commander!" -- Cobra Commander

"Cobra Commander has a mind?" -- A captive Joe

"Hey, maybe we should warm things up a little around here."

"Fool! Those gliders have no mechanisms to shake apart." -- Destro

"Your invincible weapon almost killed me!" -- Cobra Commander

"Your incredible stupidity almost killed you." -- Destro

"Crepes suzette a la Roadblock!"

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 weapon is only as clever as the thing it is aimed at. Destro's sonic cannon is the best idea in this episode, and the Joes beat it by the simplest possible move: they stop flying anything that can be shaken apart.

Everything in the first act is built to show how good the gadget is. The Rattlers lure the Skystrikers into a canyon, orange rings wash over the jets, and pieces come off the aircraft in mid-air. Ace's line, that the shock waves are tearing the planes apart, is the premise in one breath. The crucial detail is that the weapon works on machines and has nothing to say to people. Every sequence after the crash is a Joe doing something with his own body or a borrowed hunk of wood. Roadblock dives across the sand, Ace works out that the crab sees by infrared, and the group decides to warm things up a little.

Cobra has built a tool that kills equipment, and the Joes keep surviving by being the one component the tool does not account for. When the Joes finally come in on gliders, the Commander demands full power and Destro tells him, with open contempt, that the gliders have no mechanisms to shake apart and the weapon is useless against them. Destro says it as an insult to the man at the controls. It is also the plot's moral, delivered by the man who built the thing.

The Cobra bickering is, as usual, the best material. Destro warns the Commander not to underestimate G.I. Joe and is told he has grown too cautious; a few scenes later the Commander turns it around and asks whether this is the same Destro who gave that warning. Destro's reply, that it is equally unwise to underestimate his genius, stings because he is right about the weapon and the Commander has no answer. By the end they are trading insults over a cliff edge, with the Commander dangling from a cable and Destro asking whether he needs assistance in a tone that suggests he would not mind a no [1].

The arena sequence is the episode's best stretch of problem solving. The crab is slow and relentless, and the writing gives the three captives a problem to reason through rather than a monster to shoot. That makes the two lines traded mid-chase, that the thing is not so fast and that it is not going to get tired either, feel like one joke told from both sides. Scarlett's thread with Wild Bill and Sheik Ali is the weaker half of the episode. It gives her the rescue, which she earns on the cliff with a single try. Sheik Ali spends most of his scenes being worried at, and the kidnapping that sets up her finish is flagged by a line about Airborne having some kind of E.S.P., according to his personnel file. The script uses it to get the Joes to the canyon and then drops it [2].

The oil-field defence is the other soft spot. We are told it is the target, we see derricks and a gun emplacement, and the Joes arrive in the nick of time with a chorus of yo-joes, but the stakes never turn into an image. A few columns of smoke are all the loss we see.

What the episode does have is a clean shape. Cobra shows off a toy, the toy is solved with a hole in a cave floor and a rubber raft, and the villains spend the finale arguing over whose fault it is. Cobra schemes usually end in an explosion, but this one ends with a banquet at the Sheik's table, crepes suzette a la Roadblock and all, and we think that suits it!

Destro built the best idea in the episode, and it is the Commander who ends up hanging off a cable.

1 ^ Cobra Commander wears the hooded version for most of the episode; the blue dome helmet shows up only at 18:34, at the weapon controls, and again at 18:58 as he tumbles down the cable.

2 ^ The exchange runs from 16:08 to 16:21: a fumbling Airborne, a question about shell shock, an explanation from his personnel file, and then the news that the Sheik has been kidnapped. Airborne is named only in that exchange.

1. Listen to the fight at the oil field and you will catch an odd bit of dialogue: someone lists the missing Joes (the best pilot, the heavy gunner, Gung-Ho, Wild Bill and Scarlett) and then shouts "Where the heck is everybody?!" JoeGuide speculates that a cut conversation scene had its audio repurposed over the action to liven it up.
2. The ESP line about Airborne is a throwaway: asked what is wrong with him, a Joe says he has "some kind of E.S.P., or so his file says." JoeGuide counts this as the first time his powers come up, with [Mind Menace](/cartoons/1985/episodes/mind-menace/) following through. On the air, though, Mind Menace ran two days earlier, on October 15, even though its production number (600-09) is later than this one's (600-04).
3. JoeGuide counts six USA Network trims in this episode, close to 50 seconds in all, including Gung-Ho's description of the arena surprise as "something mean, ugly, and real unfriendly." That line is intact in the version we checked.
4. Gung-Ho is on form while the prisoners trade barbs with Cobra Commander. Greeted as an "old friend," he replies that "fiend" would be more like it, and another Joe follows with "Cobra Commander has a mind?"
5. Destro and Cobra Commander spend as much time sniping at each other as at the Joes. After the Commander goes over the edge, Destro's whole reaction is "Pity," which JoeGuide's summary also gives to Destro. When the Commander snaps that the weapon almost killed him, Destro answers that his "incredible stupidity" almost did.
6. The episode closes on a banquet with "crepes suzette a la Roadblock," announced by a cheering Wild Bill. Roadblock's cooking turns up again in [Cobra Claws Are Coming to Town](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cobra-claws-are-coming-to-town/), where a dinner is introduced with "Roadblock cooked you a big surprise!"
7. JoeGuide suspects the establishing shot of Cobra's rock-face base was reused in [The Greenhouse Effect](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-greenhouse-effect/), which aired two weeks earlier. If so, the animation was made for this episode but reached the screen in the other one first.