Cobra Stops the World

Cobra Commander broadcasts an ultimatum: after attacks on oil fields and offshore rigs, a fleet of tankers has vanished behind Destro's cloaking device, and one will be blown up every hour until the world surrenders. Duke and Ace, scouting a jungle for the missing ships, are forced down by a Cobra fighter and captured by Major Bludd and the Yanomamo tribesmen he has armed. Scarlett, disguised as an old woman, breaks into a Cobra safe house on the West Coast and questions a trooper. Back at the command center, the radioman Sparks races to finish a scanner that can trace remote-control signals.

Duke and Ace escape and find that the tribe's village has become an air base and diamond mine feeding the cloaking device. Sparks traces the next detonation to a base off Patagonia, the Joes assault it, and Cobra Commander and Destro escape.

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

"Loud, clear, and ugly, Colonel Sharp." -- Duke

"Till you, they'd never met a snake with legs." -- Duke

"Even the goldfish swear they know nothin' about it." -- Torpedo

"Hang on, Duke. I'm gonna try to beat the odds and lose 'em!" -- Ace

"Except for the lethal wound to my pride." -- Ace

"But we may have won the fleet!" -- Sparks

"Yahoo! The secret word is Patagonia!" -- Sparks

"Did you truly think me defenseless?" -- Cobra Commander

"We do now, Destro." -- Duke

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.

Cobra's loudest weapon in this episode is a transmission, and a transmission can be traced. Steve Gerber opens on Cobra Commander addressing the nations of the world, with tankers evaporating behind a cloaking device and a demand for surrender, and then lets that broadcast come back on its author for the rest of the running time. The first ultimatum is bounced off a satellite so that nobody can find the sender [1]. The second is beamed onto a living-room television where Scarlett happens to be standing, and the remote detonator that makes the threat believable is the very thing that finally walks the Joes to Cobra's door.

Scarlett's sequence is the one that plays best. A frail old woman rings a doorbell, says she is lost and asks to use the telephone, and is told to beat it by a man who calls her Granny. She answers with a high kick and a dagger, and a moment later she is in his living room with the crossbow out, explaining that she is only hungry for information. While she is questioning a Cobra trooper, Cobra Commander is on the television behind her announcing that a tanker will be detonated each hour. The staging sets Cobra's own channel against Cobra, and the episode never makes the point more neatly.

The same idea explains who the hero is. Duke gets the glory shots, but he spends the middle of the story being shot down and marched around a jungle. The canyon chase before it, with Ace threading the jet between two rock walls and insisting it was not as close as it looked, is lovely banter that moves nothing. What moves it is Sparks, the radioman, working on a scanner at a console with fifty-six minutes on the clock. When a tanker goes up he whoops, and when he is asked what the devil he is so happy about, since they have just lost one, he answers that they may have won the fleet. Nobody in the field finds the base. A technician with a frequency detector does the job, and the show is generous enough to let him be the one who shouts the secret word, Patagonia!

Cobra's side is livelier than its plan. Cobra Commander commends Destro for the cloaking device, and Destro cautions him against proclaiming a triumph prematurely. He is proved right, and the Commander's answer once the Joes have arrived is to tell Destro he will pay for his stupidity, as though the remote in his own hand had nothing to do with it [2].

The real weakness is the tribe, and we wish the script had stayed with it. Bludd introduces the Yanomamo as people who have not left their forest in thousands of years, and explains the arrangement frankly. Cobra supplied firepower so that they could win a war with a neighbouring village, and in exchange takes nothing they will miss, just the means to stop the world. Duke and Ace then find that the village has been turned into an air base with a diamond mine as well. It is the episode's most unsettling image, and the tribesmen are never mentioned again once the Joes are in the air. A story that raises the question of what Cobra does to people it uses and then drops it for a jailbreak is leaving its best material on the floor. The likely reason is a crowded half hour, but the loss is real.

The ending is brisk and slightly deflating. The Joes tear into the golden snake-headed base, Cobra Commander turns out to have a defence ready that leaves Duke coughing on his knees, and by the time he stands the pair have gone. The closing banter, with a suggestion of dinner and a movie, lets the air out gently.

It is a quick, tidy, well-made thriller rather than a great one, but the idea is a good one and it keeps faith with it from the first broadcast to the last: the villains' loudest weapon tells the heroes where to look.

1 ^ At 2:17 Colonel Sharp asks Sparks whether he could trace the transmission, and the answer is that Cobra bounced it off a satellite, so their base could be anywhere in the world.

2 ^ The sequence runs from 20:00 to 20:44: the Commander says the "ingenious detonator" has led the Joes to their door, Destro replies that no Joe scanner could trace his signal, and Duke answers that they have one now. The Commander's threat that Destro will pay comes at 20:44.

1. Sparks has the best day of his run here. The fan wiki says this episode gives him, Ace, Torpedo, Colonel Sharp and Major Bludd more lines than they get anywhere else, and Sparks's homemade scanner, which tracks Cobra's remote detonation signal, is what finally pins down the missing tankers.
2. The big reveal is a pun: "The secret word is Patagonia!" Sparks crows, and Duke tells him to quit "Patagoni-in'" himself on the back and get an assault force moving. The tankers turn out to be about 200 miles due east of the Falklands.
3. Fans have noticed that the Cobra Rattlers' engine screech in the canyon chase is the TIE fighter sound from Star Wars, and JoeGuide's notes mention it too.
4. Fans on the G.I. Joe wiki credit this as the first appearance of Deep Six, the Joe diver. The dialogue never names him, so you have to take the fans' word for it.
5. Those Cobra divers carry sonic rifles, which is enough to leave Torpedo yelling "My brain's doing a hula!" Cobra goes bigger on the same sound-weapon theme three weeks later in [Cobra Soundwaves](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cobra-soundwaves/), and the SHARC craft Torpedo reports in from, "Sharc One," turn up again in [Spell of the Siren](/cartoons/1985/episodes/spell-of-the-siren/).
6. Scarlett spends several minutes as a sweet old lady at a Cobra safe house that Colonel Sharp describes as having a rose garden and a white picket fence. The guard tells her to "beat it, granny," she says "Okay, sonny," and then the kick comes out. Her excuse for the visit: "I'm only hungry for information."
7. Major Bludd's allies in the jungle are the Yanomamo, a tribe he says had not left the forest for thousands of years and had "never met a snake with legs." Cobra armed them against a neighboring village, then turned their village into an air base. The jewels from the diamond mine, we learn, power Destro's cloaking device.
8. By production number this was the fifth episode made, but it was the ninth of the 1985 season to air, counting from The Further Adventures of G.I. Joe. JoeGuide's notes say it was later issued on VHS as Volume 3 of the FHE tape series.