Flint's Vacation

Flint takes leave to surprise his cousin Ted in Pleasant Cove, an experimental community on the coast, and finds a household that answers in monotones and goes to bed ten minutes after he arrives. Waking from a nightmare of a giant Cobra Commander hand, he finds the family gone and the town marching in line past Cobra guards. The sheriff hands him to a gang of Dreadnoks, a car chase ends with his racer over a cliff, and Zartan presents him to Cobra Commander as a new recruit in Cobra's underwater city.

The Commander broadcasts a world ultimatum while the townspeople work as slaves, hypnotised by subliminal messages in the nightly news. Breaker and Lady Jaye trace the signal to a dish pointing down, and the Joes enter the city by submarine. Breaker alters the hidden message, the town wakes, Tripwire sends the missile into space, and Cobra floods its own city.

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

"Tomorrow will be another pleasant day in Pleasant Cove, followed by a pleasant night." -- The Pleasant Cove news anchor

"Well, my relatives were so excited to see me they went to bed 10 minutes after I arrived." -- Flint

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and...boring."

"They like their jobs so much, we don't even have to pay them."

"Satellite dishes are supposed to point up. That one's pointing down."

"Don't use your weapons! They're innocent civilians." -- Lady Jaye

"Anybody know a good comedy routine?"

"Ignore Cobra Commander. He's a jerk!" -- The altered broadcast

"Who is that fool on the TV?! I am not making a broadcast!" -- Cobra Commander

"I want to get back on duty, where I can get some peace and quiet." -- Flint

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.

Pleasant Cove has a seven o'clock news bulletin that promises tomorrow will be another pleasant day, followed by a pleasant night, and it is the most frightening piece of writing in the episode. Everything wrong with the town is in the register. Cousin Ted greets Flint at the door in a monotone (the closed captions even label it as one). The rest of the family say how nice it is to see him and that he is always welcome in unison, and they are all in bed ten minutes after the guest arrives. Flint, who has come to see how real people live, does the sensible thing and phones Lady Jaye, and the sensible thing he tells her is that it seems odd.

The first act is a very good small-scale horror setup, and it ends the way those do. Flint wakes from a nightmare to an empty house, a family that has gone out in the night, and a crowd of townspeople walking in a line past a Cobra guard. [1] The sheriff he reports it to finds the idea of a terrorist group kidnapping his town a little farfetched and passes him to the Dreadnoks playing cards in the same room. From there the episode becomes a chase, with Buzzer, Ripper and Torch splitting up the coastal roads by name over the radio while Flint drives a racer that does not survive the cliff.

Then the Joes arrive, and the story gets to its real problem. The Joes cannot shoot their way through a population that is only following orders, and Lady Jaye says so the moment the townspeople come at the rescue party: do not use your weapons, they are innocent civilians. Cobra's weapon is the evening news, delivered through a satellite dish that points the wrong way, and the only cure on offer is another edit. Breaker has the right instinct for it. He gives Lady Jaye soundproofing for her ears so she can see but not hear the broadcast, and explains that he will show her only every twentieth frame. A few minutes later the hidden instruction to report to the docks at midnight has been replaced with a message of the Joes' own: ignore Cobra Commander, he's a jerk. [2]

The reason this works as comedy and not only as plot is the Commander's vanity. His great demand all episode is to be made supreme leader of a world he has just held to ransom, and what undoes him is the one thing he cannot tolerate: somebody else controlling his picture. He watches his own face tell the whole town to ignore him and demands to know who that fool on the screen is, since he is not making a broadcast. The sharpest beat is Flint's. Ordered to close the inner door and open the sea door, which would drown the very Joes trying to save him, Flint resists, and the Commander cries out that he has been disobeyed. The people who were about to be drowned get their friend back in the same scene that the town gets its own minds back.

Cobra's control room is quick and funny too, and we would happily stay longer. When the breach comes, one voice announces that he will take the responsibility but not the blame and names Zartan in the same breath, and the Commander tells everyone to stop bickering because he is watching something very interesting. [3]

Where the episode comes up short is the ultimatum. Cobra Commander threatens a weapon that can kill off all the earth's vegetation, stages a demonstration on a patch of dying wilderness, and gives the world's leaders eight hours. It is a big idea with no screen time. Tripwire disposes of it in two exchanges, warning that touching the missile will set it off and then announcing that he has rerouted it into space, and the eight-hour clock returns only as a taunt. The kidnapped-town story carries the episode, and the world-ransom plot barely gets a look in.

Flint's coda is the right one! He has lost the car and the vacation, is offered two more weeks of leave, and asks instead to go back on duty.

1 ^ The nightmare, a giant dark hand reaching for Flint, is never explained on screen. The subliminal-news plot that follows is the obvious suspect, but nothing in the dialogue links the two.

2 ^ Breaker's dart board is a running gag nobody resolves: at 14:16 someone asks Ace what Breaker wants with it, and at 16:16 one Joe asks another whether they have it and hears that the darts were forgotten.

3 ^ In the torpedo exchange the subtitles run "Good shot, Baroness!" into "You hit the wrong target, idiot!" between 15:35 and 15:46, and at 15:31 and 15:41 we see a gunboat exploding and the Baroness leaping from a burning boat; the subtitle track does not say whose boat took the hit.

1. Cobra brainwashes Pleasant Cove through the nightly news. The anchor promises, "Tomorrow will be another pleasant day in Pleasant Cove, followed by a pleasant night," and the show doubles as Cobra's "training film" for new recruits. To read the hidden order to report to the boarding docks at midnight, the Joes slow the broadcast down, and someone explains, "I'm only gonna show you every 20th frame." At the finish the Joes alter the message to "Ignore Cobra Commander. He's a jerk!"
2. Cobra is run like a company. Cobra Commander welcomes Flint to "our company" and predicts a brilliant career (Flint: "Yeah, in the demolition department"). The fringe benefits are "quite good": "If you work very hard, we let you sleep." The brainwashed workers like their jobs so much, he gloats, "we don't even have to pay them. That is our incentive program."
3. A storyboarded scene never made it to the screen, according to the Joe fan wiki. After Cobra Commander's ultimatum, Lady Jaye was to phone Flint's cousin Ted, who would say he had not talked to Flint in months, and the call would confirm that Pleasant Cove is Cobra's headquarters. The finished episode leaves that deduction to the viewer.
4. Breaker's gum is a comic book touch. The Joe fan wiki points out that his gum-popping in this episode is one of the few nods in the cartoon to the Marvel comic. It is the only mention of the gum in the season's dialogue, when someone hisses, "Breaker, will you stop popping your gum? They'll hear you!"
5. The Joe fan wiki points to a reused shot. When Flint phones Lady Jaye from his cousin's house, the establishing shot shows his car outside, and the wiki says it recycles an earlier shot of Flint sitting in the car, so he seems to be in two places at once. The wiki also asks how the Joes figure out the undersea base is near Pleasant Cove, since the only clue is a camera move following Flint during the broadcast.
6. The Joe WHALE dodges Cobra torpedoes with a nifty trick: "Hit the vertical thrusters, Cutter!" The Joe fan wiki finds such thrusters implausible, and the Joe Guide site compares the leap to Kup and Hot Rod evading Galvatron in The Transformers: The Movie, with another parallel in [Bazooka Saw a Sea Serpent](/cartoons/1985/episodes/bazooka-saw-a-sea-serpent/).
7. Flint's car goes up in flames in a roadside plunge. The Joe fan wiki says it is the same car Flint drives in [The Gamemaster](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-gamemaster/), and that he wears his Ranger beret in public while on leave in both episodes. When a gloating captor calls it a "tragedy about your car" and says he was looking forward to confiscating it, Flint shrugs that it "needed a tune-up."
8. The trouble with brainwashed civilians echoes [Captives of Cobra, Part II](/cartoons/1985/episodes/captives-of-cobra-part-ii/), where the Joes also have to hold back against the people Cobra has turned into soldiers. Here Lady Jaye orders, "Don't use your weapons! They're innocent civilians."
9. Flint's vacation ends with Colonel Sharp offering two more weeks off, and Flint refusing: he wants to get back on duty "where I can get some peace and quiet." Lady Jaye had already teased him in [Spell of the Siren](/cartoons/1985/episodes/spell-of-the-siren/): "If this is your idea of a vacation, Flint, I'd hate to see where you'd take me on business." Four weeks later she takes her own trip in [Skeletons in the Closet](/cartoons/1985/episodes/skeletons-in-the-closet/), and it goes worse.