Jungle Trap

In India, Duke, Scarlett, Recondo and Rock 'n Roll meet Dr. Shakur, whose Vulcan Machine can draw boiling lava from the earth's core, but Zartan springs a trap in the city and Cobra takes the doctor to a hidden temple. Cobra Commander has Shakur build the machine for him and shoots down the helicopters sent after him. The surviving Joes cut through the jungle toward the base while the Commander's traps go to work: a snare, a laser trap, a charging rhino and a pack of striped hyenas.

Recondo's jungle sense and Snake Eyes's disobedience get the team through. They overpower Copperhead, steal a hovercraft and Cobra uniforms, and walk into the temple posing as guards with a prisoner. Inside, Cobra weighs which city to burn first and settles on Los Angeles, the Joes burst out of disguise, and the machine turns its last power on the temple itself while the team escapes across the lake.

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

"Does that umbrella protect you from the sun?" -- Duke

"I'd bet my bush hat that's where Cobra's holed up." -- Recondo

"My jungle traps will make their journey quite interesting." -- Cobra Commander

"If I never see another vine again, it'll be too soon." -- Rock 'n Roll

"I feel like I just took a tidal wave without my surfboard." -- Rock 'n Roll

"Glorious! Simply glorious!" -- Cobra Commander

"I told you to go back. You deliberately disobeyed an order! But...if you don't say anything, I won't, either."

"Sleeping sickness. He picked it up in the jungle. Be careful. It's catching." -- A Joe in a Cobra uniform

"No way some creep's gonna ace my hometown."

"I sure hope you're bookin' us for a return engagement." -- Wild Bill

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 Commander promises his enemies a jungle full of traps, and Paul Dini's script spends the rest of the episode showing that a trap is only as good as the people who walk into it. The Joes do not get past the vine, the laser trap, the rhino or the hyenas by being stronger than whoever set them. They get past because somebody on the team is always thinking about what the jungle itself will do. Then, in the last third, the team stops running from traps and lays one of its own: a stolen hovercraft, a set of borrowed uniforms and a story about a sleeping sickness.

It begins in a crowded Indian market with Recondo savoring the savagery of the jungle mixed with the excitement of the city, Scarlett regretting that there is no time for sightseeing, and Dr. Shakur waiting under a red umbrella with the Vulcan Machine to protect. The introductions are quietly charming, and Duke gives his surname as Hauser before telling the doctor that his friends call him Duke [1], an easy, friendly way to meet a stranger. Then Zartan, watching from a window in a red hood, springs his surprise, a helpful stranger points the Joes down a shortcut, the shortcut ends at Cobra Hiss tanks, and the doctor is gone.

The best scene in the episode is the one at the temple dock. The hovercraft docks at the temple, the Joes are in blue Cobra uniforms with a prisoner in tow, and a guard asks what happened to Copperhead. Sleeping sickness, comes the reply, picked up in the jungle, be careful, it's catching; and the guard sends them straight to the infirmary before they contaminate the whole base. A fortress full of professional soldiers is walked into through its front door on the strength of a made-up illness! It works because the lie lets the guard do what a frightened man does and send the problem somewhere else.

The jungle sequence has smaller pleasures. Recondo promises a walk through the park, Rock 'n Roll complains that he feels like he took a tidal wave without his surfboard, and then announces that if he never sees another vine again it will be too soon. One of the Joes saves a rhino from a bullet by talking it into a mud bath. When the hyenas arrive, someone shouts at Snake Eyes to go back, and afterwards a voice says that he deliberately disobeyed an order but if he does not say anything, neither will they. The bargain offered to a character who never speaks is the funniest line in the script, and we would have it on a mug. [2]

On the Cobra side the Commander is at his theatrical best, hailing the crash of the helicopters as glorious, simply glorious, and polling the room for a test city for the lava as if reading from a menu: Paris, New York, Moscow, Los Angeles. A Joe listening in hears the last name and takes it personally, and the line that sets off the final attack is a hometown boast.

The weak spot is the doctor. At 6:00 Dr. Shakur says he will never work for the Commander; a laugh later he is hailing him, and the Commander remarks that he is a fast learner. By 17:51 he is calling the Commander master and announcing that Project Vulcan is finished, and by 19:03 he is running out of the control room with the Joes, with nothing in between to explain either turn. [3] The reason is probably the running time, which has to hold a city ambush, a helicopter battle, a jungle march and a disguise heist, but the mission is all about Shakur, and he is the one person on screen we never get to know.

This is a clean, quick adventure with no arc to carry, and everyone on the team gets one smart moment. Cobra builds the traps, and the Joes bring the one weapon the Commander never planned for, a good lie.

1 ^ The surname is spoken once, at 1:37, and not repeated in the rest of the episode.

2 ^ The order at 15:04 and the deal at 15:31 carry no speaker label in the closed captions, so we leave the speaker unnamed. Snake Eyes is on screen, surrounded by hyenas, between the two.

3 ^ At 9:20 Shakur is seen smiling in a Cobra headband. Nothing on the soundtrack says what the headband does.

1. Duke introduces himself to Dr. Shakur as "First Sergeant Hauser" and adds that his friends call him Duke. General Stack uses the same surname in [Battle for the Train of Gold](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-for-the-train-of-gold/), where he calls him "Sergeant Hauser".
2. The shortcut that leads Duke's team into Zartan's ambush comes from a stranger in the alley, and Duke takes it with a cheerful "Thanks, friend." The G.I. Joe wiki grumbles that a random stranger should not have known where the Joes were headed. Cobra HISS tanks show up moments later.
3. Paul Dini wrote this one, and the fan wiki points out that he later became one of the creative minds behind "Batman: The Animated Series".
4. Fans on the G.I. Joe wiki note that the number of hyenas keeps changing from shot to shot, and that the rhino that tumbles over a cliff ought to have been more badly hurt, even if it lands in a river.
5. Zartan strolls through the first scenes in full daylight with no ill effects, then later cringes when sunlight streams into the Cobra base. Both the G.I. Joe wiki and the JoeGuide fan site flag it as a continuity slip.
6. The fan wiki says Snake Eyes is in midnight-navy fatigues here, while in other episodes, including [Red Rocket's Glare](/cartoons/1985/episodes/red-rockets-glare/), he is a lighter blue-gray. The wiki blames the episodes being produced and shown out of order.
7. Copperhead is the one-off Cobra pilot who catches Duke's party in the jungle, with the line "a couple of G.I. jungle rats". No other episode of the season features him. The Joes take his hovercraft and his uniforms, then tell the base guards he has sleeping sickness and "it's catching" to get past them.
8. JoeGuide credits Zartan with a communication cobra that has a camera in its mouth and a monitor on its body, likening it to a webcam, and says the episode was later released as volume 11 of the FHE video series. The wiki adds that Cobra's world map is centered on Japan, which it guesses came from the animators' usual map.