Lights! Camera! Cobra!

Producer Marty Goldblatt and a director named George are shooting "The G.I. Joe Story", and George refuses to go on without real Joes and real equipment. Duke ships over the team's oddballs, Shipwreck and Cover Girl among them. At Cobra headquarters Destro reports that the captured Firebat is sitting at the studio, and that its homing device could lead the Joes straight to the base, so Cobra Commander summons Zartan and the Dreadnoks.

Zartan's gang ambushes Recondo and Dusty, stirs up a brawl around Shipwreck, and wrecks the battle shoot for real. The Firebat flies itself home with Shipwreck aboard, and Cobra locks him up. The Joes answer with a message on Cobra's own secret frequency, a trade that turns into a fight, and a raid that the film crew happily photographs. Cobra Commander slips away and the studio lies in ruins.

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

"It's all wrong. It's all phony."

"Well, of course it's phony. It's a movie!"

"Hang the cost! Get me real G.I. Joes as technical advisers and real G.I. Joe equipment, or I'm walking off this picture!" -- George

"It takes a strong stomach to watch me eat, doesn't it, Destro?" -- Cobra Commander

"It cost $15 million to build that homing device. It would be cheaper to steal the Firebat back." -- Cobra Commander

"Smoke shifters, of course! Marty, we've got to have smoke shifters."

"Look! Those aren't actors. Those are Dreadnoks."

"Too bad my camera was crushed under the water tower."

"I'm really looking forward to finally seeing this." -- Shipwreck

"'Cause you were in jail, barnacle brain." -- 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 film about G.I. Joe that demands real G.I. Joes is a joke the franchise could not resist, and Buzz Dixon runs with it for the full half hour. The opening battle turns out to be a set: actors rappelling, a blue-clad extra sprinting past a shuttered door, a director shouting cut. The cartoon's first move is to laugh at the idea of itself.

The director's demands escalate in the way a good farce needs. George wants real Joes as technical advisers and real equipment in the same breath, and then, once the Joes have arrived and been found slightly scruffy, official G.I. Joe smoke shifters, which nobody can explain and Shipwreck is promptly sent to Hollywood to find. Marty, the producer, shuffles between horror and complicity, and the exchange in which he points out that authenticity costs money is answered with "hang the cost". The episode's engine is a man who wants the real thing and has no idea what the real thing would do to his set.

The story turns on the thin line between a staged battle and a real one, and how little the film people notice the difference. The best sequence is the shoot that Zartan's gang takes over. A water tower is dropped on the director's position, a bomb is ticking in the background, dogs are barking, and a voice declares it fabulous, colossal, the most realistic battle scene ever filmed. Then the cameras are accounted for one at a time, one crushed under the tower, one hit by a truck, one by shrapnel, and the long shot is the last hope. It is the funniest run of dialogue in the episode, and it works because each answer is a little more specific than the last [1].

The Cobra half is in the same spirit. Cobra Commander sits down to a meal, someone has to call for his hood, and Destro's report on the Firebat becomes an argument about budget. The Commander says the homing device cost fifteen million dollars to build and would be cheaper to steal back than to replace. A cartoon supervillain doing procurement makes both leaders look like they work for the same dysfunctional firm.

Shipwreck anchors the Joe side as a nuisance with a point, and we would happily watch more of him loose in Hollywood! He is the one in the pool-hall brawl, the one sent to Hollywood to look for smoke shifters, and the one who ends up strapped in the Firebat's cockpit when it flies itself home. The Joes' plan for getting him out depends on a trick with Torch: a message on Cobra's own secret frequency, a threat to a chained captive, and a captive who appears to be in on the joke [2].

The weak spot is the homing device itself. The episode makes the signal the prize, and then a Joe laments that they had the secret right in their hands and lost it. After that the signal is never followed. The Firebat is destroyed in the raid and the location of Cobra headquarters stops mattering. It is a plot that sets up a large consequence and then uses it as a way of moving the cast from one location to another.

Even so, the episode keeps its good humour. Cover Girl and Recondo get actual scenes, the studio gets wrecked in the finale, and the movie premiere closes things on a speech thanking mom and dad that the cast greets with fury.

Shipwreck says he is looking forward to finally seeing the picture, and so are we.

1 ^ The footage tally runs from 10:18 to 10:35: the camera under the water tower, then the side camera, the ravine camera, and finally the long shot.

2 ^ At 17:17 Zartan asks why Torch was not in maximum security; Torch replies that he was taken to the studio so a female Joe could study his face, and Zartan concludes she is a make-up expert and must be up to something. The Torch seen chained in the Cobra base earlier (17:00) is therefore presumably a stand-in, though the make-up work itself is never shown.

1. Destro walks in on Cobra Commander in the middle of a meal and says, "Your hood, put it on!" Cobra Commander just laughs that "it takes a strong stomach to watch me eat."
2. The Cobra bike in the midnight race against Recondo and Dusty is called a "Python Cycle" in the dialogue. The Joe fan wiki traces that name to the toy's working title in the series bible.
3. Torch's interrogation line "You expect me to talk, Cobra?" gets the answer "No. We expect you to fry!" The fan wiki says the exchange is lifted from Goldfinger, with "fry" standing in for "die". Out in the desert, one of the Joes also does a Road Runner "Meep, meep!" at a coyote.
4. Marty the producer is surprised that the Joes who arrive are not more spit and polish. The reason is Duke: he "wanted all the oddballs out of his hair for a couple of weeks", and Shipwreck and Cover Girl are among those shipped to Hollywood.
5. Torch says the Joes took him to the studio so a female Joe could study his face, and Zartan decides she is "a makeup expert" who must be up to something. The fan wiki points out that on the Joe roster that job belongs to Lady Jaye, while Cover Girl is the armor and vehicle specialist.
6. Destro recommends destroying the captured Firebat at once. Cobra Commander sneers that this is just a way to sell Cobra a new one, and that the homing device cost $15 million, so stealing the plane back is cheaper. No other episode of the season shows how the Firebat was captured.
7. When Shipwreck and Cover Girl start a brawl in a pool hall, a voice on the phone asks the police to "report a riot". The fan wiki credits the call to Torch, and JoeGuide says it was one of the bits trimmed for the USA Network reruns.
8. Lights! Camera! Cobra! carries production code 600-10, but it was the twenty-ninth episode to air counting both earlier miniseries, on October 10, 1985. JoeGuide says it was released on home video as Volume 9 of the FHE tape series, and that the Cobra base here matches the design from the 1984 Revenge of Cobra miniseries.