Primordial Plot

Wild Weasel raids a dig site for dinosaur bones, and Cobra then storms a lecture hall and kidnaps Dr. Massey, whose cloned snake has just hatched. The Joes learn that Cobra means to clone dinosaurs and grow them to full size within a day, and Deep Six spots an island that is not on any map before Cobra shoots down the Skystrikers.

Flint, Scarlett and Gung-Ho cross the island on foot, hungry, while Cobra Commander and Destro put a cybernetic control disk on the cloned dinosaurs and send them hunting. The Joes escape one attack, then feed the dinosaurs a food packet and discover the control disk cannot hold against hunger. Gung-Ho is caught, but his friends bring the cliff down on the fortress, the dinosaurs break in, and Cobra scatters. Dr. Massey keeps the dinosaurs on the island.

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

"Cobra has an irritating habit of doing the impossible."

"This planet was once ruled by reptiles. Soon it will be again, this time by reptiles known as Cobra." -- Cobra Commander

"Congratulations, Dr. Massey, from Cobra!"

"Anybody got an aspirin?" -- Flint

"Dinner? He'd only be an appetizer."

"Hey, I thought dinosaurs were stupid."

"They just don't make 'em like they used to."

"No mind-control device can override the need for food."

"Perhaps we could open a museum." -- Dr. Massey

"My investors... can suck eggs, as far as I'm concerned." -- Dr. Massey

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.

Every villain's plan eventually runs into a basic fact about the creatures it relies on, and "Primordial Plot" finds the cheapest fact available: they get hungry. Donald F. Glut gives Cobra the full kit of a monster movie: a cloned snake egg that hatches on cue, a rapid-growth catalyst, an island missing from the map and a cybernetic control disk. Then he lets a hungry Joe and a food packet take it all apart. Appetite keeps coming up long before the dinosaurs do.

It starts with a theft at a dig site, where Wild Weasel lands his jet beside a pile of bones and a worker who cannot see why anyone would want them ("A bone's a bone, far as I can tell"). The kidnapping of Dr. Massey follows in the middle of his own lecture, with a snake hatching to applause and a voice cutting in to congratulate him on behalf of Cobra. A signal passes between Cobra's people, plan A is declared complete, and Tomax and Xamot order plan B.

Once the Joes reach the island, hunger takes over the script. Gung-Ho is the voice of it, sulking about food packets while a colleague insists on rationing them, then announcing that the top two items on his list of primal urges are food and shelter. Played for laughs, it is also a set-up. The Joes talk about little else on the walk across the island. The Cobra control room gets its turn when one villain warns that the dinosaurs must be fed before they are released and the other laughs that feeding them is just what he plans to do. So when the plan collapses it feels earned.

The collapse is neat. Scarlett works out that the dinosaur at their heels wants the food packet, tosses it, and sends the creatures off with a cry of "Go fetch, boys!" toward Cobra's missile crew. The verdict from the control room is a single sentence: no mind-control device can override the need for food. The sequence is cleverer than the usual cartoon rescue because the Joes win with something they have been carrying, and complaining about, since the crash [1].

Cobra gets to be funny too. Destro and the Commander trade barbs over whose genius is responsible for the plan, and Cobra's crew ask for their break because they are union. At the end the Commander slips out through a cracked window while the Crimson Twins ask Destro for a lift. The villains are petty rather than frightening, which suits a story about prehistoric animals loose in a fortress. By the end the dinosaurs are pointed at the people who thought they could manage them.

The weakness is the middle. After the crash there is a long walk through the swamp in which the Joes grumble about food, joke about their luck and hear a roar, and the plot barely moves until the dinosaurs appear. The humour covers it, but the climb up the rocks and the retreat from the cave are the stretch that could be tighter. And the explanation for the final trap, that the Joes "figured on bringin' the fortress to the dinosaurs", arrives as a line of dialogue just before the collapse instead of as something we watched them set up [2].

Still, the finish is warm. Dr. Massey, who has been a nervous hostage all episode, suggests a museum and then tells his investors they can suck eggs, and the dinosaurs stay on the island while Gung-Ho asks where the grub is and shoves in beside them. Cobra's plans are usually stopped by firepower; this one is stopped by a packet of rations. We'll take it!

1 ^ The Joes' lack of a radio is established at 8:06, which is the script's excuse for no air strike arriving and the whole party staying on foot; Flint's burning Skystriker is on screen from about 6:54.

2 ^ The red smoke and falling boulders on the cliff are on screen at 19:02, a few seconds after Gung-Ho's line at 18:51; the episode never shows who set the charge or when.

1. Fans on the Joe wiki note that the island of living dinosaurs echoes Dinobot Island from Hasbro's Transformers, the cartoon's own hidden dinosaur island.
2. This aired in 1985, and a Joe fan guide points out it beat Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel to the idea of cloning dinosaurs by about five years and the film by eight. Cobra Commander says the planet "was once ruled by reptiles" and will be again, this time "by reptiles known as Cobra."
3. Dr. Massey's rapid-growth catalyst is the sort of shortcut the series loves: the clones reach full size in less than 24 hours after hatching, which a Joe only gets after asking for it "in English." "Infinity is a very big number," comes the reply when Cobra Commander says the bone fragments can clone an infinite number of dinosaurs.
4. Gung-Ho gets two good lines in the swamp. When another Joe remarks that the place should remind him of home, he answers, "It does. Now you know why I left." Later he boasts, "I grew up wrestlin' gators!" before settling for chameleons.
5. Someone on Cobra's staff asks for a break before tracking the Joes, with the excuse "We're union, you know." Both the Joe fan guide and the wiki also notice the Crimson Twins' sashes turn gray in some shots instead of the usual red.
6. Flint crashes his Skystriker into the swamp, gets out, and asks, "Anybody got an aspirin?" The jet wreck is one of several aircraft downed by Cobra's island defenses.
7. Deep Six is the one who reports an island "that's not on the map", but he vanishes once the Joes reach it, and fans on the wiki ask where he was while Flint, Scarlett and Gung-Ho were on the ground. He turns up again in [Bazooka Saw a Sea Serpent](/cartoons/1985/episodes/bazooka-saw-a-sea-serpent/).
8. The wiki also notes that a triceratops walks through a wall and the Joes walk through a big piece of equipment back at headquarters.