Red Rocket's Glare

Joes Roadblock and Recondo help raid Destro's jungle laboratory, where Destro finishes a new weapon, the photon disintegrator, and escapes with it. On two weeks of leave, the pair visit Roadblock's Aunt Sarah and Uncle Caleb, whose Red Rocket drive-in is losing customers to a biker gang with ray guns. The company that owns the chain, Extensive Enterprises, is run by Tomax and Xamot, who are buying back every franchise and send Mr. Queeg and a squad of Tele-Vipers after Caleb and Sarah. After the Joes drive the Tele-Vipers off, Cobra Commander broadcasts a demonstration of the photon disintegrator on a replica city and demands that every nation surrender by dawn. Roadblock notices that the map of missile sites matches the Red Rocket locations, the Joes attack, and he rides the last rocket skyward to blow off its nose cone.

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

"Maybe 'cause no one's ever been able to get over this ravine without Destro's help." -- Recondo

"Call me Roadblock, okay? Not Marvin." -- Roadblock

"He can find an eyelash you lost in the woods two years ago." -- Roadblock

"I'll be the turkey if you'll be the stuffing!"

"Nobody makes my Aunt Sarah cry and gets away with it." -- Roadblock

"Cobra can, at times, be a bit heavy-handed." -- A speaker at Extensive Enterprises

"No rubble, no untidy after-effects. Nothing remains... but memories." -- Cobra Commander

"You have till dawn to decide. Sleep on it." -- Cobra Commander

"It matches the map of the Red Rocket drive-ins exactly." -- Roadblock

"Mostly that a 1,000-foot drop does nothing to help the digestion of Peking duck."

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.

Where does a terrorist army hide a hundred and fifty missiles aimed at the capitals of the world? Mary Skrenes's answer is a pun, and the script's good fortune is that it plays the pun straight: on the roofs of a fast-food chain, in plain sight.

The road there starts with Roadblock's family. A jungle raid opens the episode, with Tollbooth's bridge layer carrying the Joes over a ravine and Blowtorch burning out Destro's laboratory while Destro slips away with a weapon that, by his own account, cost him two years; the reward is two weeks of leave. Roadblock and Recondo go up the coast in Hawaiian shirts and find Aunt Sarah greeting her nephew as Marvin, Uncle Caleb buried in bills, and a Red Rocket franchise bought with their retirement money that has lost its customers to a gang of bikers with ray guns. Roadblock has just finished promising that Recondo can find an eyelash you lost in the woods two years ago. "We lost our shirts," comes the answer from his hosts. "Can he find those?"

What trips Cobra up is something personal, and the episode knows it. Nobody at Joe headquarters has a reason to look twice at a burger chain; the reason arrives as an aunt in tears, and Roadblock's line, "Nobody makes my Aunt Sarah cry and gets away with it," drives the second half. He asks the sharpest question in the script, why Cobra would want to muscle his relatives out of their little hamburger joint. The command room's research supplies part of the answer: Extensive Enterprises owns Red Rocket, sold the franchises mostly to retired couples, and has been buying them all back, everyone except Caleb and Sarah, which is why Mr. Queeg and his Tele-Vipers come calling [1]. The rest arrives when Cobra Commander's ultimatum puts a map of missile sites on the screen and Roadblock is the one who notices that it matches the map of the Red Rocket drive-ins. A grudge gets there before the briefing does.

The funniest stretch is corporate. Tomax and Xamot run Extensive Enterprises from a green-carpeted office and deliver much of their dialogue in unison, which suits the material. When Roadblock storms in, Cobra, they say, "can, at times, be a bit heavy-handed," but they cannot be held responsible for every action of their business associates, and they recommend that he take it up with Cobra. It is deniability dressed as customer service, and the Commander's own ultimatum is pitched in the same register, delivered over a replica city while a white blast rolls across a church and a parked car: "No rubble, no untidy after-effects." "You have till dawn to decide. Sleep on it." These are salesmen, and the villainy on offer is a business model.

The weak joint is the night itself. Once the Joes have the map, the order goes out to take out a hundred and fifty rocket sites before dawn. The episode answers by cutting to one pier-side restaurant where Cutter, on a megaphone, gives the Cobra occupants five seconds to leave before the firing starts. The race against dawn that the ultimatum set up is declared rather than staged; a few more sites falling would have made the stakes feel as large as the map.

What the episode does stage is the last restaurant. Rocket number 104, the one on Caleb and Sarah's roof, climbs toward Washington, D.C., with Lady Jaye dangling from its nose cone on ropes before liftoff and Roadblock holding on once it climbs. [2] We enjoyed watching a man who turns up his nose at drive-in food hang off a drive-in's roof ornament over a city, and enjoyed his plan more, which is to blow the nose cone off and hope: "There's a chance...maybe." The cut to a raft on a smoky canal, and then to Roadblock in an apron with a plate of ribs, is good comic timing, and the rhyme about eating at Joes' that closes the dinner scene is as silly as it ought to be!

Doomsday weapons are easy to come by in this cartoon; a doomsday weapon sitting on an aunt and uncle's retirement money is rarer.

1 ^ Queeg tells his Tele-Vipers at about 9:49 that the Crimson Guard has authorized extreme measures. The subtitle track never explains the name, and Tomax and Xamot, who give Queeg his orders, are not called by it. 2 ^ R.R. 104 is named at about 8:38 as the last drive-in Extensive Enterprises needs to buy back, and the rocket announced as launched at 20:09 carries the same number, so the one franchise that would not sell is also the one whose missile we see leave the roof.

1. Roadblock's first name is spoken only in this episode of the season. His Aunt Sarah greets him with "It's Marvin!" and he answers, "Call me Roadblock, okay? Not Marvin." Because her family name is Bronson, the wiki reasons that the aunt and uncle are on his mother's side.
2. The production numbers show how scrambled the 1985 run was. This episode is number 600-12, yet it aired on September 24, after the five Pyramid of Darkness chapters (numbered 600-37 to 600-41) that aired the week before. [Cobra's Creatures](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cobras-creatures/), numbered 600-01, did not air until September 30.
3. Extensive Enterprises is no newcomer to Cobra's payroll, and someone at Joe headquarters says as much: "Extensive Enterprises has done business with Cobra before." Five days earlier, in [Chaos in the Sea of Lost Souls](/cartoons/1985/episodes/chaos-in-the-sea-of-lost-souls/), Cobra is reminded that Extensive Enterprise has financed the Pyramid of Darkness operation 100 percent.
4. The title riffs on "The Star-Spangled Banner" ("and the rockets' red glare"), and the story ends on a rhyme about Joe beating Cobra: "So when you want relief from your worries and your woes, you can come on down and eat at Joes'." The wiki connects that last line to the old cartoon gag "Eat at Joe's," which goes back to the late 1930s.
5. JoeGuide hears a couple of famous sound effects behind the fighting: the hiss of Luke's practice droid from Star Wars while the Cobra ASPs open fire on the Joe WHALE, and later a lightsaber hum. JoeGuide also spots the same droid sound in [Mind Menace](/cartoons/1985/episodes/mind-menace/).
6. Destro's photon disintegrator is two years of work, and Cobra Commander's demonstration on a replica town is cold: "No rubble, no untidy after-effects. Nothing remains... but memories." JoeGuide's reviewer thinks his delivery here, controlled and menacing instead of campy, is one of the best moments of the series.
7. JoeGuide points out one shot where a Cobra agent is never shown escaping his ASP before it blows up. The wiki also grumbles that the map of the United States is poorly drawn.
8. The wiki flags a map slip: R.R. 104, the Bronsons' drive-in, is the last one Extensive wants to buy back and sits on the California coast, yet the 104 rocket is the one launched at Washington, D.C. JoeGuide adds that the episode came out on tape as volume 6 of the FHE commercial series.