The Funhouse

Zartan knocks out the scientist Dr. Hibbentrope in his lab and impersonates him in a ransom broadcast, while Cobra Commander demands sixty billion dollars for a group of kidnapped scientists. The Joes smell a trap, trace the transmission, and send a strike team anyway. They take the outer defenses of a temple fortress, but inside the Commander greets them with a funhouse of booby traps: three doors, hallucinogenic balloons, a snake-headed ride, a robot ringmaster, a jack-in-the-box and marching robots, and tells them the island is a bomb.

The team is picked off until Flint is the last one standing, taunting the Commander and hunting for a way to disarm the bomb. The others recover and the Joes escape the blast. Meanwhile Wild Bill, posted to watch the airspace, has followed the Commander's aircraft to the real fortress, where the Joes storm the temple and free the actual scientists.

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. Anyone care to guess what Cobra's gonna do when they complete their set?" -- Flint

"It's too easy. I've got a bad feeling about this."

"You know, there will be an extra charge for my acting services." -- Zartan

"Your acting couldn't get you onto a soap opera." -- The Baroness

"Welcome to my funhouse!" -- Cobra Commander

"And ruin my fun? Surely you jest." -- Cobra Commander

"Let him take as long as he likes. I am paid by the hour." -- Zartan

"This is just like cleaning a stable back home!" -- Wild Bill

"Your robots are lousy shots, Commander! Did you program 'em yourself?" -- Flint

"I want to watch him squirm!" -- Cobra Commander

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.

Everything in The Funhouse is staged, and the Joes work that out within three minutes. The ransom broadcast is Zartan in a gray wig playing a frightened Dr. Hibbentrope, the demand is sixty billion dollars, and the transmission obligingly traces back to South America; at the console somebody says it is too easy and that they have a bad feeling about it, and somebody else says it is too pat. Steve Mitchell and Barbara Petty then spend the next twenty minutes making the Joes walk into the trap they have just described. The idea, argued out loud by its own characters, is that suspecting a trap is not the same as avoiding one. The first half of the script pays the cost of that idea and the second collects on it [1].

The cost is the funhouse itself. Cobra Commander plays carnival barker, with three doors and two of them dead ends, a mechanical ringmaster in a top hat, a ride with a snake's head on the front and a clown in a box. The Joes are separated and picked off by gags with plain names: balloons, a shooting gallery, bowling, baseball, a floor like glass. The writers keep the tone light enough that being caught is funnier than frightening, and a Joe observes that the man in charge is not playing with a full deck. The standout is the first pair to meet a trap, Dusty and Airtight. Dusty breathes the balloon gas, sees Airtight as a snake, and backs away from the one man trying to save him. Airtight, who held his breath, explains it patiently, gets called a liar, and knocks his friend out with the promise to be back after he has kicked some snake butt. It is a misunderstanding played as a rescue.

The Commander loses because he wants an audience. Asked why he does not disarm the bomb himself, he asks whether he is meant to ruin his own fun, and one of his lieutenants tells him to take no chances and destroy the Joes now. Zartan, who has already told him there will be an extra charge for his acting services, is the foil. His reminder that he is paid by the hour is the sharpest joke in the middle of the episode, because it puts a price on the Commander's patience. When Flint is the last Joe standing the Commander will not hurry the finish, insisting he wants to watch him squirm, and Flint repays the courtesy by asking whether he programmed his robots himself. The vanity buys Flint the time he needs, and the bomb he has been bragging about turns out to hang on an unmarked switch [2].

The payoff happens where nobody in the funhouse can see it. Wild Bill has been posted to watch for any aircraft leaving the island, the Commander's own plane takes off, and the Joes follow it to a golden Cobra temple in the desert where the real scientists are held. The funhouse was built to hold the Joes' attention, and nobody on Cobra's side thought about the one Joe left on lookout. The final act is quick: Flint leads the second wave in, the Baroness suggests a swift departure while their necks are still intact, and a closing gag about a moonlit stroll sends everyone off laughing!

The weak point is the pulse scene. At 13:02 Flint kneels over a limp Joe after shouting for Lady Jaye and says he cannot get a pulse. The episode lingers on his shout, and by 16:55 Lady Jaye is on the radio asking where he is, with nothing in between to say how she got up. A cartoon like this will not kill a Joe on screen, and everyone watching knows it, so the scene mainly serves to make Flint angry, which it would have done as well with a Joe who was merely down.

The Funhouse is a lighter, tighter half hour than its premise suggests, and the Commander's showmanship is the best thing in it. We would happily ride the Cobra Express again.

1 ^ The setting is not as tidy as the dialogue. The Joes trace the broadcast to South America at 3:21, what we see is a jungle island with a surf beach, and the real fortress is a golden temple in a desert; no location is named on screen after the trace.

2 ^ The bomb's destruct panel on screen at 16:56 reads 4:35. Under half a minute later Flint is telling the Joes they have three minutes, after flipping a switch that turns out to be a reset switch, so either the switch did something or the clock is a flexible instrument.

1. Faced with Cobra Commander's $60 billion ransom demand, one Joe waves it off: "We'll just put it on my credit card. I never leave home wi..." before an annoyed voice cuts him off. The Joe fan wiki says it is Alpine, and that his card is a send-up of a certain famous charge card, complete with the slogan. The Joe Guide site spots the same gag.
2. Zartan earns his pay as an actor this time. He knocks out Dr. Hibbentrope, plays the doctor in a gray wig in the ransom broadcast, then says there will be "an extra charge for my acting services." The Baroness sneers, "Your acting couldn't get you onto a soap opera," and later he shrugs off the delay with "I am paid by the hour." Zartan impersonates people elsewhere too, posing as Cobra Commander in [Countdown for Zartan](/cartoons/1985/episodes/countdown-for-zartan/) and as a general in [Battle for the Train of Gold](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-for-the-train-of-gold/).
3. The whole island is a decoy. The Joes smell a trap ("It's too pat") but go in anyway, and the scientists are finally found at a second, golden temple in the desert, which the Joes traced by watching for planes leaving the island. The Joe fan wiki also grumbles that Breaker's trace of the ransom call gets no closer than South America, which is vague for a communications expert.
4. Everyone in the gauntlet reaches for a sports metaphor. One Joe cheers "Safe at second!" and another frets that this guy "wants to throw me out at the plate." A third asks, "What is this, the Pro Bowler's tour?" As the island counts down, Alpine yells, "It's fourth quarter, two seconds, and we've got 99 yards to go!" Even the Cobra control room joins in, with one gleeful voice counting "11!" and calling it "even better than a strike!"
5. The island ends in a mushroom-shaped fireball, and everyone is cheerfully fine afterward. The Joe Guide site recalls animator Frank Paur telling the Wall Street Journal in 1989 that Hasbro's rule was plenty of firepower but nobody gets hurt, and it wonders whether that rule landed after this episode.
6. The Joe fan wiki credits this episode with the first appearance of the Cobra Firebat, here in a blue and gray scheme, ahead of its 1986 toy release with the Terror Drome playset. The Firebat is later named on the radio in [The Phantom Brigade](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-phantom-brigade/) ("Firebat One to Major Bludd") and drives the plot of [Lights! Camera! Cobra!](/cartoons/1985/episodes/lights-camera-cobra/).
7. The Joe Guide site says the self-destruct clock starts at five minutes and drops to three after Flint hits the unmarked reset switch, even though the reset should land on four. Just before that, someone asks, "Isn't there a scrub switch?" and gets the answer, "There's a switch, but it isn't marked." The next announcement to the team is, "We've got three minutes to get out of here!"
8. Joe Guide says the golden second base reuses the design of the Cobra base from the 1984 Weather Dominator miniseries, which fans call The Revenge of Cobra and which begins with [In the Cobra's Pit](/cartoons/1985/episodes/in-the-cobras-pit/), and that the Joes' Maulers are green here where they were beige there. The site also lists this episode as volume 10 of the FHE commercial video tape series.
9. The closing gag is a jealousy joke. Someone asks if anyone will take her for a stroll on a moonlit beach, one Joe says "Sure!" and the answer is "You do and you'll be scrubbing bathrooms for a week." The Joe fan wiki reads it as Flint warding Alpine off Lady Jaye. The offer then goes to Bazooka, who answers "No way."