The Gamemaster

A bored, wealthy game player known as the Gamemaster abducts Flint, Lady Jaye, the Baroness and Cobra Commander and drops them on a toy-filled island with no rules beyond the prize: the first player to find the one-man helicopter wins, and the losers die. The four face toy soldiers with live ammunition, a candy forest, a butterscotch pit and a giant purple robot, and Flint and the Baroness bargain over who will rescue whom.

On the mainland each side blames the other for the kidnappings. Destro seizes Ace, the Joes seize Zartan, and a monitor call from Destro convinces the Joes that a third party is responsible. The two teams agree to cooperate, trace Flint's broadcast and storm the island. They wreck the Gamemaster's defenses, he throws a tantrum over his broken toys, and the four captives and their rescuers part on the same suspicious terms they began with.

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

"I want to play a new game, Coco, a game where real people fight for their lives, where I can play but can't get hurt." -- The Gamemaster

"Hidden somewhere on this island is a one-man helicopter. The winner is the one who finds it and flies away." -- The Gamemaster

"I'll tell you what, Baroness. You'll just have to trust me. You save Lady Jaye. I'll save Cobra Commander." -- Flint

"G.I. Joe is dedicated to saving lives, even Cobra Commander's." -- Flint

"Give me one good reason to trust you."

"No, but a deal's a deal."

"An organization of 10,000 men, and I'm stuck in a jungle. I can't stand it."

"All my toys are broken, and it's your fault!" -- The Gamemaster

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 truce, in this episode, is two enemies agreeing that the other should go first, and neither of them going. On the island, one of the Cobra pair answers Flint's suggestion with "And turn my back on you? How stupid do you think I am?" Near the end, with the toy kingdom in ruins, the standoff comes round again over who takes off first, and gets the same answer. Flint Dille's script is built on the idea that two sides who cannot trust one another can still keep a deal, and that the deal is all they get.

The Gamemaster arrives calling check, then checkmate, over a board of toy robots, and what he says next is "I'm bored." What he wants is a game in which real people fight for their lives and he can play without getting hurt, and the show wastes no time giving him a toybox to do it with. There is a candy forest of licorice trees and marshmallows, red-coated toy soldiers who turn out to carry real ammunition, windup pallbearers, a giant purple robot, and finally a lawn mower that is the most frightening thing in the episode [1].

The best scene is the argument over the butterscotch. Lady Jaye and Cobra Commander are sinking, Flint and the Baroness are circling each other, and the question is who gets pulled out first. Each is sure the other will double-cross the moment their hands are free, so Flint settles it the only way available: "You'll just have to trust me. You save Lady Jaye. I'll save Cobra Commander." Nobody says anything noble about it. It works because both of them are too practical to refuse, and all four come out of the pit. A few minutes later Flint tries to save the Commander from the robot, with the line "G.I. Joe is dedicated to saving lives, even Cobra Commander's," and pays for it, as far as anyone on the island can tell, with his life [2].

The mainland half runs on the same logic with a bigger cast. Destro has taken Ace, the Joes have taken Zartan and are threatening him with a swamp-flu cocktail, and each side is demanding its people back from the other. It takes Destro appearing on a monitor to say the quiet part: two of his agents and two of the Joes' have been kidnapped, apparently by a third party. "Give me one good reason to trust you," says a Joe, and the answer is an order to Cobra agents to drop their weapons. "That's a good reason." It is the sharpest joke in the second half, and it makes the same point as the butterscotch pit: nobody here is asked to like anybody, only to put the gun down once!

The Joes then get their finest moment, when Flint's fading broadcast gives them his position and the order goes out to alert Cobra and dispatch a strike team. "You really want us to tell Cobra?" "No, but a deal's a deal." The island's defenses are wrecked by both sides, and everyone leaves as suspicious as they arrived.

The weakness is the villain. The Gamemaster is defined by boredom in the first minute and by a tantrum in the last: "All my toys are broken, and it's your fault!" There is a lovely moment in between when Coco laughs and he says he has not heard that in so long, but he never wants anything beyond being amused, so the stakes live in the toys rather than in him. A slot this short leaves little room to build an antagonist, and the toys are in fairness the better characters.

It is a children's cartoon in which the toys behave badly, and the only moral that survives is the dry one: Cobra and the Joes do not become friends. They stay as suspicious of each other as before, and as dependent on the other side not to cheat.

1 ^ The speaker labels in the caption track spell the villain GAMESMASTER, while the title card has The Gamemaster.

2 ^ Flint is flung overhead by the robot at 12:06 and the Gamemaster says "One down, three to go" at 12:39, but Flint is back at the Gamemaster's console from 16:58, and no scene in between explains how.

1. A fan guide guesses that the Gamemaster, a bored tycoon who runs real people through lethal games while a doll comments, was probably inspired by Galt, the Master Thrall in the old Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion." Guides and the wiki file this episode as "The Gamesmaster," with an s.
2. This one is blunt about the stakes. When the Gamemaster is asked what happens to the losers, the answer is a giggled "They die." Fans on the wiki call that unusual for the era, when cartoons usually reached for softer words.
3. The Gamemaster's big finale gag is Flint's funeral. Windup pallbearers carry a coffin to a grave, Lady Jaye is devastated, and a voice urges her to think of revenge instead of sorrow. Flint is, of course, alive a few minutes later. Fans on the wiki grumble that six toy pallbearers would be far too heavy for the push that sends Flint to his grave.
4. The red and blue toy robots slugging it out in the opening are a nod to the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots toy, say fans on the wiki, who also see the red robot as an Optimus Prime lookalike and the purple one as Shockwave with a Megatron-style mace.
5. The same exchange of lines plays out twice. Midway, the Commander sneers "Very clever, Flint. How considerate of you," followed by "How stupid do you think I am?" and the reply "Have you got a better idea?" At the end the same lines come around again as the Joes and Cobra each refuse to turn their backs on the other.
6. The Joes and Cobra only cooperate because a deal's a deal. Flint's broadcast lets Joe HQ trace the island, and the order goes out to alert Cobra and send a strike team, with the grudging line "a deal's a deal." Earlier, someone tells Destro to "listen up, chrome dome," a nickname that also turns up in [The Greenhouse Effect](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-greenhouse-effect/).
7. The opening shots set Flint up as "second in command of the G.I. Joe team," and Joe Guide notes the car he drives is a Cobra Stingray, an ironic ride for a Joe. The wiki spots the hologram chessboard and the weapon sounds as Star Wars borrowings.
8. A guide notes that Ace tucks away a wrecked oversized toy soldier as a souvenir, and compares it to the rock collecting heard in [The Viper is Coming](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-viper-is-coming/).
9. A fan guide says the episode was left out of the 1990s syndication package and came out on home video as volume 8 of the FHE commercial tape series.