The Greenhouse Effect

A Crimson Guard disguised as a janitor steals a canister of Professor Bullock's pollution-free nitrogen rocket fuel from the Joes' lab and flees across the rocks. He hides the canister in a greenhouse owned by Harvey Lathrop, a man with a long record of false alarms, and is arrested by police who are surprised to find a real intruder.

Harvey mistakes the canister for his own invention, a super plant food, and takes his giant produce to the county fair. Destro goes after the fuel himself and fights Wild Bill and the Joes in the air over the fairgrounds, but returns to Cobra Commander with nothing but a bean. Once Destro explains that the fuel is a super fertilizer, Cobra plants mutant seeds in Chicago. Airtight's defoliant, spread by seeding the storm clouds, kills the vines, and Harvey tells the crowd that G.I. Joe came to him for advice.

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

"Believe me, officer, I know the difference between an intruder and a banana plant, especially my own banana plant." -- Harvey Lathrop

"Yeah. That breaks his string of 187 false alarms."

"You're foaming at the mouth again, Cobra Commander." -- Destro

"Needs sour cream."

"You call this success? You let them have the fuel and bring me a bean?" -- Cobra Commander

"That was more than just nitrogen rocket fuel! It's a super nitrogen fertilizer!" -- Destro

"No! That's why we're the good guys!" -- Wild Bill

"Squashed by a squash!"

"And another Cobra game is rained out!"

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.

Nobody believes Harvey Lathrop, and the script is cruel enough to give him a real burglar to prove it. By the police's own tally he has called in 187 false alarms, and when an intruder finally turns up in his greenhouse the two officers who respond are astonished. The Greenhouse Effect is dressed as a farce about a rocket-fuel canister and a county fair, but it is a story about the man at its centre. He is the neighbour nobody takes seriously, his greenhouse happens to hide the one thing Cobra is after, and he ends by telling a crowd how G.I. Joe came to him for advice.

Gordon Kent's opening sets the mechanics up quickly. Professor Bullock explains that his nitrogen-based fuel leaves no trace of pollution but is still too unstable to be allowed outside the lab, the sort of sentence a script writes in order to break it. Within a few minutes a Crimson Guard posing as a janitor has apologised his way into the lab, knocked Alpine flat with a mop, grabbed a canister, swung from the rafters and gone out through a window. The orders he got from Cobra Commander, when he started to make excuses, were a curt "just do it." He hides the canister, in his own words, in "some guy's greenhouse," and the greenhouse belongs to Harvey, who takes the contents for the secret of a super plant food [1].

The Cobra side is played for the same low comedy. Tomax and Xamot visit the jailed Guard and propose to blanket the city with Crimson Guards dressed as normal people, and the resulting census-takers go door to door asking about banana plants, which sets up the funniest running gag in the episode! [2] Cobra Commander and Destro fall out over who should have been where, and Destro answers the Commander's ranting with "you're foaming at the mouth again." Destro is also the only one who works out what has happened. When he comes back from the fair with a bean rather than the fuel, the Commander declares that he fears for his sanity, and the sight of Destro being called mad for the correct diagnosis is the episode's quiet reversal. Later the vines close around the hooded Commander himself, which settles the argument.

The fair is where the animation has the most fun. Giant grapes, a pumpkin and potatoes sit on the display table, and Bazooka, found at last, delivers the verdict "needs sour cream," and we cannot argue. Wild Bill and a blond pilot chase Destro's black helicopter above the fairgrounds. The pilot ends up hanging from a skid, and the clash ends with Wild Bill's Dragonfly lost and the cheerful claim that he "saved the world."

The Chicago sequence is the broader half. The Commander issues his ultimatum, the twins sing "a-planting we will go," Shipwreck's parrot trades insults with him, and Barbecue greets the city with "oranges at 12:00!" as a giant fruit rolls down the street. Wild Bill gets the best line, answering a villain's exasperation with "no! That's why we're the good guys!"

The weakness is the cure. Airtight has been working on a super weed spray, and the solution arrives in a few lines of lab talk: a gas, a plan to crystallise it and seed the clouds so that rain carries it down, and a worry that it has not been properly tested. It works, and the episode does not stop to say why. After a story built carefully on cause and effect, from the unstable fuel to the nearest greenhouse to a farmer's pride, a storm that arrives on cue is the one thing in it that feels merely convenient.

Harvey gets the last scene, as he should. He told his plants they would be the hit of the county fair and promised that no one would laugh at him again. Now he finishes the episode in front of a crowd, telling his tale while the Joes stand by the photo booth and let him have it. The last sound is a crowd laughing, at a story he is telling with full gusto.

1 ^ The canister is described as a nitrogen-based rocket fuel by Bullock and as "more than just nitrogen rocket fuel" by Destro at 14:27; no line explains why it works as a fertiliser, so the plot's central turn rests on that one remark.

2 ^ The banana plant runs through Harvey's complaint to the police at 5:38, the census-taker's question at 8:32 and the refusal to let a stranger sleep among "my potted banana plants" at 8:49.

1. Jack and the Beanstalk, anyone? Cobra Commander rages that Destro let the Joes keep the fuel and came back to "bring me a bean," then has him taken away. The JoeGuide site reads it as the fairy tale with Destro as Jack and the Commander as his furious mother, and the Joe fan wiki spots the same nod.
2. Destro's pitch includes the line "expendable fruits and vegetables replacing Cobra's ground troops," which fans on the Joe wiki nominate as possibly the most absurd line in the franchise. He commits to it, too, describing a grapefruit tree 14 stories high that rains "fruit the size of wrecking balls."
3. Tomax and Xamot flood the town with Crimson Guards posing as census takers, and one doorstep exchange ends with a resident reacting to "sleeping with banana plants" with "must be from California." JoeGuide says USA Network reruns cut this stretch, so it is worth catching uncut. The same site passes along a collector guide's quibble that the twins could have just checked where their man was arrested.
4. Polly cracks "Squashed by a squash!" when the Joes face a tomb of giant squash. JoeGuide says it is the first time the line is heard, and she recycles it in [Excalibur](/cartoons/1985/episodes/excalibur/).
5. Harvey Lathrop's record stands at 187 false alarms, so the police are surprised when his intruder turns out to be real. JoeGuide lists the episode's closing safety lesson as Barbecue warning that false alarms delay firefighters.
6. Production order is a muddle here. This one is production number 600-21 and aired October 3, 1985, while [Cobra Soundwaves](/cartoons/1985/episodes/cobra-soundwaves/), numbered 600-04, did not air until October 17. JoeGuide thinks the shot of Cobra's rocky base in this episode may be reused from that one, a reuse running backward by air date.
7. The Joes' fix, cooked up by Airtight, is real-world weather meddling: he wants to crystallize his gas and "seed those clouds before it rains." The storm washes out Cobra's plant army, and someone sums it up with "another Cobra game is rained out!"
8. A TV Tropes funny-moments entry remembers the fairground gag where the Joes spot a painted corn cutout behind Harvey and Airtight sneaks up on it. The episode's last gag has Harvey boasting to the crowd that he does not "even know the meaning of the word" scared, just before a scream.