The Palace of Doom

A recap explains that the Weather Dominator has split into three parts and that both sides want them. Flint, Mutt and Shipwreck survive a sandstorm in their sand craft and rejoin the Joes, while Cobra Commander sends the Baroness and Zartan to the Island of No Return for the Ion Correlator and Major Bludd to the Palace of Doom for the Hydromaster. Lady Jaye leads the strike on the temple with Shipwreck and Gung-Ho. Cutter, Wild Bill, Torpedo and Spirit fight across a reef and a whirlpool toward the island, where Spirit meets Storm Shadow. Roadblock, fresh from mountain lions, frees Honda Lou West from a Cobra truck. In the temple, a stone guardian and a giant cobra robot fight, and an earthquake strikes before the Joes lose the fragment.

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.

Jackson Beck Mike Bell Gregg Berger Arthur Burghardt Dave Hall Zack Hoffman Kene Holliday Buster Jones Sally Julian Chris Latta Mary McDonald Lewis Morgan Lofting Bill Morey Rob Paulsen Bill Ratner Neil Ross Will Ryan B.J. Ward Frank Welker Michael Yama Keone Young

"The whole cotton-pickin' planet's gone ape!" -- Gung-Ho

"Nice kitty. Be good, and Roadblock will show you where to find some giant mice." -- Roadblock

"I'm hungry, I'm a gourmet chef, and the name's not Jack." -- Roadblock

"I don't care if you're with the tooth fairy!" -- Honda Lou West

"Legend may call it the Palace of Doom, but I call it a simple military objective." -- Major Bludd

"Possibility and impossibility are states of mind. In my mind, there is only the possible." -- Spirit

"When it serves my purpose... and not before." -- Zartan

"Look at the bright side. At least he's not wearin' shoes."

"My detection device has picked up a mucho earthquake rolling our way." -- Tripwire

"This place is shaking like a 10-cent milkshake!"

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 serial needs a middle chapter in which nothing may be allowed to finish, and this is the one for The Revenge of Cobra. The narrator calls it the third episode of the run. The last exchange is one Joe saying that the fragment is lost and another saying they will get it back, but there is no time now [1]. What lifts it above a holding pattern is how much trouble the broken Weather Dominator keeps making for everybody.

The Weather Dominator is in three pieces, each of which, as the Cobra briefing puts it, has fallen into a remote and dangerous part of the Earth, and the script treats that sentence as a travel brief. The sand craft at the top rides through a sandstorm, and the approach to the Island of No Return is a funnel of wind over a smoking rock, a stormy sea, and a whirlpool strong enough to break up a ship. Gung-Ho names the problem early with "The whole cotton-pickin' planet's gone ape!" and the last act proves him right, when Tripwire's detector picks up an earthquake that he blames on the freak weather around the world. The broken machine has been supplying the hazards all along, and the earthquake is the moment it finally costs the Joes something.

None of that is why the episode is fun, though. The best scene in it has no weather at all. Roadblock, after a run-in with a pair of mountain lions, finds himself in the back of a truck cutting loose a tied-up stranger who greets him with suspicion rather than gratitude. Honda Lou West, president and manager of Wild West Haulin', informs him that the trucks are hers and not Cobra's; Roadblock, hungry and a gourmet chef, says so, and when he gives his name and says he is with G.I. Joe she tells him she does not care if he is with the tooth fairy. The exchange is a duet, and each of them wins a round. We could have watched a full episode of it!

Elsewhere everything is movement. Flint, Mutt and Shipwreck reach headquarters in time for the intruder alarm, Flint in a blue Cobra shirt that nobody mentions [2]. Cutter, Wild Bill, Torpedo and Spirit take the sea route, and Lady Jaye, Gung-Ho and Shipwreck take the temple. Major Bludd calls it "a simple military objective," which is how a soldier talks about a cursed building. A Joe in the entry hall suspects he saw the set on "The Late Late Show." The temple, when they reach it, has opinions of its own. A stone guardian with bared fangs stirs, a giant cobra robot arrives, and the two wrestle across the floor while the Joes huddle in a corner and one of them finds the bright side: at least "he" is not wearing shoes.

Spirit gets the episode's moment of stillness. Told that sailing for the island is impossible, he says that possibility and impossibility are states of mind and that in his mind there is only the possible; then he launches the sea sled with Freedom and goes. A line like that could sink a character, and it holds up because the next scene backs it: he reaches the shore, tells his eagle that he feels another presence, and a voice answers that the presence feels him as well. Zartan has a smaller moment worth watching: the Baroness orders him to respond, and he lets her wait until it serves his purpose, which the closing preview confirms by promising a plan of treachery.

The weak joint is the climax. Lady Jaye's team crosses a firefight and a stone-and-robot brawl to reach the fragment, and an earthquake takes it out of their hands before any of their choices can decide anything. An earthquake is a fair villain for a story about a weather machine, but it leaves the Joes nothing to show for the trouble they took.

It moves the pieces into position and keeps the jokes coming while it does. A good middle.

1 ^ The dialogue names the fragments: the Ion Correlator on the Island of No Return, the Hydromaster at the Palace of Doom, and the laser core as the third. The closing line says only "the fragment," and we take it to be the Hydromaster because the Palace is where the Joes lose it. 2 ^ The shirt is visible at about 6:16. The introduction of Shipwreck to Lady Jaye is captioned "Uh, she's your buddy?" at 6:21, probably a caption slip for "he."

1. This is the third of the five parts of the 1984 "Revenge of Cobra" run, and the recap says so outright. [Battle on the Roof of the World](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-on-the-roof-of-the-world/) opens by calling itself the fourth. The five parts went out on five consecutive nights in September 1984 (this one on the 12th), and fan guides note the whole run was repeated that December.
2. Some written summaries put the second Weather Dominator piece, the Ion Correlator, inside the Palace of Doom. On screen it is the other way round: Cobra Commander sends the Baroness and Zartan to the Island of No Return for the Ion Correlator, while Major Bludd is told to retrieve the Hydromaster from the Palace.
3. The previous part, [The Vines of Evil](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-vines-of-evil/), ended with Mutt being swept up by a sandstorm, so this one spends its first minutes catching up: a recap, Mutt back aboard Shipwreck's sand craft, and the first joke after the rescue is "I got sand in my shoe."
4. Flint strolls back into Joe headquarters still wearing the blue Cobra shirt he picked up in [The Vines of Evil](/cartoons/1985/episodes/the-vines-of-evil/). Fans on the G.I. Joe wiki point out that Hasbro eventually turned that look into a figure, "Flint in Cobra Disguise", in 2008.
5. Honda Lou West, the trucking boss Roadblock frees from her ropes, turns up in this episode and the next one, and no other episode of the season features her. The Joe fan wiki notes her big rigs look suspiciously like the Optimus Prime truck model.
6. The movie nods come thick and fast. Roadblock's scene with Honda Lou ends on a line about the beginning of a beautiful friendship (a Casablanca paraphrase, according to the fan wiki), someone shouts "He-e-e-e-re's Cobra!" (which the same wiki hears as a Shining joke), a Joe in the temple says he saw the place on "The Late Late Show", and one fan guide reads the whole Palace of Doom as a nod to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
7. When the call goes out to "Release Pac/Rats now!" the little robot decoys are sent to keep Cobra's robots out of the temple. One fan episode guide says the chirping the Pac/Rats make sounds a lot like R2-D2.
8. The closing teaser promises that Roadblock and Honda Lou will kidnap Cobra Commander in his own temple and that Zartan will reveal a plan of treachery. In [Battle on the Roof of the World](/cartoons/1985/episodes/battle-on-the-roof-of-the-world/) Roadblock does end up pinning the hooded Commander in a headlock in the control room, and here Zartan answers a summons with "When it serves my purpose... and not before."