G.I. Joe: The Movie

The film opens on a high: the full G.I. Joe team battling Cobra across the Statue of Liberty, the famous theme song roaring over the action. But Cobra is fracturing. The engineered emperor Serpentor now commands the organization and the deposed Cobra Commander chafes under him, each blaming the other for Cobra's failures.

Into the Terror Drome slips Pythona, a clawed woman from a hidden civilization called Cobra-La, who reveals an ancient secret: Cobra-La engineered Serpentor's very creation, planting the idea in Doctor Mindbender's mind. She urges Cobra to seize the Joes' new super-weapon, the Broadcast Energy Transmitter, being field-tested in the Himalayas. The raid fails, Serpentor is captured, and Cobra retreats into Cobra-La, the underground city that turns out to be Cobra's true headquarters.

Meanwhile a class of rookie Joes arrives, among them Duke's reckless half-brother, the Green Beret Lt. Falcon, whose dereliction of duty lets the Dreadnoks free Serpentor. Inside Cobra-La, the immortal ruler Golobulus reveals the full history and punishes the failed Cobra Commander by mutating him into a snake. Cobra-La's plan is apocalyptic: launch spore pods into the upper atmosphere, then use the stolen Transmitter to ripen them and rain mutative spores down to revert all humanity into mindless beasts, clearing the Earth for Cobra-La to reclaim. Disgraced, Falcon is retrained by Sgt. Slaughter and his Renegades, and in the Himalayan climax the rookies prove themselves, Falcon destroys the spore pods in space, and Cobra-La falls as Golobulus escapes.

G.I. Joe: The Movie was built to be a theatrical feature, the third Hasbro animated film of 1986-87 after My Little Pony: The Movie and The Transformers: The Movie. It never got there. Production delays meant Transformers reached theaters first, and when the Hasbro slate, Transformers especially, underperformed at the box office, the studio lost its nerve.

G.I. Joe was quietly rerouted direct-to-video, premiering on home video through Celebrity Home Entertainment on August 25, 1987, then sliding into TV syndication that September, first as a feature and later chopped into a five-part miniseries. In the United Kingdom it carried the title Action Force: The Movie. The same commercial caution that softened its story (see below) had already cost it the big screen.

It was produced by Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions and animated in Japan by Toei Animation, directed by Don Jurwich from a screenplay by Ron Friedman, with the franchise's longtime story editor Buzz Dixon shaping the material behind the scenes. Decades later, Dixon would record the commentary for the 2010 Shout Factory Blu-ray, which finally gave the film a proper restoration and made its troubled history public.

The film's other enormous swing was the revelation that Cobra had never been a mere modern terrorist organization at all. It was a front for Cobra-La, an ancient civilization of genetically engineered creatures that ruled the Earth some forty thousand years ago before being driven into the Himalayan caverns by the Ice Age and the rise of technological humanity. Its immortal, serpent-tailed ruler Golobulus has plotted to reclaim the surface ever since, and it was Golobulus who long ago recruited the nobleman who would become Cobra Commander.

It was a bold piece of mythology that retroactively rewrote the origins of both Cobra Commander and Serpentor, and fans were divided, many felt the sudden introduction of magic snake-people came out of nowhere and clashed with the grounded military-versus-terrorist premise of the series. Even the name was an accident. 'Cobra-La' was a placeholder, a riff on Shangri-La from James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, that the writers fully intended to replace, until Hasbro executives loved it and forced them to keep it. The film's credits even list Lost Horizon as an inspiration.

The single most notorious image in the film, and arguably in all of 1980s Joe, is the fate of Cobra Commander. Punished by Golobulus for his repeated failures, the Commander is exposed to Cobra-La's mutagenic spores and slowly devolves into a literal snake, hissing his disbelief: 'I was once a man! A man!'

Voiced by Chris Latta, the same actor behind Starscream in Transformers, the snake-Commander became the film's most-quoted and most-memed moment, an image so strange that some fans assumed the description was a joke. It has outlived everything else in the movie: Hasbro built a 2024 San Diego Comic-Con Classified Series figure, 'Cobra Commander (Once a Man),' entirely around the transformation. It remains the perfect emblem of a film that went stranger and darker than anyone expected a toy commercial to go.

Like the Transformers movie before it, which lured Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy and Eric Idle into a toy commercial, G.I. Joe: The Movie reached for marquee names. Burgess Meredith, the veteran of Rocky and the Penguin from Batman, voiced Golobulus with relish, his old-time-radio gravitas giving the snake-bodied villain genuine menace. Don Johnson, then at the absolute peak of his Miami Vice fame, voiced the new hero Lt. Falcon.

Sgt. Slaughter, the real professional wrestler already merchandised as a G.I. Joe figure, voiced his own cartoon counterpart and his squad of reformed villains, the Renegades. Around the stars worked the deep Sunbow ensemble: Chris Latta as Cobra Commander, Dick Gautier as Serpentor, Jennifer Darling as Pythona, Peter Cullen as Nemesis Enforcer, Michael Bell as Duke, and a roster of dozens. The golden-age radio narrator Jackson Beck framed the whole thing.

G.I. Joe: The Movie is the strange, ambitious full stop on the original animated era, the last time the Sunbow Joes rode into battle on the big-canvas scale of a feature. Its boldest choices, the Cobra-La reveal and the snake-Commander, were swiftly disowned: the 1989 DiC series quietly restored Cobra Commander to human form and never mentioned Cobra-La again, and later comics and continuities treated the whole episode as a dead end.

Yet it endures precisely because of those swings. The Duke coma became a legendary piece of animation lore, a famous example of a death softened in the dub. The film's twin, The Transformers: The Movie, shares its DNA almost exactly: paired Hasbro productions, both bumped by box-office caution, both writing out their lead to refresh the toy line. And the franchise never quite escaped it, the live-action Retaliation in 2013 finally went through with actually killing Duke, as if making up for the cop-out a quarter-century later. Flawed, divisive and utterly singular, it remains the most beloved and most argued-over chapter of classic G.I. Joe.