Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 176: G.I. Joe

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

America's daring, highly trained special podcasting force of Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, and Chris Sims take on G.I. Joe, the ruthless comics/toy/games franchise that ruled the world during the ’80s.

Hey folks, it's Bob from Retronauts, and I'm here to let you know that Jeremy and I will once again be at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this year in Portland, Oregon. It's happening this Sunday, October 19th to 21st, and on the 21st, that's a Sunday, at 3.30, we'll be doing a panel on full motion video games. This will be our sixth year in a row at the show, and we really hope to see you there. And if you're a fan of Talking Simpsons, I'll also be doing two live shows with my pal, Henry Gilbert, in Portland that weekend. Saturday, October 20th, we'll be doing two live shows at Kelly's Olympian in Portland, Oregon, and that'll be happening at 426 Southwest Washington Street. We'll be covering the greatest hits of the Simpsons Halloween episodes with a 2 o'clock show and a 5 o'clock show. And our 5 o'clock show will have, as a special guest, Bill Oakley, former Simpsons writer and showrunner.

Tickets are going fast, so if you want to attend either of the Talking Simpsons live shows, go to tiny URL.com slash Talking Simpsons Halloween. That's tiny URL.com slash Talking Simpson's Halloween. Once again, you can see us Sunday, October 21st at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo at 3.30 p.m. And you can see Talking Simpsons live

on Saturday, October 20th, at 2 o'clock p.m. and 5 o'clock p.m. And again, go to tinyurl.com slash Talking Simpsons Halloween to get tickets. That's three big live shows, and I can't wait to see you folks there in Portland. This weekend retronauts, who wants a body massage? Josh machine. Go. What? That's not how it goes.

It does. That, of course, was a reference to the Fensler films. I'm sure you guys have seen those. Chris obviously has. I've had my share of pork chop sandwiches. Okay, there we go. I used to watch this over and over and over again. I'm sure you have stopped all the downloading. Yeah. Yes, hi, everyone. It's Jeremy Parrish here at Retronauts East. And this week, we are talking about G.I. Joe, not just the Fensler films. Actually, probably we're not going to talk about those much at all. But they are, I think, a kind of like a character witness for the cultural impact and importance of the topic we are discussing, which is G.I. Joe.

And this is another one of those episodes that's going to be about games, but also not because there just aren't that many G.I. Joe video games. And also because all of us here grew up with G.I. Joe playing with the toys, watching the cartoons, reading the comics, whatever, and have some things to say about the property in general. So, gentlemen, please introduce yourselves. I am the silent master of the Rasha-Kaga Ninja Clan, aka Chris Sims. And over here in the left corner. Ben Edwards. I am a guy who loves G.I.J. What is your primary military specialty, binge?

Oh, gosh. I, you know, I had a custom G.I. Joe guy made for me when I was a kid. You could send off for, like, you know, it was just. The Steel Brigade guy. But you get to write what your thing was. I think mine was like karate specialist or something. You should be, you should totally be like the replacement for dial tone or something. Like the technical engineering.

You know, mainframe, they had a computer guy. Yeah. They have engineers. They have tinkerers. At that age, I did not know that I was interested in that kind of stuff. I just wanted to kick some ass. Okay. I guess my only equivalent on the team would be Scoop, who's terrible.

He's the journalist. and there's hashtag she's actually really good I don't think that counts there's no toy of hashtag there is where there's a toy of hashtag where are you talking about agent helix no I'm not talking about agent helix we can talk about agent helix let's not and the wraith who only loves two things I do not know I do not know

hashtag hashtag was part of the the Fred van Lentie run on G.I. Joe from maybe like 10 years ago she was their social media specialist Nothing after 1990 counts. I don't think that's true because then you miss out on the Allie Viper and you miss out on big brawl. 95 is the cutoff. The might of right?

Come on. Or the right of might? I don't know. Anyway. Sergeant Slaughter. Sergeant Slaughter was 85, 86. Okay, fine. Yeah, you're right.

I had him. Everyone had him because he was free. He was awesome. Because if you owned G.I. Joe Toys, he was like a dollar and a, oh, you got the with the triple. tea. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I remember getting that at Toys R Us. I love G.I.J. toys. I had tons of them. The only one I never got was the hovercraft. And, of course, I didn't have the SS flag or whatever. I was about asking if you had the flag. Like, no one had that. A friend of my brothers down the street when I was a kid had that and it took up their whole closet. I know we've talked about this for some reason. Probably. The USS flag was an amazing piece of plastic that could not exist in this day and age. It is bonkers that it like came out and was sold. Yeah, like it was definitely for kids who had a basement all to themselves where they could play with their toys and parents who were, you know, rolling in Ronald Reagan cocaine banking money, which were not my parents. My parents, my dad was a teacher. So I was like, wow, I get to buy a $3 figure every six months. That's great. I like school lunches. They're free.

Weirdly enough, I was never super into the toys as a kid. But when the 25th anniversary toys came out, I became obsessed with them. So I had at one time, like all. of the 25th anniversary, G.I. Joes, which are really, really good toys because they're, you know, they were made in 2007. So they're, like, the sculpts are higher quality. I heard them described as being what you remember the original toys looking like. Right. Well, except the early line, the early, the early ones did have diaper crotch where, like, their, their waist pieces were cut very full in the front, not in like a, a, like, wow, he's packing, but more like a, wow, he's dressed like Donald Trump playing golf. He needs a change. Exactly. Yeah, they weren't flattering.

But yeah, the 20th anniversary, 25th anniversary line eventually became the 30th anniversary line. And the later figures in that line are like, how are you doing this in four inches of plastic? It's so detailed. My favorite, I think, ridiculous element of that entire line was low light, the sniper. He comes with a bullet. He comes with a two-scale bullet. That is, you know, proportionate to a 4-inch action figure. It's so tiny and stupid.

And I love that they did that. A tiny bullet. I remember now the last G.I. Joe figure I ever bought was in the Street Fighter 2 series. They had like a Blanca. That would be the end for me, too, yeah. What was the year was that, you think? That was like 93-ish. They also did Mortal Kombat, but, you know.

I didn't have those. Yeah, so which one you got Ryu and Blanke? Yeah, were you? I always say right. That's fine. I don't know how to pronounce it. So you got the two of them, no bad guys. I got the Chumley at home.

Wasn't she based on the scarlet body? It was like the Ninja Force Scarlet. I think so, because there was a lot of free... Yeah, like it was, they also used a bunch of the toys for Jurassic Park and for Mortal Kombat. Like those little three and three quarter action figures, they went places. The cool thing about the 20th anniversary set was that at the time, Hasbro had Indiana Jones and Marvel Universe figures that were also like 4-inch scale. So I had, for a long time, I had like the Punisher driving around and the Austriker with Indy hanging off the side with his whip. Right.

Did you have, though, the pre-Cobra-Cobra commander figure that they had? It was a Comic-Con special. And they used like, I think Marcus Brody or someone or like, at some of something, some dude in a suit, but it's like a guy in a suit wearing the Cobra Commander mask, and he comes with a little podium. I wanted it so bad. The only San Diego one that I ever got was the movie Destro. Okay, not the Pimp Daddy Destro?

Not the Pimp Daddy Destro. Although I did have a custom plush doll of Destro with the leopard print collar. Nice. But I got the one that has like Christopher Eccleston and then also his weird ancestor from the movie. Oh, right, right. Because I'm a Destro guy. You are. You're happy Destro.

I am indeed. I like Destro. He was an interesting character, and I think he kind of actually gets to what makes G.I. Joe is a property unique, especially the 80s iteration of G.I. Joe. And we should probably talk about that because we've just been, like, farting around with our memories and everyone in the audience is like, what the hell? What are you guys talking about? So, G.I. Joe. Yo, Joe! He'll fight for freedom, wherever there's trouble.

G.I. Joe is there. A real American hero. G.I. Joe is there. It's G.I. Joe against Cobra and Destro fighting to save the day. He never gives up. He's always there. Of America's daring highly. No, anyway. G.I. Joe.

I can do that part. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Give us the load out. Which part do you want me to talk about? G.I. Joe is like a bunch of pseudo-cino-co guys. No, you're supposed to do the bit. Do the bit. Come on. You just said you could do it. Oh. Well, okay. You didn't think I was going to call your bluff, did you? G.I. Joe is the name of America's highly trained. Daring,

Daring, highly trained, special mission force. Their purpose. Their purpose. It should defend human freedom. To defend human freedom. Okay. Against Cobra. Against Cobra. Come on, this is like the Boy Scout Oath here. You should know it. It's been a long time since I've seen the cartoon.

All right. A ruthless terrorist organization bent on. That wants to rule the world. Sorry, I should have memorized it before it came over. Yeah, well, I didn't tell you guys there would be a quote. I could sing the song, including the cobra verse if you want. Yo, Joe. Oh, you're doing the movie song.

Yeah, the extended version. With the best animation that G.I. Joe ever had for five minutes. Yeah, it was pretty great. Yeah. So anyway, yes, G.I. Joe, okay, to start with, I actually gave a really great breakdown of the complete history of G.I. Joe on the What a Cartoon podcast that Retronauts co-host Bob Mackey runs with Henry Gilbert. So look that up. That was in September of 2018. It's the episode, looked at the cartoon episode, there's no place like Springfield. Wow, I somehow can't talk.

And that episode has the total breakdown of the G.I. Joe property, starting with the G.I. Joe toy line of the 60s and all the way up to the cartoon in the 80s. Yeah, but we're specifically talking about G.I. Joe, colon, a real American hero. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it is worth saying that G.I. Joe started as a Barbie scale toy toy. a doll for boys, but boys won't buy dolls because toys have to be gendered. So they were action figures. And instead of having, you know, like a refrigerator, they had Kung Fu Action Grip. So they were very detailed, well articulated, very accurate toys based on, you know, military concepts. And the guy was just like G.I. Joe.

Every character was G.I. Joe. That was just what he was called. And then Vietnam happened and people stopped liking the military. so much in America. So G.I. Joe became the adventure team and started chasing Bigfoot in the Arctic and doing some weird stuff. And then the OPEC oil crisis happened. And toys became very expensive to make because they were made of plastic, which uses oil. And so G.I. Joe went away pretty much. Bigfoot went extinct too. Well, that's because of G.I. Joe. I mean, Bigfoot hunting was up 300% after that line. Meanwhile, at Marvel Comics, Nick Fury, Agent of Shield was going, what was a well-regarded

property, having been revitalized by Jim Staranko in the 60s, and become a sort of Ersatz James Bond super spy property that was rooted in a military comic from the 50s and 60s called Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandoes. And so a young up-and-comer named Larry Hama pitched a new version of Atkins Shield slash Howling Commandos that was going to be called Fury Force. That would be about Nick Fury's son, leading a new team. The James Bond Jr. of Marvel. Yeah.

Except for James Bond Jr. was actually James Bond's nephew, which figure that one out. That's for a different time. So the idea was that this would be this new generation of howling commandos, but they would be going on what were essentially like James Bondi type missions, which if you've seen the James Bond movies of the 70s and 80s, is a lot of world traveling and dealing with like the science fiction stuff. Yeah, sci-fi stuff and like criminal cartels. So that didn't happen. It did not. Instead, Hasbro came to Marvel wanting to do a tie-it comic. Right. So, yeah, the important thing to remember is that in 1977, this little thing called Star Wars came along.

And Kenner bought their rights to Star Wars to make toys thinking, oh, this will, you know, like there's some Star Trek toys out there and other stuff like that. So this might be worth something. So they jumped in and didn't actually have toys ready for the movies launch. It didn't actually. The toys didn't come out until like 78. But people really love Star Wars. It turned out to be successful.

And Kinner suddenly was like, wait a minute, we can make a lot of money. So they put out the placeholder box at retail. Like you go to Sears, buy a box, an empty box for Christmas. It was like, if you bought this box, then you're going to get eight action figures next year. And that was a huge runaway hit. And all of a sudden, like, the toy line became, in a lot of ways, more valuable as a property than Star Wars, the movie. And everyone who made toys was like, wait a minute. And I think Hasbro especially, you know, having had this history of G.I. Joe and Boys Toys were like, hmm, these tiny action figures would be much less expensive and much oil friendlier than the big action figures we've been making.

So they decided to jump in on that. They looked to Japan where their sort of collaborator Takara was making a series called Microman, which was originally also like a 12-inch figure that they shrank down to a 3-inch line or 3-and-3-quarter-inch line with very, very detailed bodies. Like they were kind of equivalent to the 12-inch articulation that G.I. Joe had been using. So all these things came together and Hathrow was like, yeah, let's make G.I. Joe the toy at this new scale. And they said, you know, Star Wars was popular, not because the toys were cool, because they were cool, but that wasn't what drove the toy sales. It was because there was this movie attached to it. And kids want something to kind of spark their imagination, like a starting point, a property to work from.

So they decided to build a property around their toy line. And that's where they went to Marvel. Yeah, there was the idea that you had to teach kids how to pay, teach kids how to play with the toys. This is the same idea that would come back in Secret Wars, where Mattel, which was left out of the Hasbro-Kenner explosion, had been trying to get a foothold with Masters of the Universe, which was a success in terms of having a toy line. But when they wanted to get a license, they got the Marvel superheroes. So Secret Wars was, according to Jim Shooter, to teach kids how to play with the toys. And I'm assuming that Marvel went or Hasbro went to Marvel specifically because Marvel had the Star Wars comics. So they were like, you guys know how to do this, you know, tie-in property thing pretty well.

Marvel at the time had a really strong record of doing tie-in comics. And that was like the only thing that was saving their butts at the time. Star Wars saved Marvel in the 70s and was a huge hit. But also, they had done ROM Space Night starting in 78, which was an action figure, quote unquote, line that had one toy. It was Rom the Space Knight. and there was no mythology behind the toy. There was just this weird robot from space that came with some light-up accessories.

Marvel created a series. Bill Mantlo wrote it for 80 issues. There's an 80-issue ROM series. And the funniest thing about it is that it is in the Marvel universe. He hangs out with Rick Jones, which is the most Marvel thing you can do. Well, tech transformers were in the Marvel universe at first. So was G.I. Joe.

Oh, was he? G.I. Joe was briefly. So was Godzilla, actually. The 70s Godzilla series, Godzilla gets yelled out by J.J. Jameson and is hunted down by that. Where is G.I. Joe in the Marvel Universe? There is a part where they parachute into the Bayonne Mall, and they land on a guy who's dressed as the Hulk, but he's just like a character, you know, performer. There are references to Marvel Universe stuff that quickly go away. And then because Transformers also exist in G.I. Joe, because they team up with Tank Megatron, 10 years down the line, then. There's a transitive property.

Oh, God. Yeah, I forgot about the Dr. Biggles-Jones' plot arc. Oh, Dr. Biggles-Jones made me cry when she finally got it. The nothing was as in the Marvel universe as Rom and Godzilla. Godzilla was full on, like, Godzilla. Dracula's not licensed, though. Dracula's public domain. I'd like to say that.

Castlevania disagrees. Yeah, ROM, I had issues of ROM as a kid. I was like, this is the most lame thing I've ever seen. I had no idea as a toy, but that makes sense. sense now. And I mean, they would do other toy tie and stuff, like US 1 was based on a remote control truck and there was Team America that was based on

like remote control motorcycles and everything had to be like weirdly retrofitted once the license went away. Like the monster that was Godzilla still exists in the Marvel universe under a different name. It's mutated into a similar to but legally distinct

right. Kind of like the equivalent of Shumagoroth or something. Right. And Rom, you know, for a while like the funny thing is Marvel created all the stuff around Rom so like all the space nights could exist in the Marvel universe even after they lost the license the planet Gallador like all

of that stuff but Rom himself Oh no that's Galifrey never mind I was like wait a minute Galador completely okay Galador totally different Totally different point being like by by 1980 Marvel had two regardless of Benj's feelings

Rom was a hit like Rom Rom ran for a really long time So Rom no Iron Man in your esteem Yeah, I didn't get the appeal of it. It's a series that I think is worth revisiting, but unfortunately you can't because it's never going to be reprinted because now a different company has the license. I have all the copies of it. Because Bench took them all. Yeah, it took them all. I'm burning them right now.

So, yes, back to G.I. Joe. Now back to G.I. Joe. Marvel was the place where licensed comics went. DC didn't really have a lot of licenses. They had done like Masters of the Universe mini comics. And we've talked about the Sword Quest mini comics that were published three. DC. But when you've got Superman and Batman, you don't need licenses. Marvel had Conan, which was a huge hit, that again would run for 110 issues. So all of these licensed properties

that had all of this cross-genre appeal that had ties to movies like Conan and Star Wars and had ties to toys, those were all coming from Marvel. And so we have the collaboration between Marvel and Hasbro, which it was pretty revolutionary. It kind of set the tone and the stage for the approach to toys that we'd see throughout the 80s with stuff like He-Man and Transformers and, I don't know, what the hell else? Strawberry Shortcake. My Little Pony, I don't know. Yeah, sure, all that stuff.

Like, G.I. Joe kind of set the tone for it. And basically, they came to Hasbro or Hasbro came to Marvel and were like, help us come up with a fiction for these characters. And initially, it was just going to be G.I. Joe. And Marvel, having experience with comics and narrative and storytelling. And all of that said, well, there's got to be conflict. So you're going to need some bad guys. And so you end up with Cobra. Totally not Hydra. Absolutely in no way at all like Hydra. Totally different. Yeah. And so, yeah, basically, like Larry Hama was given this assignment. And it was kind of one of those things. It was, you know, everyone was like, I'm going to pass this buck. No, thanks. A toy comic,

no, I don't want to do that. I mean, there was, licensed toys or comics were good business for Marvel, but it wasn't the business anyone there wanted to do. I mean, Star Wars, like, you know, you had you know, those early comics by Chacon, but they quickly were kind of passed down to the sort of like the B team. And people, you know, they wanted to do their Spider-Man stories and their X-Men stories. Well, no, okay, that was that was Claremont only. Bad example, Iron Man stories or, you know, Punisher or whatever. But yet, I mean, if nothing else doing a license property, as someone who has done a handful of license of comics, I've never had a bad experience, but there is an additional layer of approval. You know, like something not only has to get past the editor, they have to send it into the license.

Well, you know, I think it was also just a matter of prestige. Like, do you want to come up with a character who could be as heavy hitter, as much of a heavy, heavy hitter as Spider-Man. Do you want to be the one who creates Venom? Or do you want to work on a toy property that's probably going to go away in a year? Yeah. Twelve issues was probably what they were expecting. Well, and the interesting thing is if you look at the early G.I. Joe comics, the first 12 issues or so are kind of like these little self-contained stories. And then after that, I guess once they started to get some traction, Larry Hama started building out this huge, elaborate mythos for the series. And basically issues, I would say like 12 or 13 through somewhere in the 50s,

uh, is just like this huge, sprawling epic arc of, it's about toy characters, but like it feels pretty convincing. There's, there's some goofy stuff in there sometimes. Uh, you know, he definitely had to accommodate for characters like Zartan, but he made the best of it. And he could do that because Hasbro was like to find these characters for us. And so Larry, Hama wrote all the file cards for almost every single G.I. Joe character through the original run of the series. I think Stephen King wrote a file card. But aside from that, like, yeah, well, his son was, Owen King was a huge G.I. Joe fan. So he actually, there is a character, I think, sneak peek. His file name is Owen King, if I'm not mistaken. So it's like a reference to Stephen King's

son. But then I think Stephen King wrote the file card for Crystal Ball, who, never really got like anytime larry hamma didn't find a character himself that character had very little part in the comic book like we talked i talked about this on the uh the what a cartoon podcast shipwreck was originally created for the cartoon so he had almost no role in the comic quick kick we're going to talk about him later with action force um he was created for the cartoon originally also so he shows up in like one issue and then 30 issues later he's one of the people just slaughtered in trusional abysma when the Saw Viper

kills off all the dud characters that Hama was like, can I kill these guys? And Hazra said, sure, we're not going to do anything with them. RIP, dusty, RIP footloops. RIP doc. I took it right in the face. Doc right in the face. Doc one.

Or doc one. I didn't know those guys are dead. They totally got killed. Oh, man. There was a big house clearing in the early 90s. Shoot. Yeah. Yep.

But don't worry. Don't worry. Snake Eyes got his revenge on the song. Hyper. He did. And also one of the characters lived? One of them lived. Oh, wait, Sneak He didn't actually die. They thought he did, but he didn't. And that's because

Larry Hama, writing the comic 20 years later, forgot that he had killed Sneak Peak. And then he was like, oh, God, I got to work that out. Yeah, that's, which brings me to the big point, which is that it wound up being Larry Hama, who had this pitch that he was going to use for Fury Forest. He basically just retrofitted

on Digi-Jo and Cobra. And, you know, Nick Fury Jr. became Hawk. And he wrote that comic. Larry's worked on Wolverine, Batman, plenty of stuff. He's been an editor at Marvel. He's had, like, creator-owned stuff published. Before that, though, he was like an indie comic guy. Yeah, he was one of the Cubs.

His stuff in the 70s is like super, yeah, super kind of underground. Yeah. He was one of the Krusty Bunkers in the weird, like, inking collective in New York. He was also on 70 Net Live once. MASH. And MASH. He had a rock band. But the thing he will always be known for is G.I. Joe.

Because A, it is a sprawling, genuinely good masterpiece of comics. And B, he's been on it for 250 issues over the course of, like, there was, what, a 10-year span where he wasn't on there? Like 10 or 15 years. But he wrote, of the 15-5 issues of the original run, he wrote 150. plus he wrote, I think, 35 of the 40 issues of special missions. Then he came back and wrote all of the, like, G.I. Joe, Real American Heroes, starting with 155 and a half that led into 156, and he's been over ever since. And the kind of really crazy thing is that he didn't plan any of it out. Every single issue, he just, like, goes into it, not knowing where it's going to end up, and he's like, I'm just going to write.

it is that comic is so complicated and the way those characters lives interconnect is so twisting and interesting and complex and someone asked him this was an interview on on cbrr someone asked him how far ahead did you plot and he said two or three pages at most which makes sense because if he's going to get a call from hasro it's like hey we're going to introduce these new characters called doc and or called a duke and robock you need to put him in the comic and they need to be major characters. You don't want to have to derail your story. Right. So they just show up at Destro's funeral and, or no, sorry, General Flag's funeral and shoot at Baroness or whatever. Yeah. And so, hey, we're, your new character's too good roadblock. Here's how it's going to be from now on. So all of the sort of twisting complexity of G.I. Joe, which I genuinely think is on the level of like a Claremont's X-Men. Oh, yeah. By far. It is, which makes it even more impressive to me. Yeah, I mean, once you, I feel like, you know, the golden era that I was talking about in the mid-80s, where you have things like a character, you know, the paratrooper ripcord going off on a mission that turns into like a 15-issue issue arc where he ends up infiltrating Cobra's new island base that they raise out of the Gulf of Mexico so they can be a sovereign nation. And then somehow gets interchanged with Zartan.

And like, there's some really amazing plotting going on and knowing that it was just like him saying, well, basically like the the comic book writer equivalent of sitting there with his little action figures like smashing them together and saying now what it's it's all really impressive and it all seems very suitable like very appropriate for the nature of the property you're making me want to read this whole lot you should only have a few issues of it I read the whole thing going up to like the current stuff about four or five years ago so I read up to like 200 like one to 200 plus special missions it's I mean it's worth it it is a shockingly good book. Yeah, I feel like if you read the comics up through the point where Andy Wiggum stops drawing, like that's, that's kind of, or Rodwam, yeah, sorry, and Andy Muschinsky, that was the Inker. Like, their work, I don't know, they were just like a perfect combo for, for Hama's sort of approach to storytelling. And the art is kind of stiff, but it's all very technical and good, like, you know, very well, well positioned and framed and everything. Like, to me, that's kind of the golden era. Once you actually have G.I. Joe roll into Springfield and

blow it up, then I feel like it kind of loses the plot a little bit. But up to that point, like everything leading up to issue 50 of the comic series, it really feels like a thoughtfully crafted story that has internal logic and consistency. And you're like, really, this is about a toy? Yeah, I think there's a lot of really good stuff later in the run. Once you get past like 110. Like 110 to 155 is a pretty rough stretch. Yeah, I mean, at that point, Hasbro was like, this, you know, this line is faltering. Make it as kid-friendly as you can. All this is great, but did you have the, did they have the plot arc where the G.I. Joe guys climb up the stairs and go up the Christmas tree like I did.

That was the best one. Destro fell off and cracked his head and then he's protected by Berulium Steel. How did he crack his head? It was a long fall. Damn. I mean, this is, that was the world's largest Christmas tree. But I will say this, the Snake Eyes trilogy, which happens, it's like, it's like in the late 90s. I think it's like 97, 98, 99 are, that's like a really good story.

And then 100 is one of my favorite single issues of comics ever. That's the one more COBRA commander. That's the brainwashing and Broca Beach, right? Yeah, in Millville. Millville. Okay. Yeah, Cobra Commander takes over a town because it is economically anxious. and he goes in and tells them

that they need to make the town great again and not pay high taxes and that he's just going to keep all the other people in from coming in and taking their jobs and he'll pay them in cash and they want to pay taxes. And all these people are like, this cobra commander guy who's kicking a dog on page one

sounds like he knows what he's talking about and then they go get into the brainwashing machine. Grabbed him by the puppy. Yeah. Yeah. So I agree. There is a lot in the series. that kind of taps into things, you know, cultural undercurrents that maybe we didn't recognize.

But Ham is interesting because he is, I think he was American-born, but he is of Japanese descent, and he served in the military in Vietnam. And a lot of, I feel like, what you read in G.I. Joe, beyond just like, oh, there's a lot of ninjas. Like, it does have the sort of perspective on it that, one, maybe someone who's a bit of a cultural outsider would experience. And two, a guy who served in a really, really crappy war, like a miserable, poorly justified war would, would, you know, would kind of bring to the table. Like we were talking about this at lunch before the podcast, but, you know, if you look at

Hama's writing in G.I. Joe, he's writing a military comic, but it seems to have a lot of respect for the individuals within the army, the people who go out. and serve, but not a lot of respect for the institutions for the military organizations themselves, for the politicians running the show, for the political motives behind everything. It's got a very cynical perspective from that point of view. And it really, I mean, you know,

like if you know that Hamas served in Vietnam, you understand why he writes that way. That's interesting. That's a total tangent, but it's related to what you're saying, which is that there are other authors in the past to have served in wars who dedicate their careers to educating people about how bad war is and they never want it to happen again, like all quiet on the Western Front and a farewell to

arms by Hemingway is. They're all meditations on how horrible it is and they don't want it to happen again, you know. And this is, when I was reading those in high school, I look back to G.I. Joe and I'm thinking there's a dissonance there, like this glorification of war as a toy as a children's thing. actual reality of war and i had no idea one of the writers of the comics was a a veteran you know well you know i think i think hama wanted to get the the misery of conflict and serving uh you know to approach that as much as he could within the context of a comic book about a children's toy like there's only so much he could do but there's definitely a strong undercurrent there i mean uh we we talked at lunch

about October Guard, the like the Russian equivalent, the Soviet equivalent of GI Joe and how, you know, in issue six of the comics, six and seven, there's like a two-issue arc very early on in the run where he's still kind of figuring out what is GI Joe. And you have the GI Joe team with the October Guard sort of team while competing with each other to track down a lost like satellite weapon that America had, you know, had fallen out of orbit and America needs. to recover. They're in Afghanistan. So there's a lot happening there that is a very like, you know, take that moment in history and kind of see like what's happening. And it's, it's very interesting. But, you know, the whole thing at the very end, it turns out the Joe team, like what they were doing was actually just misdirection. Like they were sent to protect a fake satellite. And basically, it didn't matter if Cobra got it or if the October Guard got it. it wasn't the real thing. It was a distraction so the American army could go in and, or CIA, I guess, could go in and actually procure the real lost device. So the entire time, you know, the Joe team has

been put into harms away and put against both a terrorist organization and the elite soldiers from a rival nation, you know, great personal potential for great personal harm to them. And it's all just a ruse. And at the very end, it's just walking away saying, you did a good job. and you see a stalker standing behind him clearly looking not happy about it, but what can you do? Because that was the mission. So there's a lot of cynicism about, you know, the role of the military and the way people are used when they, you know, serve in the military within this comic. And I don't know that that necessarily comes through in the toy line, but you even do see that a little bit in some of the bio cards alongside goofy jokes like, you know, Cutter's code name is Skip A. Stone. And quick kick was MacArthur Ito.

Yeah. So, yeah, there's like lots of little doofy jokes like that. The way that I always described Jancho in terms of, like, its political leanings, is that it's very pro-soldier, but it is also weirdly anti-war. Because it is a military fantasy comic, but I, like, it's like 30% military, 70% fantasy. You know, like, it is, it's not quite to the level of this, but it's, it's about the military, almost in the way that Star Trek is about the military, you know? Like, there's, there's more to it, obviously.

But there's a stretch of G.I. Joe, where the prime antagonists for the team aren't necessarily Cobra. It's the jugglers. Yeah, the Pentagon. Who are the guys at the Pentagon who are, you know, determining what they do. Those are the guys that are their weapon is the budget, basically. Yeah. And there's always this, this push and pull between G.I. Joe and the Department of Defense, essentially. not the conflict that you would expect to be in a comic that essentially is a big, you know, military here, our favorite soldiers comic because it's not like they're like, oh, they're not letting us go and kill whoever we want. It's very much like we are being mismanaged. We are being misused. And your inaction is allowing bad things to happen. Yeah. I mean, the issue I was talking about, you know, later in the run where there's kind of the house clearing, that takes place in a very open analog for Saudi Arabia. And the Joe team is sent there to protect American interests. And no one's really. happy about being there, about having to work with the local government. But, you know, that's the

mission. That's the job. That's what they were sent to do. So, so yeah, there is, you know, this stuff didn't come through, again, in the toy line or even in the cartoon. But there was, I think, more room for it to be sort of woven into the comic book, especially because, you know, I don't think Hasbro was paying as much attention to the comic book. It was like too many words to read. Was there ever a bureaucrat action figure that you could fight you? There was a general flag figure. There's General Flagg and there's Joe Colton. Oh, there are a few Joe Colton characters.

He's not really a bureaucrat. He's like, he's the mascot. He's the figurehead. He's the literal figure. But yeah, like, I, I, I, Hasbro had no reason to ask for changes in G.I. Joe. It was huge. Like, the comic was a huge hit.

There's a, uh, something that surfaced a few years ago. And it was like a list that Jim Shooter had made of like, what are Marvel's most important titles? Like, it was every title Marvel was publishing a month, and that was like, how important are these to our bottom line? And it was based on how many stars they had. Amazing Spider-Man had four stars next to it, because it was like their top-selling title in the mid-80s.

So did G.I. Joe. Uncanny X-Men had three. Yeah. If you go back and look at ads, you know, the ads they run for, like, mile high comics or whatever in the mid-80s, there's a bunch of them that are like G.I. Joe. is the hottest comic of the 80s. Yeah. Like, you have artwork of Wolverine standing next to it, but it says,

G.I. Joe, get this. It's hot. Like, the second issue of G.I. Joe used to sell for, like, 40, 50 bucks in the 80s. Yeah. Because, you know, Marvel was like, well, it's a toy line-based comic. No one's going to buy it. So they put out a ton of issue one, because that's what you always do, and then drop the order for number two.

And then the comic exploded in popularity. So all of a sudden, everyone wanted issue two. Yeah. Which, by the way, focuses on a Russian sci-ops campaign to destabilize America. So, yeah, again, you're getting like these things that resonate with modern day history. Yeah, Marvel put out a G.I. Joe yearbook every year that would just be like, hey, here's what happened in the last year's worth of G.I. Joe comics. They didn't do that for anything else. They didn't do that for X-Men, you know, which is a comic that probably could have used it. But I think it's, you know, kids were being lured in by the toys, by the cartoon, and, you know, the comics are very bright and colorful.

And the cover to G.I.J. Number one is one of my favorite covers ever. It's very iconic. Where just jumping off a tank. And then you had stuff that was like being critically acclaimed, like number 21, the silent issue, silent underlude, which I love. And then I don't think there was a lot of turnover in kids who were reading G.I. Joe for a very long time. At one point, like at its height, they had four hundred. thousand subscribers to G.I. Joe, which is huge. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Any comic book would be happy to have 400,000 readers these

days. If, yeah, if there were 400,000 copies of a comic coming out. Not even copies, just readers, like eyeballs on the page. Yeah. Half of that today and your huge success. So. Yeah, so G.I. Joe was big and, you know, it did help that. It had the cartoon on television. And the cartoon actually sprang out of advertisements for the toy and comic because they would come up with these advertisements, Marvel's ad agency, a call or something. I can't remember. I wrote it down on the other notes. But they basically put together advertisements that tied the toy to the comic and they would always end with like this animated sequence that had a freeze frame and that was the comic that was coming out like next month. And, you know, that's not how comic

book schedules work. Animation schedules work in a much longer time frame than comic books. So basically, they would be given this comic cover and said, okay, you guys need to come up with a story that works for, you know, like, here's the swamp skier and there's a little dragonfly helicopter shooting at it. So Hama, you figure out what that's about. And so they were kind of working backward. In addition to all the other things they were doing, like they were still kind of like figuring out how to work backward from these advertisements and figure out where do we where do we work this into the story this ongoing comic book military soap opera yeah and of course if you've got a a TV show that's on every day and also there's a comic that's

you know at the grocery store at the drugstore at the comic store down the street like then that's a great ad for it yeah it was always like there was like a little 15 second animation that looked just like the cartoon, and it would say, what happens next? Find out in Marvel comics. And you saw the issue right there, so you were like, I got to go to this door and find out what's going on. And usually the story in the comic didn't quite line up with the cartoon, but it didn't matter because here was Duke and Zartan fighting each other. Here was, you know, they captured Cobra Commander. How do they do that? Like, how to read? Let's find out. Yeah. Here's Snake Eyes who does nothing on the cartoon, but is, uh, guess what? He's your new favorite dude. He got radioactive once. He also puts on a wig and dances over his ninja costume at one point in, uh, in that first, uh, dark pyramid. Yeah, Snake Eyes was definitely the breakout character for the comic and not the cartoon, because

a character who doesn't speak and just wears solid black, not really a dynamic cartoon character, but, you know, that you were going to say, oh, I was going to say, should we talk about silent interlude and how like how big a deal that was i mean marvel did you okay there yeah right marvel did have an entire month called nuff said where everyone had to do their own silent interlude which is a terrible corporate mandate by the way like who cares about artistic integrity but it does speak to silent interludes impact what is silent interlude is silent interlude is is gijum number 21 uh there there are a lot of apocryphal stories about how it came out, but like one of the most famous being like, oh, it was over deadline.

And so they didn't even have a chance to put the letters on the page. That is not true. Larry Hama had wanted for a while to experiment with doing a dialogue-free comic and see if he could pull it off. So, and Hama, in addition to be- Not just dialogue, but also sound effect-free. Sound-effect-free. Yeah, there's no, there's a computer screen readout at one point, but that's it. But that's the only work. That's not sound. That's like diagetic text. Yeah. Hama was also an artist of, you know, so pretty skilled.

He's pretty good. He's pretty good. So he. He drew a few of the issues. Besides that one, he also drew like one of the Snake Eyes origin issues, I think, a few episodes later, a few months later. So Larry Hama wrote and drew G.I.J.21, which is a story of Scarlet gets kidnapped by Storm Shadow and taken to Destero's Castle. and Snake Eyes, who doesn't talk, so it's very appropriate. It's a Snake Eyes spotlight story, infiltrates the castle, rescue Scarlet, and they get away. And then it is revealed at the end that Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes have the same tattoo of their Ninja Clan.

They have the same Trigram tattoo, which, of course, becomes the driving force of the comic for the next 130 issues. 130, like 200. For the next 200. To this day, like the Arashikaga Ninja Clown. yeah um but larry wrote and drew it steve leoloa did the inks on it and it was billed as like the most unusual comic of the year the strangest story ever yeah i think because this was mainstream high selling popular marble comics you don't really see a lot of like format experiments in that kind of comic a lot of that stuff comes from like you know lower selling titles where you know you can get away without the eyes on it you got you It's Swamp Thing or something. Yeah. Which would have been contemporary to this.

It's like the Allen Moore Swamp Thing. It went over huge. It is one of, like, I have a book that is a hardcover collection of that one issue that has the issue as it was printed. Then it has Larry's layouts. And then it has the script in it. Because it is a fascinating piece of comics. It is a beautifully constructed comic. And it's literally like a ninja toy going through a castle play set.

to rescue another ninja toy. And it became kind of the signature of G.I. Joe. So I think maybe like 30 issues later, there's one that's just called SFX, where the only sounds, quote, unquote, in the comic are sound effects. He revisited that a few times. There was one in, I think, the third year book, where Snake Eyes, I think, has to be rescued from the Cobra consulate. You know, this is by the point where Cobra is a sovereign nation and they have an embassy and the US. Like, Snake Eyes is captured and is imprisoned in the consulate so they can do some brainwashing on him. And so I think, I'm not mistaken, Scarlett goes in and basically reverses

the silent interlude. But then a few issues, maybe like, I don't know, a year or two later, they did one that kind of did the same thing when it was Zartan chasing down the Arashigagi ninjas in San Francisco. That's the, that's the stuff. Okay, okay. Yeah. And then, of course, the silent castle becomes a bit, which I always thought was hilarious, because they, They call it the silent castle in the comic, like they knew it was the one in the issue where nobody told. That was the one where snake eyes didn't say anything, right? Yeah, that was the, oh, yeah, the silent castle. And that became very influential.

Jeremy mentioned that Marvel did back in 2001. Was it that long ago? Yeah. It was during Morrison's new X-Men. It was 2001, 2002. Like Marvel did an event called Nuff Said, where every comic that month was a silent issue. And then also, there have been different homages to it. that are not in G.I. Joe, the sixth gun,

the Cullen Bunn, Brian Hurt, like supernatural Western series. In the 21st issue of that series, of the lead character, a gun goes off by her ears, and she gets deafened. And so that whole issue is a silent issue. The cover is her in the snake eyes pose

hanging off the side of a building. Yeah, and you have stuff like the hawk eye issue that's told from the perspective of the dog. So there's like people, yeah, people talking, but it's just like, like you don't actually know what they're saying. And it's all, like, pictograms and, you know, that sounds cool. Dog level stuff.

It's a great issue. That is a great issue. But, yeah, like, all, like, that all comes from Larry Hama, a genius. Trying to sell toys. Yeah. I was going to say, Larry Hama sounds like the world's most interesting person. Oh, he's super, like, he's a fascinating. He actually is.

Like, they could do whiskey commercials about him, yeah, beer commercials. But, I mean, like, that's, I think that is the level of, like, again, I went back and read the entire run as an adult. And I, you know, I grew up. with the cartoon. I was never really into the toys until I was an adult. And I never really got into the comic and like reread the whole thing until I was in my 20s and they were putting out the complete collections. Because for so long it was just out of print. Right. Yeah, I got into the comic late. Like it was after the cartoon had ended. I watched the cartoon religiously every afternoon bought a bunch of the toys. My brother bought a bunch of the toys. He ended up going into the Navy.

So it probably had some influence there. And then I think a friend of mine when I was in elementary School brought the issue with, I think it's the one where Sergeant Slaughter makes his debut, so like 48 or so. It's the one where the cover is like Zartan holding some guy, I think gung-ho, like holding him by the throat and like sneaking through the pit. So Zartan is, you know, infiltrated G.I. Joe headquarters, the hidden pit that no one is supposed to know where it is. So that was the first issue I read. And it was amazing. It's like super well constructed. And it's this great story about toys. And from that point on, I would pick up the comic whenever I could. So around maybe like a year later, I finally started going to comic shops regularly and

could pick up the issues instead of just finding them occasionally at the grocery store. I think what really says a lot about that comic is that there's a couple dozen characters on each side. Like, obviously, Duke after he shows up is a big deal all the way through. In the comic? Not really. Well, he's there, I guess I should say. He's a presence. He's a big deal.

He's like the field commander, but Hawk never stopped. stopped being the leader in the comics. Hawks a big deal, stalker is a big deal, snake eyes is a big deal. You know, like, roadblock is a big deal. But of the, like, again, a couple dozen characters on every side, everybody has a pretty distinct voice and is like, for characters that are all kind of like talking in the same military jargon, because there's a lot of, like, a lot of footnotes explaining what all the abbreviations are.

Right. He tried to make it sound like authentic dialogue that you would use in the military. Yeah. characters come off as like really distinct and and they have personality even when it's you know even when it's just like okay snow jobs around for like three issues because we got to sell that figure right but at the same time you don't have characters defined in broad strokes like they are in the comic or in the cartoon you don't have bazooka dumb as a post like he's the his file card is like he's the guy who's a genius at ballistics and he can do math in his head and then the cartoon he's like the baluca so you know it's It's much more down-to-earth plotting than that. Yeah. Like, Destro and Cobra Commander and Baroness are all, like, really strong in mold-of-up characters. And to its credit, like, that is a book that probably had more named female characters with developed personalities in starring roles than a lot of other comics of the era.

Well, I mentioned this in the other podcast I did, but if you look at the top three characters in the cartoon, who have the most dialogue, it's Cobra Commander, lady jay and the baroness yeah like it's two women and one guy uh and that's i think a reflection of sort of the creative teams who worked on these series like um you know originally scarlet when they were developing the figure her her military specialty was just girl she was just the girl like you had to throw a girl in there but she became a critical character both on the cartoon and in the comic i think lady jay was one of my favorite characters in the cartoon yeah she was great And Hawke? Hawk was the guy with the beret, right? No, that's the point. Flint. Flint, yeah. Hawk barely had any role in the comic.

Who's the? Hawk? You didn't really see Hawk in the cartoon until the second version of the figure with the bomber jacket and the helmet. Okay, yeah. His original version actually came, like the toy came with a laser gun, like this big laser installation. So you didn't really, like, I didn't know a lot of people who had Hawk. But he was a big character in the comic because Hamad conceived him as, as the team leader, but the cartoon didn't start until after they had brought out Duke as a character. So Duke got top billing because he was kind of like, you know, the hawk replacement. He was the, it didn't make a lot of sense to have a colonel out on the field and eventually a general, like shooting lasers at people.

But it did make sense to have a top shirt, you know, for a sergeant who was out there as the field commander. So Duke became sort of like the lead figure. Duke is the blonde-haired guy. Yeah, but they had to change Hawk's hair because Hawk was also originally blonde. And then when Duke came in, they were like, Hawk has Brown hair. Oh, is that why there are two different toys? Isn't there two different toys of a hawk? There's many different Hawks.

There's also like the Space Soldier Hawk when they started getting weird in the late 80. Yeah, late 80s, early 90s or like weird figures. That one doesn't have a laser gun, right? I believe he does have a laser gun. It's like a sick shooter. But like along the same lines, like it is also, I literally cannot think of another comment from the 80s that has that much of a racially diverse cast. either. Like, I mean...

Roadblock doesn't talk in rap in the comic book. In the comic book. He's a gourmet chef. He is. He's like, but to put it in very blunt terms, I can't think of another superhero comic or mainstream comic that had two Native Americans in it in the 80s and G.I. Joe does. And it's, and again, it's a sort of like traditional Native American character in the form of spirit, who's the tracker, of course.

but there's also Alpine. Oh, who's... You're forgetting... Where's a blue vest? Airborne. Airborne. Airborne. He's a different kind of Native American.

Like, his family is rich on oil wealth. Yeah. They're like landowners. So you got like a lot of like, you know, a lot of racial diversity, a lot of class diversity. Like, in an interesting way that I think probably comes, I mean, obviously comes from television and, you know, we need to, you know, we need to cover all our marketable basis. What about Larry Hama?

Don't you think he's responsible for it? for that. I mean, I think... Probably so, yeah. I would say so. I mean, I'm saying he's 70s percent and he's... Yeah, but you know, I think a lot of that does come just from the idea of like, well, we've got all these toys, we need to sell to lots of different people. We'll have the obligatory, here's the female character for this year. We have like the obligatory to African American characters for this year. I really think that was just like demographics, you know, designing for the toys. But Hama was the one who decided, like, the female characters are all going to be important. Cover girl who was a model before she joined G.I. Joe is going to be a tank mechanic. Right. I love that.

Yeah. But, yeah, like almost all the female characters, both, you know, Cobra and G.I. Joe, have major roles in both comics and cartoons. He's, you know, Hama's the one who decided, like, Stalker and African American is going to be in roadblock an African American. Like, these are going to be major figures in the comic. It also has like a weird effect on, on Cobra, because Cobra, lately he said, it's not Hydra, but, you know, Hasbro had a rule against making any black villains. Like, Jedda from Jim was originally meant to be a black character, and they told Christy Marks, no, you can't. You can't put a black character on the bad guy team. so Jedda wasn't. Jedda was white on Jim.

The same thing goes for G.I. Joe, where everybody on G.I. Joe is white. So, and when they... You mean everyone in Cobra? Yeah, sorry. Everyone in Cobra is white. So when you get to the point where they're literally manufacturing, they have like factories that are making friends who are these blonde-haired, blue-eyed, average American sleeper agents, that it's like, they do get this weird white supremacist, like, undercurrent. that I think is actually really interesting because once you get like different reboots of G.I. Joe going into the 2000s.

I remember Firefly was black in the IDW continuity. And I remember a friend of mine being like, oh, that's weird. But not in a way of like like, oh, they're making Firefly black now. It wasn't one of those. It was just like, oh, cobra was kind of subtly a white supremacist organization for 20 years. Well, a lot of it, you know, in the file cards, they were characters drawn from all over Europe

mostly. You had like the Crimson Gar the Crimson Twins were from Corsica, ha, ha, ha, the Corsican twins. The Baroness was of some mysterious Eastern European descent, Firefly I can't remember exactly where he had been from,

but Major Blood, I think, was Irish. Sebastian Blood? Yeah, Sebastian Blood. Yeah, so Destro Scottish. Desro Scottish. Laird James McCullendester The 24th, my boy So yeah

This is full name Yep The idea is like it's You know The old world versus Versus the new almost Yeah There's America versus everybody

Pretty much In a way that is really interesting Although you did have You know The October Guard eventually Did join forces with GI Joe Once Glass Nost happened Yeah

And you got occasional like Guys from other countries Like Big Ben Showing up from the UK, but yeah, it was a Russian pun names. Like, not really. Um,

horror show that I'm trying to, I can't remember which names I'm thinking of are from G.I. Joe and which character names are thinking of were from those Firestorm comics where there's a Russian firestorm in the 80s. I don't know. When I was a kid, I, I remember arguing with my brother that there was a character named Blowjob. All right.

Well, I think that's a great place to pause and, uh, We should probably start talking about the video games. You were wrong. I killed the torch, and there was snow job. But do not put the two together. There was Big Lob. It's like, that's not, like, you know, but I'm like, it's a fan thing with fans, flowing fans.

I was like six. I had no idea. Okay. Well, that's forgivable then. You probably had seen a lot of, you know, Ken Star and Clinton. Probably saw the movie and like, you know, Big Lob makes his play. It's very easy to miss here. Big Law.

I think I was thinking a snow job. Probably. Yes. All right. So we've talked a lot about that stuff. Let's take a break and then talk about the video games, which is what everyone's here to hear. Pluto TV is the leading free, streaming television service, watch more than 100 TV channels and thousands of movies on demand all completely free. Pluto TV never asks for a credit card you don't even need to sign up to watch free.

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Rita, complete this quote. Rita, you're like a podcast of, we need to stay on the podcast one or. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. Okay, we kind of didn't talk about the games yet, which is bad, which is bad. So we need to power through that

Because this was supposed to be like a Retronauts Micro Which doesn't exist anymore, but still a shorter episode Anyway, I'm not helping matters here any by rambling So let's jump immediately to the reader mailbag And let you guys talk All right, so our first letter from Matthew, Matt. Matt. Yes, names Matt. Instead of G.I. Joe, when I was a kid, I opted for Hasbro's other 80s powerhouse property transformers. All I knew about G.I. Joe was that it had a

catchy theme song, and that some kid in my class had meticulously cataloged all the backing cards of his endless collection of Joe action figures. It was literally all he talked about, kind of like me. One night during my first winter break in college, I microwaved a couple of hot dogs and sat on my parents' couch remote in hand. That's when I stumbled upon G.I. Joe on some 100-plus-numbered cable channel. It was the TV equivalent of new old stock, a kind of comfort food I'd never eaten before. It was a miniseries, I guess, starring Shipwreck as one of the leads. And it was awesome. They stayed up the next few nights to catch an episode or two. It was sort of a way to explore the ultra-patriotism of the 80s at a time when a lot of people my age felt like

democracy had failed them. But it was mostly about sweet explosions, and I'm okay with that. That was not about video games, but that's okay. Maybe your first comment there on the comments is? This one comes from Danny Bergman who says G.I.J. was my toy of the 80s and 90s

and even some today. To my eight-year-old self, Larry Hama's comic book stories were so mature and unlike other media for kids. The N.E.S. video games seem to arrive at the dusk of the real American hero line.

But I'm glad I got to play both and enjoyed the mix of abilities and swapping of characters. That's why I actually bought a Captain Gridiron figure, hand grenade, footballs, and everything. Oh, man. Love Captain Grit Irons.

We haven't even talked about how there's a second G. series that was like season four. It was poop. Got to get tough. Yo, Joe. I remember that.

That was season three, I think. I think that there were only two Marvel Sunbow. They were very long, though. It was like 50 episodes apiece. Long seasons. But like it's, I actually have those on DVD too. They're quite awful. Yes.

Let's see from Alfonso J. Rivera. My strongest G.I. Joe memory is the NES soundtrack of the first G.I. Joe game in that system. As a kid back in the early 90s, this is the game that truly made me appreciate the glorious and amazing chip tunes of licensed NES games. While wishful thinking on my part, I hope that someday we can see an official release of this soundtrack and other hidden gyms of the NES era.

Next one comes from Bonsell in the UK, maybe. In the UK, G.I. Joe was called Action Force when it was first introduced. I don't think the cartoon was ever shown on TV, and the movie went straight to video here. We had the Marvel Comics through, though, sorry, can't read. We had the Marvel Comics, though, and they were pretty popular in my playground,

especially the issues about snake eyes and Storm Shadow. My main memory is reading a comic that centered on the Skystriker coming to a respectful stalemate, the Cobra Jet Plan. That's a good one. I had to have a Skystriker after that, and I was delighted to get one that Christmas. My other main memory is of my brother and I unscrewing the action figures

and swapping their body parts around. I did that. I had a special screwdriver just for that with all the little rubber bands around it. because I just slopped them out. I messed up so many figures that way. Yeah, I mean, that was like the second life of the figures. I had some figures that are very, very valuable now, like snake eyes.

Yeah, he got Frankenstein with Major Lud. That's like, I can't even imagine doing it. No. Snake eyes with like a bionic arm, it was so cool. That is cool. Because we could, he said, or she, I'm not sure. I remember that eventually the branding was changed to G.I. Joe to be consistent. but like the N.S, G.I. Joe was never as popular in the U.K. as it was in the U.S.

I wonder why. A real American. But they were international heroes. I had some G.I. Joe from Japan once upon a time, and it was like G.I. and then in Japanese written, Joe. And it was international heroes. Wow. Yeah. They even put it in the theme song. It's the same amount of a syllable. International heroes. International hero. Okay. Wow.

Yeah. And actually that skyscripe striker episode or issue of the comic kind of gets to the real sort of origins of G.I. Joe. Like when Hasbro first launched it, the characters were secondary. It was really about the ships, the vehicles. Toys. It was a, well, the toys, obviously, but like not specifically the figures, but rather the vehicles. The figures were, you know, drivers. They were sort of a secondary consideration. But instead, they're actually what took off because they were so well defined through the cartoon, the comic, the file cards. So obviously, like, the, you know, the vehicles were really cool.

You know, I'm sure all of us had, except maybe you, Chris, like my brother had this guy striker, and I had the Rattler, the cobra equivalent, sort of. Somehow I ended up with all the cobra stuff, and that's okay. The only one I ever had was the Night Raven.

Yeah, the Night Raven was pretty cool. Yeah. The SR-71. I had that one, I think. Yeah, I had the, the cobra moray and then he had the hydrofoil. No, that was the hydrofoil. He had the hovercraft, the whale.

So it was kind of like the good guy, bad guy thing. You got to have this parity between the toys if you had a sibling. So that was kind of nice. I bought all the new ones though when they came out with the anniversary line. So I had the trouble bubble on the... Yeah, but they never

reissued some of the big stuff. Like the whale never got to reissue. I think the Moray did, but it was kind of bad. The Skystriker got reissued. The weird thing was they were all new figures, but they used the same molds for the vehicles, so the figures didn't quite fit. Yeah. Actually, I think in hindsight, my favorite G.I. Joe toys were the ones that were like Sears exclusive. I don't know if you ever saw those. If you looked on the Sears catalog in the mid-80s, they'd always have like special exclusive G.I. Joe toys. And they were

just like the standard toys, but molded in different colors. There was one year where they had this, like, two sets of Dreadnock vehicles, and they were just like the standard Dreadnock, or the standard G.I. Joe vehicles, like a Jeep and a helicopter, but they were molded in this weird plastic. It was like dark blue and dark green, and then some of it was this light green that changed color and sunlight because that was the Zartan gimmick. Yeah. And it smelled like chocolate. It was the weirdest thing. It was like this chocolate-scented plastic. Those things sells for like $5 or $600 now. Yeah. I remember those. I'm pretty sure because we all worshiped this catalogs. So let's see. Our family says

Zach Adams was a little behind the times as far as games went. We were still scrounging Atari games from garage sales in our small towns, one-used game shop, until summer 1988. I had memories of seeing the G.I. Joe game in ads on TV, and especially in comics, where Parker Brothers had held the inside back cover slot for most Marvel books for a period of a year or two. I really wanted to play it, but never saw it in the store. When we finally found a loose copy at the used game shop, and I asked about it, the old man who ran the store started yelling about how it was

nonsensable garbage, and his rule was that if any customer could show him how to play the game, he'd give it to them for free. That was more than enough to warn nine-year-old me off of it. I still don't know how it works 30 years later. Anything else on the site? Yeah, Scott Scosie writes in to say, the second NES game, the Atlantis Factor, gets unfairly overlooked. I maintain that it is superior to the original. I loved the Bionic Commando-like map, which gave players a lot of freedom in how to tackle the game's challenges. Do you go get the laser gun first or try to recruit a third Joe like Roadblock or Storm Shadow, who is a Joe in this game? There's some try. He often was.

Yeah. He's, because, you know, he only joined Cobra to find out who killed the hard master. It was Sartan. It was Sartan. There is some trial and error in learning the best routes and which characters to use, but not much more than learning a boss order in Mega Man. It helps that it was one of the few games that I owned that I could beat. I understand it featured some lesser characters in its cast, but as someone who was just too young to really get into G.I. Joe as a kid, that didn't bother me. It still had Duke and Snake Eyes, and you still fought Destro and Cobra Commander, which was pretty

much the extent of my G.I. Joe knowledge. All right, and we'll wrap the letter section with this from Tommy. Not Tommy a Rasha Cage. Not Tommy a Roshchaga. No, I don't think so. I think it's... Nope, his last name's on here, and it's not a Rasha Cage. G.I. Joe, Real American Hero, and G.I. Joe, Atlantis Factors are example of doing

licensed games right. The first game is a great action adventure where each Joe has unique weapons, and each one feels different to use, whether it's snake eyes with this high jump and weapon that takes no ammo, or rock and roll with his contra-style spreadsheet weapon, and General Hawk with his jetpack. The second game introduces a bionic-commando-style map and some divergence in the way you can approach the game as far as underwater areas with wetsuit and passages you can crawl through with roadblock. Personally, I feel the overall... Personally, I feel overall the first game is

better in terms of the way it feels, and the music is fantastic. All right, and that is actually a really great segue into talking about the video games. So it looks to me like there were basically There have basically been five classic G.I. Joe games and two Action Force spinoffs that only happened in the UK, which we'll talk about briefly. But most of the games are okay, and then there are a couple that I think are very, very good.

Let's start with one of the okay ones, which is Cobra Strike for Atari 2,600 from 1983. So a tie-in with the early comic book and I think it slightly predates the cartoon. But, you know, a 2,600 tie-in to the toy line that, according to there's a Wikipedia quote on here that says, Jeremy Parrish of Retronaut's blog felt that this game had about as much to do with a G.I. Joe

as any other licensed game from that era, which is to say, not a whole hell of a lot. And that sounds like a great expert opinion to me. Yeah. I put that in there, by the way. I'm just kidding. I don't know. No?

I feel like I've never played this game. I've seen it. I've screenshots of it. I've tried playing it. Probably tried it, but it's not memorable enough to remember actually what happens. Yeah, like that guy, Zach Adams, who wrote in and said there was an old man who shouted at him that this game is nonsensical garbage. I can't disagree.

I've tried playing it, and I'm just like, so, okay, you are, you're, what even are? You like control a shield or something in this game. So at the bottom of the screen, there's two barracks and there's G.I. Joe dudes running from one side of the barracks to the other. You know, they're all just stick figures. So it could be scarlet. It could be cobra troopers. Who knows? Anyway, above you, there is a giant cobra, which admittedly looks pretty cool for an Atari 2600 graphic.

But it's waving just like my arm is here. You can't see it at home. But trust me, I'm hypnotizing both Benj and Chris. Oh, oh, oh, wake up, guys, wake up. Sorry. So this snake head hovers over the top of the screen and drops venom at you. And you're like blocking it, but you're also, there's guns on the side of the screen and you're like trying to shoot the snake. That's what snakes do.

They drop venom. That's not really what GI Joe's about. No. Yeah. Yeah, so it really feels like they just had a game concept and we're like, well, I guess we could attach this to the GI Joe property. Why not? It doesn't feel as, you know, as well considered as something like E.T. To be fair.

Almost every Atari game released in 1983 was horrible and nonsensical. That's true. Almost every. Not all of them, but yeah. Much better, on the other hand, was G.I. Joe, a real American hero for Commodore 64, which launched two years later. And this is one I've never actually played, but I've always wanted to. Have you guys ever played this one? No.

I have not. No. It looks pretty fun, though. Ben, you're, you know, you're like the PC guy. I'm really surprised you haven't played this one. Let me take a look at it and see. So this is, this is, like, I had a friend tell me about this. Oh, wow.

Hi. That's a pretty great rendition of the theme. Yeah, so I had a friend tell me about this game years later, and I did not believe them when they were telling me about this game where you start out and you get to pick one of eight Cobra's. and one of 12 G.I. Joe's and go fight wherever you want. I was like, this game did not exist. That sounds way too cool to have ever existed.

But no, it did exist. And it's basically like this inless toy box. According to some interviews I read online, the idea was to basically give you like a chance to, you know, again,

smash your toys together, but in computer form. So you would have a duel between a G.I. Joe guy and a cobra guy and there would be like some sort of cobra AI asset helping out like a little one of those little tracked mini vehicles or like a cobra soldier popping out

who would shoot at you or the snake armor. So yeah, there's not really that much to it, but it seems okay. It looks neat. It looks like GI. Joe. I'm just now watching a video of it and it looks pretty darn amazing for a game.

1985 C64 game, yeah. Yeah. You know, in addition to the top-down shooter sections where you're running around on foot trying to fight a cobra guy, you also have some almost like radon bungling bay style sequences where you control one of four vehicles and have to go blow up a cobra base and it's like a top-down vehicular mode and you have two aerial craft and two ground-based vehicles that you can choose from. Wow. And they, you know, they operate by their specific rules. Like the, what is it called? The vamp Jeep has to drive. drive on the ground so you have to steer around trees and stuff, but if you fly a dragonfly helicopter, then you can just fly over the trees. So it's kind of cool. It's like,

I feel like they did a lot with this. There's a lot of graphical detail here. That's really impressive. Yeah, it's a, it's a weird bunch of characters, too. Like, you mentioned that it's, it's pretty much every named cobra. To that point, yeah. To that point. But like, also the cast of good guys is, there's also eight of them. And so you get like Zapp. There's 12. There's 12. Plus four vehicle drivers. So you get Zapp and He was recondo. What a weird bunch of Joe's. I mean, it's basically like everyone who was interesting through 1984.

They left out a lot of the green shirts from the first wave of G.I. Joe's. Or grunt. Yeah, Grunt. I mean, he got to be on the Marvel Comics display box in the upper left-hand corner of every freaking issue of G.I. Joe. So how poor grunt was he really? Also, he's the only one who, like, fell in love. He got out of the Army. Yeah, he met Lola.

Yeah. She jogs. She does. So I also appreciate the fact that there is differentiation between the characters. Like if you fight Baroness, she's using her little laser gun, actually like huge laser rifle. But if you fight scrap iron, he's actually blasting missiles at you across the screen. That's pretty cool. I don't know how different those are in terms of game mechanics, but at least, you know, they paid attention to the cosmetics.

And again, you know, it's like every named character up through 1984. So the first three years of the toy line And it is a virtual toy box basically Yeah And you can't lose the game But you also can't win the game You just keep playing and facing off like I want snake eyes to fight

Firefly this time You know to put that a Rasha Caga grudge To rest that we'll find out in eight years Yeah So I don't know I feel like I'm really sad that I missed out on this one And I don't know if you guys have seen that new C64 mini that's coming out

But I'm really hoping I can hack other games onto that thing and finally have a chance to play Chi-I-Joe. Because the original C-64s practically all don't work anymore. Right. The ones I have had to take apart five of them just to make one working B-64 recent. All right. So on the, also on the computer tip here, we have in 1988 action force and action force two. And these happened only in the UK and only on the ZX spectrum. and they are as idiomatic as you would expect, you know, from a late 80s game for Spectrum. They are very kind of simplistic looking, but I feel like they're kind of ambitious.

It's basically like a gumshoe clone. Have you guys checked this out? No. No, I'm surely it's not gumshoe I'm thinking of. For NES? Yeah, the. Yeah. No, I'm thinking of the, I'm thinking of a different one.

I'm thinking of a point-and-click adventure game. Sorry. Okay, no, I'm thinking gumshoe for NES. Deja-fou. Oh, okay, that's very different. That's why I was so very confused. Both of these games star Quick Kick, just Quick Kick, just the silent weapons expert who was created as a,

he was a weird character. He was created for the cartoon, and he wasn't like a military guy. He was an aspiring actor who joined G.I. Joe when, like, a mission in encountered him filming videos or filming commercials for fudgy bars. And they were like, hey, guy who was selling frozen snacks in the Arctic, why don't you join our secret military team of highly specialized experts? I said a lot of really good things about the diversity in G.I. Joe. And I like Quick Kick as a character.

I really do. But she is egregiously stereotypical. He's the G.I. Joe who does not wear shoes or a shirt. because he's, you know, he's a silent weapons karate master. Right. No shoes for him. Right. But I do believe, I might have this wrong, but I believe Quick Kick was one of the characters

who was heavily featured in the Action Force comics, which were the European G.I. Joe comics. Probably. Which were, they were reprinted in America as European missions. Yes. I have never been able to track down a run. And those do not get me. I found a few of those back in the day, but I did not keep them. I've got one that has Destro on the country.

cover getting pointed at by a bunch of weird hands coming in from weird angles. You know those the extended UK Transformers run by Simon Furman and how that's like legend and basically people love it more than the American stuff? Yeah. G.I. Joe doesn't have that.

That's not action force. But I do know that there was a obscure Grant Morrison two-pager where Quick Kick talked about learning Kung Fu from Shang-Chi because they were introducing Master of Kung Fu into

the Action Force magazine. It was going to have like G.I. Joe lead stories and then Master of Kung Fu backups. So the transition was Morrison having Quick Kick talk about Shang Chi and how cool he was and getting all the kids hype. So I think Quick Kick was heavily featured on that side. Okay. Well, the

American comics, he showed up, let's see, when Storm Shadow broke into the G.I. Joe base, the pit. And he got beaten down so Storm Shadow could be like, I'm awesome. And then he was on a mission, to Eastern Europe into Barovia

that went horribly wrong and he ended up in a gulag for like two years and then he went to Trucial Abisma the stand-in for Saudi Arabia and died. So he didn't really get a good treatment in the comic

because he was not invented by Larry Hama. It's got a cool figure though. It was a pretty good figure. My brother had that one. He comes with nunchucks and a sword. Yeah, I think my favorite character of Asian descent in G.I. Joe is tunnel rat because the figure is made to look like Larry Hama. And that's awesome.

Also, he's short, which I also, I appreciate that. So moving on to my personal favorite on the list, which is G.I. Joe for N.S. One of you said that he didn't like this one. That's you, Chris. What the hell is wrong? I just, I feel like it's, I didn't realize this was a hot take. It is a very hot take. But I have played this game.

I just don't find it very fun. Maybe I'm completely wrong and I should go back and revisit it more often. I remember getting it when I was a kid and not liking it then. I remember, like, getting it when I got into emulation around the turn of the century and not really enjoying it then. And I remember checking it out just recently and being like, it's not really what I want out of GI Joe. So maybe it's just me. Maybe I just have, maybe where's Captain Gridiron in this game? He's right there.

He's one of the playable characters. Where's Big Lob? Where's the fridge? You'll never see him. Where's the Toxovine? I think you do fight toxo vipers. Okay, then never mind. Yeah.

You definitely fight sea vipers or bugs or whatever they're called. This game strikes. I always struck me as just a generic action platformer in the same vein as... Did you guys get past the first stage? Kabuki Quantum Fighter. It's not as good as Kabuki Quantum Fighter. You know, all those... You got a little guy jumping around shooting, Ninja Gaden, Gaiden, what are you say.

And, you know, that's... I think I rented it when I came out. I was excited that there was a new G.I. Joe game. And I don't know. Did you guys get past the first stage? Probably not. Because once you get to the second stage, it gets really interesting. So the first stage, yeah, it's like linear.

You're just a guy going through the jungle and fighting cobras who attack you. And then you fight a cobra condor at the end because, of course, like, you know, a two-part stealth plane is going to be attacking a guy in the ground. Anyway, you know, it's very much a via a view. for the vehicles of the era, the figures in vehicles, trying to sell those. But once you get to the second stage, the second part of the first stage, the second segment of the first mission, then it stops being just a side-scroller and becomes sort of a free roaming space where you have to travel throughout a cobra base and find weak points where you place bombs and you have a

set amount of time to place the bombs. And then the third mission is you getting the heck out of there before the bombs go off. Yeah, I remember that being very difficult. Really? Am I wrong? Am I bad at video games? I mean, it's not an easy game, but I don't think it's unreasonably difficult. I, you know, it's one of those that I rented, or I bought back then and finished it

within the weekend and was like, oh, well, I guess I'll keep playing over and over again. Yeah, I remember renting it and not being able to make a lot of progress into it. Well, the thing I like about this game is that it really does sort of take the GI Joe concept into consideration. For each mission, you have a mission commander who is like the fixed character for that mission. And then you can choose two characters to take along with you. And each character has their own strengths and weaknesses. So I think one of the letters got to this, like snake eyes is very physically fragile. He can't take a lot of hits, but he can jump really high. And he's the only character whose weapon doesn't use ammo because he shoots like Hadoken, basically. As he did in the

comics. He also has a, like, you have two kinds of attacks. Jeremy saw me leaning into the mic on that one. You have two, two kinds of attacks. You have melee and ranged attacks, and then you can throw grenades. So you can, like, walk around with snake eyes and stab people with swords, or you can throw fireballs or key attacks, I guess. So each character has their own, their own strengths and weaknesses. Like, like the writer said, rock and roll has, it's the second generation rock and roll. So he's got the guns that are like the size of a car engine. and those shoot a spread and each character as you play you can collect power-ups and their

weapons become stronger so it gets like better range and better attack power um i don't know i think it's really well done they threw in some vehicles in there some of the small vehicles of the era like the buzz boar allows you to actually like ride around on the ceilings and the walls um and then you know every every boss is a a named cobriff character or vehicle so you fight raptor you fight I think scrap iron no metalhead because scrap iron was out metalhead was in I don't know I just feel like it's a really well-made game it's by kid who also created low G-man which is not great bore eye fighter which is great they were pretty solid developer it was kind of produced by kin lob who you may know from golden eye or works at Microsoft now

yeah I don't know I like it I'm a big fan yeah I am glad I am glad you enjoy it. I don't know. I guess I couldn't get into it. I had a prejudice against licensed games for a long time, probably because there were so many horrible ones. They would just churn out a license of some sort of movie. Oh, sure.

Yeah. I mean, I was the same way, but I was still able to look past the prejudice and say, like, this is a great game. All right. There is also the sequel to that, G.I. Joe, The Atlantis Factor, which is made by the same developer. You're wrong. That was made by the same developer, but instead of being public, by Taxen. It was published by Capcom. I don't know what happened there. It's kind of weird. But I feel like it's not as good. It's kind of G.I. Joe in reverse, where the first game gives you all these characters you can pick from. The sequel, you can only control Hawk at the beginning and you have to find the other characters. So it's more limited at the start. It's also really, like, this one is much harder than the first one. Yeah, I could not. I could not get it. It's brutally difficult. Yeah. And I tried. So binge, why do you think it's a great game? I feel like, Just presentation-wise, it had more polished than the first one. It actually felt like a Capcom game, even though it was developed by, you know.

I feel like it's, it looks exactly the same personally. Yeah, well, I'm wrong. No, I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just so prejudiced against it. Maybe I was prejudiced by the Capcom name, and I'm like, wow, this is like Mega Man or something. Interesting, okay. I don't have a lot to say, but, I mean, I've played it here and there, you know, every once in a while, and I don't, it doesn't stick with me.

So it's nothing as good as a Larry Hama comic book. Well, no, obviously. Yeah, these, these games do lack a sophisticated narrative, which is what I want a G-edge. That's true. They're so stumpy. The little guys are so short, and I just, there's something weird about it. I like that, though. I like having more room to maneuver.

Like Mega Man, they're the same size as Mega Man. They're small on screen and there's a lot of stuff happening around you. But he's a little boy. He's like three feet tall. He's a robot. He's a boy. He's a robot. He's a fighting robot.

He is. A three-to-a-tall fighting robot. Okay, well, there was never a game comparable to the comic book, but there was a game comparable to the cartoon, and that's what we're going to end this episode on, because it's freaking great, and Chris, I feel like you have some things to say about this. Yeah, this game rules. This is the arcade game, G.I. Joe from 1992. Vinge, do you know this one? Have you played it?

Not that I know. Oh, you missed out. I did not. Okay, I might remember it. This is basically a Devastator's Clone, if you remember that game. You know, something like Cabal or whatever. Like, it's a, you run into the screen and just blow the hell out of things. Yeah. That's all, it's dumb and stupid and mindless, and I love it.

First of all, like, all the art for it looks dope. It looks exactly like the cartoon. Yeah. I did not know this game existed until, like, four or five years ago when I was over at a friend's house. And, like, he had one of those custom arcade cabinets, and it was one of the games. And I was like, G.I. Joe for the arcade. I'll play this. I don't know how this happened,

but the pizza place that my family liked to go to for lunch after church on Sundays, I feel like a lot of the games that I remember like Robocop or the Goonies, you know, on the Play Choice 10, I remember from there. And this is one that they had. They had G.I. Joe. And this came out in what, 1992?

So by that point, I was like, yeah, I'm done with the G.I. Joe. That's a kid's stuff. And it's based on the cartoon from like seven years before, but it's so perfectly done that I didn't care. I was like, wait a minute. This is like, this is scratching my childhood nostalgia right here. And I'm still a teenager. What's happening? It is a weird game to come out in 1992. Because again, like, G.I. Joe was not a going concern at the time. Like, even the toys were winding down. They were winding down. The cartoon was over. The, yeah, the comic book was on

autopilot. All the characters were dead. A handful of more. This looks slightly familiar like I've seen this at one point. But maybe I'm just thinking of like space harrier where you're behind the you know it's your the sky's running forward and you're seeing a third person over the shoulder view and you're it's almost super scalar technology yeah I mean it's very super scale at a cobra base and kill everybody it's so good pretty darn cool but yeah I don't know if I've actually played it everything that you're fighting is is straight from the cartoons there's like his tanks coming out and rattlers flying overhead and then you get to a base and baroness is at the top and she's like shooting at you

and throwing grenades and stuff. Everything looks exactly like what it is, which is pretty great. But then shortly after I had played this on one of those earlier cabinets, I was in Minneapolis, and I went to a barcade up there, I think called Up Down. And they had one there. And it's, it is a, it is a bright and shiny quarter muncher. It is like, it is one of those games where the primary skill is having quarters. But it is super fun.

Like, I thought it was a blast. Yeah, it's not a deep game by any means, but it's just like super mindless and super high energy. There's just so much stuff happening at all times. And it is like just such a perfect distillation of the Marvel Sunbow comic. It's really great. I think I've never seen it until this moment. Wow, you missed out. You stumped a retro.

You should play it. It's fun. It looks cool. It's just doing this. I would love to see Konami put out a collection of all their licensed arcade games. from back in the day. You know, they were doing stuff like The Simpsons and Teenage Muti Ninja Turtles. So this was just another one that they picked up and were like, let's make a game out

of an American license. And it was great. Teenage Mutual. All right. Well, anyway, so that's the history of G.I. Joe and video games. We're not going to talk about the stuff based on the live action movie because no. But anyway, yeah, I could obviously talk about this a whole lot more, but I'm not going to. Maybe I'll start a G.I. Joe podcast.

In the meantime, I do hope everyone... The Pit. Real American podcast. Nice. I do hope everyone will check out the NES game and see if I'm right or if these guys are right. I'm right. And, yeah, come to your own conclusions.

If you ever happen to see the arcade game in person, play it because it's like, it's a, I think it's a four-person game, right? I'm trying to remember. It's definitely two players, but I think up to four. I think you're right. I saw some options for four players. Yeah. This sounds like the greatest game I've never played.

It's fantastically bad. I mean, like bad in a wonderful way. It's like there is no thought to it, but it's so fun to just see like, oh, that's the silent castle. Yeah, I mean, they seriously put like 10 minutes of thought into the game design and just said, you know, we're going to make up for the lack of subtlety with just sheer joy. Everything is going to be so fun because you're blowing everything up. Yeah, also it is great to literally just run at a base as snake eyes laying. waste to everything in your paths. I do take issue

with the fact that when you put a quarter in Snake Eyes, if you're playing a snake eyes, he says, yo, Joe. Not acceptable. She just said dot, dot, dot. Exactly. Exactly. But I'm willing to forget that that one licensing error, it happens. Anyway, guys, tell us about yourselves where we can find you on the internet. Benj. I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me on Twitter at BenjEdwards and also vintagecomputing.com.

I'm Chris Sims. You can find everything that I do at T-H-E-SB.com. I'm also on Twitter as the ISB, where my icon for the past 10 years has been a screenshot of Destro laughing on the cartoon, where he is mysteriously hot pink for some reason. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. The co-host of Retronauts. Retronauts is at Retronauts.com on podcast services like iTunes. And at the podcast One Network, we are supported through Patreon, patreon.com slash retronauts. that's what pays for me to be able to eat and to be able to have a home where these people can come and talk about video games in G.I. Joe with me. So if you'd like to help make that happen, check out patreon.com slash retronauts. And you get cool stuff in exchange for your generosity.

Anyway, that wraps it up for this episode. We'll have another episode soon because there's no escaping the retronauts. Yo, Joe. Crashing through the sky comes a fearful cry Cobra Cobra Cobra Armies of the night

Evil taking flight Cobra Cobra Cobra Nowhere to run Nowhere to hide Panic spreading car and why Who can turn the time?

T.I.T. American hero. Yo! T.I. Joe! T.I.I.O. American hero. With Domino's week-long carry-out deal, you can carry out large three-topping pizzas, and now, medium three-topping handmade pan pizzas for $7.99 each. It's fantastic news.

Cut, cut. Puns? You mean pans? Calling all panatics for two layers of cheese on crispy gold. and crust. So grab your panty packs because domino's large three topping pizzas and medium three topping handmade pan pizzas are 799 each. It's pandemonium. Bandastico. Carry out only. You must ask for this limited time offer. Prices participation in charges may vary. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the attorney. General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican Senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from

it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.