I only watched this show for the first time last year, or possibly late the previous year. I have no doubt that I would have been a regular viewer if I’d known when it was on over here at the time. Must have been on ITV as I never saw it listed on the BBC.
The 5 parts of this opener were all good, and it is a true 5-parter - many 5-part stories in 80s shows had at least one redundant episode, or sometimes two or even more. But this was a fully involved 5-part storyline, and it needed to be - there’s so much going on! Plenty of action right from the word go! The plot is fairly basic, your bog-standard 80s cartoon with a villain with big plans for world domination, the only thing standing in the villain’s way are a small team of heroes. Only this show has a rather larger cast on both sides.
This story introduces many memorable characters, I’ll start with the villains.
Cobra Commander is iconic of course, Chris Latta doing pretty much the same voice he used so memorably as Starscream in Transformers and Cravex in Visionaries. He put a bit more hiss into it for this pilot.
Destro is the perfect foil to Cobra Commander, completely unfazed by him and sort of co-leader of Cobra.
The Baroness is shown here as the mistress of disguise, a mysterious femme fatale. Of course, the first time we see her, as “Major Hooper”, she is in disguise, although it’s pretty obvious that she’s a bad’un from the get-go, if only because of the endemic sexism in cartoons, in which all female characters under the age of about 50 seemingly have to be drawn as desirable: Major Hooper has a very frumpy look, it’s like we’re being told not to like her right away. And is it my imagination or when the Baroness pulls off the face mask, her entire figure changes to something a little more conventional for the female characters?
And finally of course, Major Bludd, the effective field commander of the Cobra troops.
As for the heroes, well, Duke is very much the all-American action hero in the mould of film stars like Kirk Douglas and Steve McQueen. He also reminds me a lot of Flash Gordon in Defenders Of The Earth (and maybe some of his other incarnations for all I know). He’s a good character to have as the star, but the oddity here is his rank. He’s a sergeant, a senior enlisted man, and yet he has authority over many characters who are technically commissioned officers, including Doc, whose bio identifies him as a captain. It would make more sense for Duke to be an officer, a major at least, if not a colonel. His counterpart in the Russian version of GI Joe (who appear in a handful of episodes) is a colonel, so Duke probably should have been that.
Scarlett is also introduced here and it’s immediately apparent from their opening interaction that there’s more than a little bit of fraternising going on between them. But she’s a tough cookie too, highly skilled with a crossbow and also martial arts - hmm, that’s another point on the sexism front, how come women fighters are always martial arts experts? Because it’s sexier to have the female character doing those moves than punching people in the face.
Snake Eyes is a fun character, but the fact that he never speaks can make things difficult. There are times when the other characters have slightly iffy lines when talking to him to get around his lack of dialogue, and it does make me wonder if it was worth it. Still, that aside he’s a very useful character.
This was the only time where Stalker really had much to do, which is a pity, he’s a good sidekick.
Cover Girl was introduced too, but with a different look to all her subsequent appearances. In later appearances she had short auburn hair that made her look more like Scarlett. Her blonde hair and standard military greens in this story gave her a more distinctive appearance and much easier to tell apart.
Other noteworthy characters introduced here are Gung-Ho and Wild Bill, although for some reason it’s the former who’s seen as the helicopter pilot rather than the latter. Gung-Ho is sort of the comic relief here, all muscle and little brains. It’s also the first appearances of Doc, Ace, Breaker, Snowjob and Torpedo, the latter having a very unfortunate abbreviation to his codename!
The villains’ plan, involving a teleportation device, basically “beam me up Scotty” - and how apt that many of the sound effects used in this show were originally created for Star Trek!
The animation was pretty good too, especially with the number of characters moving about on screen.
Good solid show.
