DIC GI Joe: The Good and the Bad
By Past Nastification
The Sunbow GI Joe cartoon feels as if it were aimed at 9 or 10 year olds, but watching it decades later it still holds up, at least in terms of spirit.
Having outgrown the toy line, I never had any exposure to the DiC successor when it premiered in 1989. After re-watching all of the Sunbow run, I decided I had to also view the DiC episodes, which are the spoiling leftovers compared to Sunbow’s freshly toasted sandwich.
DiC’s cartoon run began with Operation: Dragonfire, in which the snake-mutated Cobra Commander was returned to a more-or-less human form. Since he was snake-ified in 1987’s GI Joe: The Movie, the Sunbow run and DiC run are unfortunately linked to each other. The DiC run appears to have been aimed at a slightly younger set, perhaps 6 or 7 year olds. It shows. The episodes aren’t just animated poorly, but they also feel structurally hollow and without the something-something that Sunbow’s run had.
Despite its mostly milquetoast quality, DiC’s run had several good things. Here is a list of the bad and the good of the DiC run.
Because it’s so easy, let’s get the bad out of the way first:
8. Missing villains
At the end of GI Joe: The Movie, Cobra Commander was turned into a snake. But his command staff? Though presumably captured, the fate of the rest of the Cobra hierarchy was left open. Aside from Serpentor, the Baroness, and (strangely, because he didn’t get much Sunbow play) Copperhead, the other Cobra big wigs were just… gone. Major Bludd did show up once or twice, but Tomax & Xamot, Scrap Iron, Dr. Mindbender, Zartan, most of the Dreadnoks, and Firefly were not to be seen again. Certainly, Hasbro was pushing its new product in the DiC run, but a mention of these characters would have been nice.
7. Battle Copters
The worst air vehicles in the GI Joe fleet, but like roaches in a dirty kitchen, they made their way into the DiC run again and again and again. These filled the same small-frame helicopter role as the really cool Locust helicopters, making their inclusion even more painful.
6. No Cobra soldiers!
Aside from a quick shot of a Python Patrol Cobra Soldier (or was it an officer?) in Operation: Dragonfire, there are no basic Cobra soldiers to be seen anywhere. Without the standard blue-clad cannon fodder, DiC used other characters to fill the void. When specialized characters, like Night Vipers, were used as generic soldiers it took away from their specialization.
5. Dumbed-down writing
Operation: Dragonfire felt pretty close to Sunbow product, probably due to the writing of Doug Booth, who had written one Sunbow episode. It had better animation than the following two DiC seasons and also featured a few holdover voiceover actors. Several scenes would actually have passed for Sunbow material. Outside of the miniseries, though, flat writing was the common thread among the DiC episodes. There’s no true character development for the most part and any feeling of continuity dissolved. Sunbow’s Scarlett was a witty, take-charge character; DiC’s Scarlett was a weak link in the few episodes she appeared. Childish writing and logic gaps were so dull and lazy and bad that, by comparison, they made Sunbow’s The MASS Device mini-series feel like David Mamet wrote it.
4. Flashback episodes
Two of the final episodes, Basic Training and The Legend of Metal Head, were flashback episodes. For a show that was cheaply animated to begin with, why did viewers have to get punished with episodes that recycled shot after shot from earlier episodes?
3. Sound Effects
To match the lower age demographic, ridiculous sound effects were used in the DiC run that no one at Sunbow would have ever allowed. The worst offenders? Trombone slide (I think, maybe a kazoo), fast-pattering feet, and the “boing” noise. To my untrained ears, it always sounded like Sunbow may have “sampled” a few sounds from other popular culture movies/television shows, but I can live with that because the plagiarism at least served a purpose. Having a Joe character’s feet make a Hanna-Barbera foot patter sound as he runs out of a room? Sad.
2. Bad voice acting
Ever try to watch a “movie” made by college kids or one on SyFy or Lifetime? There are one or two actors who actually seem to know what they’re doing, but the rest are wooden and/or devoid of any talent. Imagine if you took all of the untalented folks and cast them as the lead actors in a show. That’s what DiC managed to do. Thankfully, a few original cast members stayed around. Chris Latta as Cobra Commander (apparently not credited or someone doing a flawless impression), Morgan Lofting as the Baroness, Sgt. Slaughter as himself, and Ed Gilbert as Hawk made the leap from Sunbow from DiC. The replacement voice actors for Duke, Wetsuit, Scarlett, and Flint were so conflicted with the Sunbow versions that it made no sense. It gets worse. The Sunbow voices that DiC tried to imitate but missed were particularly painful, most notably Destro and Serpentor.
1. Metal Head
Unlike his Sunbow predecessor, Scrap Iron, Metalhead’s DiC depiction is that of a low-IQ goofball. Not deranged in a frightening way, but in a way that would only get the character a job as a circus carney, not as a missile-toting baddy for a ruthless terrorist organization. “Bang! Bang!” to you, Metal Head. You’re horrible.
It might seem odd that I haven’t harped on the poor animation. The mini-series was near Sunbow’s quality, the first DiC season was mediocre, and the second season was outright bad. As odd as it sounds, the animation was the least important aspect of why the DiC cartoon didn’t match the Sunbow cartoon. The stories themselves, the voice acting, and the overall feel of the series weren’t up to par with Sunbow. Had those elements been closer, the animation could have been overlooked or excused.
Could I have made the bad list forty items long? Yes, but I wanted to roughly balance it with the good list. Here’s a list of seven good things:
7. Logo built into opening scene
The second season of the DiC run featured a visual gimmick that worked. At the beginning of the first scene the GI Joe logo was used as an environmental element of the background painting, where it would seen by the camera before the camera panned away from it.
6. Night Creeper Leader
Unlike the Hasbro NCL figure, DiC’s version wore a Night Creeper uniform slightly modified with open fingered gloves and a pointy tipped mask/hood. The character largely filled the bad ninja role vacated by Storm Shadow’s defection to the GI Joe team. Sunbow created dozens of cartoon-only characters, but NCL was one of just a few DiC-originated characters worthy of conversation.
5. Cobra Commander became a more involved leader
In the Sunbow episodes, Cobra Commander often sent out his henchmen to do his dirty work. In the DiC episodes, CC actually gets out in the field to personally oversee operations and lead attacks! This probably isn’t true character development so much as DiC wiping away most of the supporting villains, so we’ll call it a win by default.
4. More variety of characters
The quality of the Sunbow run was unquestionably higher, but so was the frequency of the same characters over and over. Flint, Lady Jaye, Shipwreck, and Duke got far too much exposure compared to the other characters. In fairness, older Sunbow characters like Stalker and Ace also faded out by the last season. But, all in all, DiC really seemed to spread the limelight around a little bit better than Sunbow did. Even Captain Gridiron was the center of an episode. This is probably the only category in which I’d give the decision to DiC over Sunbow.
3. Bob Hope (sort of)
In the episode That’s Entertainment, Hawk’s unabashed admiration for USO performer Jackie Love is revealed. Jackie Love was clearly based on Bob Hope and featured a voice actor doing a Bob Hope impression, if not a very good one. By the time the episode was made, Bob Hope’s celebrity had started to sunset and DiC might have been able to get him to do an episode had they just tried. A few dollars and some kind of lifetime achievement award and they probably could have landed him to perform as himself. Having just finished reading the biography Hope by Richard Zoglin days before I saw the episode, I sensed that the writer, George Carrangonne, obviously appreciated Bob Hope on some level. GI Joe, even the DiC version, would have been a fitting addition to Hope’s late work. Hasbro did eventually make a 1:6 Bob Hope, so the idea of him playing himself on a Joe cartoon might not be too far off.
2. The Baroness and Zarana
Unlike the rest of the tossed-aside Cobra hierarchy, the Baroness and Zarana were featured in DiC’s run. Speculatively, this might have been because DiC wanted at least two female villains and there were no new female figure from which to source. To freshen up the existing designs, both characters’ uniforms were slightly modified and recolored. Another win by default.
1. Good mesh on some voiceover for old characters
According to interviews and the internet, most of the Sunbow voice cast was lost due to contract and/or recording issues. Most of the replacement voices just didn’t work. A few were pretty decent, though, and bridged decently with the Sunbow run. Low Light, Stalker, Major Bludd, Zaranna, the Baroness (second season) and Spirit matched up pretty well to their Sunbow counterparts.
DiC’s run on GI Joe will never live up to the Sunbow run. It was never intended to keep pace with Sunbow or match its quality. The overall tone is blander, the shine certainly isn’t there, and even the Nostalgia Fairy can’t help it. But somehow, stray bits of goodness do manage to peek through.
If you decide to view the DiC episodes, do yourself a favor and don’t do it directly after watching the Sunbow ones. Allow some time to pass to minimize comparisons between the two cartoons. A few weeks or maybe a month later, watch the DiC run and try to appreciate as its own animal. You might be mildly entertained.
Excellent article, Rob. For years, all I knew of the DIC cartoon (aside from vague memories from its time on the USA Network) was the fan outcry over how bad it was. There was even one fan site with a G.I. Joe episode guide in which the site owner outright said he would not be including the DIC episodes because he personally did not consider them canon! It was hard to even find any information about them for awhile. So when the DIC seasons finally came out on DVD, I bought them and discovered… they were not as bad as fans made them out to be. They’re not great, for the reasons you described above, but they are kind of fun and it’s neat to see the animated Joe universe Sunbow created continue in some form. I wish G1 Transformers had gotten more episodes, even if they weren’t up to the same quality as Sunbow’s. For me, I love tracking which toys from later G.I. Joe got an animated appearance during the DIC years.
I became something of a DIC fan back in the late 90s, and tracked down the series during my VHS tape trading days. It’s a mostly goofy show, for sure. And by the way, the article is courtesy of reader Past Nastification. I think he nicely distilled what DIC really is about for those of us who have an interest in the show.
I thought Maurice LaMarche was a decent Destro, if only because he had more of the Scottish tint added than Arthur Burghardt did.
I still need to watch this series. All I’ve seen of it is the ‘Got to Get Tough’ theme that for some reason was used on the Sunbow cartoon in reruns on USA. It’s a shame that all the original animation cels you can find on ebay are always of this series 🙂
Great write up, I need to check these out.
The only way i could see the series was by buying a low quality bootleg set which was a pain to watch. Last year i finally picked up the region 3 release. I watched every episode 2-3 times and took notes on them as i hope to have a complete G.I.JOE cartoon site one day. Metel head really got up my nose to the point where i shouted at the show more than anything else.
I think the childishness and the needless slapstick was shoehorned into the show in order to compete with ninja turtles.
Oh yes, and my namesake wrestlers an aligot in one episode.
Skymate, I really look forward to seeing your site when it is ready!
The DIC series most definitely is not anything near sunbow, but it’s like anything else you just can’t beat the original. I was 5 when this series came out and fortunately my older cousins had taped the sunbow series and had VHS tapes they bought, so I got to watch what wasn’t in reruns. My opinion is probably swayed some because I grew up watching these and they are just goofy but as a kid they were fun, and I can say my 4 year old boy and 10 year ol girl enjoy te DIC series along with the sunbow. My boy loves some of the silly stuff that I dislike about it but as I said it is made for kids to enjoy and I think it did it’s job although I enjoyed sunbow better when I was a kid and now and so do my kids. They sold toys not that sadly those bright colors needed selling cause I was giving hasbro all my parents money for anything I saw in the cartoon, cardbacks, pamphlets, comics, whatever gi Joe had it I was buying, even the DIC cartoon. So anyways awesome article great breakdown and yo Joe!
It definately came across as a cheaper show. It seems like they felt like they had to get certain voice actors (Cobra Commander & Sgt Slaughter were basically must-haves), but the rest seemed to be whatever they could get for the cheap. I was still into GI Joe at the time, across both series. I loved the Sunbow series, I felt the DIC series was kind of stupid but I watched it because it was still new GI Joe and after GI Joe, TF, He-Man & She-Ra went off the air, there was about 2 seasons or so where there wasn’t much filling that action show cartoon niche and this was a time when there was no Netflix, Amazon, etc where the really popular older series would still be available… When a series ended, it sometimes completely disappeared (GI Joe & TF had at least 1 season of reruns though from what I read, in full reruns, a show’s ratings hold up for a while, but then really plummet once the older stuff gets aired enough times) so sometimes there were droughts in good series and you have to pick from whatever the independent channels/Fox affiliates offered (though IIRC, TMNT went 5 days a week in the 89-90 Season, same season Operation: Dragonfire came from). But yeah, if a 9-10 year old thinks a cartoon is pretty stupid in the writing & humor then it probably was written down too dumb/simple. The interesting thing is the cartoon seemed to skew younger (I’d say more to an audience of 5-7) before the toyline really started to show signs of that (use of neons, action gimmicks).
I guess reflecting that, in my area, it went from airing weekday afternoons (once I week I think, not sure which day, can’t recall if they padded the rest of the week with Sunbow reruns or what) in Season 1 to airing early Sunday mornings in Season 2 on a different channel. One would think if its ratings did well, the Fox affiliate would’ve held onto it and even if say, the independent station outbid them, they could’ve aired it in a timeslot more kids would’ve been awake. Ah, still miss the old days when one could see cartoons on the broadcast stations weekday mornings, weekday afternoons, Saturday mornings, and Sunday mornings.
Doug Booth wrote several Transformers episodes so it may have been his writing style, coming from the classic Sunbow years or it may have been DIC not really knowing what they want to aim at until the full-blown series entered production.
When this series started, we had re-located to a new area and it did not have a FOX station at that time. I saw very little of this series and after years of reading about it and seeing snippets online, I don’t feel like I missed out. Still, someday, something to do….
I had a lot of fond memories of “Operation: Dragonfire” as a kid (in part because the new Stalker figure with the kayak was one of my favs, and he featured prominently in the story) and finally was able to rewatch it when the DVDs came out a few years ago. It held up, for the most part, at least to the level of some of the Sunbow minis.
The rest of the series…not so much. It’s definitely a step down from Sunbow, but I agree with Past Nastification that it’s not entirely without without its charms. It’s a lot more bearable if you go into it knowing it’s almost an entirely different beast than the Sunbow cartoon, geared for a different audience with a different aesthetic.
The DIC cartoon is pretty bad. Still, it’s fun to see some newer characters animated, like the Sky Patrol and the ’90/’91 roster. I started watching DIC with my daughter when she was 8, and it quickly turned into an MST3K-like riffing on how ridiculous the episodes were. Metal Head is intolerable. But the Range Viper’s mask changing expression cracks me up every time!
Great article!
Bad comments.
8. I think it’s more interesting that their fates are open to speculation, like maybe they all died at Cobra-La.
7. I agree.
6. Disagree, made Cobra more interesting, because it meant that Cobra’s troop types could be changed or discarded at the leader’s whim. Simply put, by Dic’s first season there were no blueshirts or basic vipers, recruits chose their specialty path as implied in “an Officer and a Viperman”. Range Vipers were one of the more common classes, it seems.
5. No argument there.
4. Clip shows. What crap.
3. Sunbow did license Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars sound effects, I think.
2. Latta was credited as Chris Collins, I’ve heard he was replaced by a sound alike for season 2. Lofting and Gilbert were replaced for season 2. Sci-Fi had his original Sunbow voice actor for his one season 1 Dic episode.
1. Yeah, worse than any of Sunbow’s dreadnoks, who were at least bad guys and could be threatening.
Well, said. I agree 💯💯💯💯💯💯💯!! The Sunbow Series was hands down the best. I can that most of us reading this grew up watching the Sunbow show. Somebody even said that the DIC Series is a continuation of the Sunbow series. No it’s not. There are way too many elements left out that you pretty much covered. Thank you for the article. Well done.