What A Cartoon! - G.I. Joe "There's No Place Like Springfield Part 1 & 2"
Added 2018-09-10 04:45:15 +0000 UTC
Straight from Retronauts and Retronauts Video Works, Jeremy Parish is here to help us with his deep love and knowledge of G.I. Joe as we watch our first ever '80s cartoon. Sure, G.I. Joe was conceived as a toy commercial, but the folks creating the series could still write subversive episodes like this trippy two-parter and get it past the censors. We delve into Cobra lore here, so make sure you're not surrounded by synthoids and listen to this week's episode!
Every time you guys imitated Shipwreck's voice I was cracking up
Chris Artigas
2018-09-14 15:29:38 +0000 UTC
Jeremy edged riiight up against it, but decided *not* to talk about Larry Hama's other Marvel comic, Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja. It's a charming tale about two childhood friends and and the futility of nuclear disarmament.
T
2018-09-12 19:15:21 +0000 UTC
Shipwreck and Gung Ho were my favorite Joes, the former because he was smartass comedic relief and the latter cuz he looked like my dad, who was also in the Marines. I definitely want to check out the Larry Hama comics since Jeremy always lauded them. Would the best place to start be at issue 1 or is there a certain stand out storyline worth reading first?
Christopher McDougall
2018-09-12 18:33:54 +0000 UTC
One of my favorite "bored at the computer" activities is falling down the rabbit hole of 80s cartoons, in particular shows like GI Joe which existed as a multi-faceted attack of toys, comics, and TV. When GI Joe was winding down the TMNT was taking over. I always felt like Hasbro tried to piggy-back off of that phenomenon by adapting another Hama comic creation in Bucky O'Hare. They used Sunbow once again, released a bunch of toys, and partnered with Konami for a pair of video games (since that was now in play). Of course, history didn't repeat itself and that franchise is something less than a footnote on the era. It did introduce me to AKOM though, and their fingers were in everything it seems. They did the GI Joe Extreme show as well as other Sunbow stuff before it seemed like they turned their attention to Fox where they got a lot of work. They did X-Men and some of the worst episodes of Batman before getting fired from that show. Oh, and of course, they did a lot of work for a show called The Simpsons. AKOM is usually the point where my rabbit hole gets too unwieldy and I lose focus.
Joe Hodgson
2018-09-12 17:57:37 +0000 UTC
The writing in this episode is way better than I would have ever expected as someone who only touched GI Joe casually throughout my life - and the animation is pretty decent. It sucks that the GI Joe movie got shafted so hard by Transformers bombing, because the opening sequence is GREAT and I wish the rest of the movie could have lived up to that potential.
Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag
2018-09-11 22:16:58 +0000 UTC
I think I can answer the question as to why Shipwreck was just a Jack Nicholson impression in a sailor outfit: back in the 70s Jack played a sailor in The Last Detail and the poster/VHS box was him wearing a white sailor cap and nothing else. I never saw the film but I’ll never forget seeing that image on the shelves at the video store.
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Detail" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Detail</a>
Diamond Feit
2018-09-11 13:39:22 +0000 UTC
If you guys are interested in watching more "trippy"/"mess up" GI Joe episodes, check out the two parter "Worlds Without End" (I think I mentioned it on the announcement post for September's cartoons.)
Similar to this one, it has characters acknowledging other character's deaths, and they even show dead bodies, including the dead bodies of the Joes that we're actually watching (because they're in a parallel universe where Cobra won and most Joes are dead/missing.)
Similar to Shipwreck's freakouts, one of the Joes has a bad fever and is freaking out at seeing the world in chaos and his own dead body.
Andrew Bouvier
2018-09-11 13:37:38 +0000 UTC
There aren’t many podcasts that can bring a tear to my eye. Listening to that theme song for GI Joe did the trick though. Also nice to have Jeremy on the show. Wonderful episode, guys!
VaultBoy1974
2018-09-10 19:06:34 +0000 UTC