Duel in the Devil's Cauldron

The President and the Joint Chiefs order General Flagg to assemble the G.I. Joe force and surrender to Cobra. He complies where Cobra can watch him do it, and gets one instruction past Duke: leave one team out of it. The third catalytic element is a meteorite buried in the lava of the Devil's Cauldron in South America, and Scarlett, Gung-Ho and Wild Bill go in after it with cables and an electromagnet slung under a helicopter. Cobra Commander, who has been told by Destro that they have only a handful of the meteorite metal left, fires on New York anyway, and the beam has not the fuel to finish. Destro shells the crater wall to blow the meteorite clear, nets it in mid-air, and leaves with both the meteorite and Scarlett.

"And knowing is half the battle." Every Sunbow episode closed on a public-service spot delivered to camera by a Joe, addressing children on a real-world hazard. The ethic underneath the writing, across the whole run, is that Cobra acts out of fear and the Joes act out of responsibility.

Voice talents, as credited on this episode's closing titles. The Sunbow credit crawl lists the company of voice actors for the miniseries and does not assign roles, so no role attributions are given here.

Liz Aubrey Jackson Beck Michael Bell Arthur Burghardt Peter Cullen Pat Fraley Marla Frumkin Scott Buster Jones Christopher Latta Morgan Lofting Rob Paulsen John Stephenson B.J. Ward Frank Welker Michael Yama

"They're kind of cute, you know. Better than an electric train set." -- Gung-Ho, wandering into the shot

"I hope I was as convincing as these models. My only previous acting experience was playing a pumpkin in the school Thanksgiving show." -- Stalker

"Breaker discovered Cobra was intercepting our ultra-secret transmission, and you gave them the show we wanted them to see." -- Duke

"My old daddy taught me how to dip a net to catch a mess of blue crab. This is about the same, except this old crab weighs about ten tons." -- Wild Bill

"Get down too close to that lava and it's Barbecue City." -- Over the radio, on the lift

"Tell me, do we actually have enough catalytic elements to disintegrate New York as I threatened?" -- Cobra Commander

"I do not know. We have scavenged Destro's original shipment containers and found only a handful of the meteorite metal." -- The answer he gets

"It will have to suffice." -- Cobra Commander

Dialogue transcribed for gijoe.army from the episode audio, 2026-09-14. The Sunbow prints carry no subtitle track, so every line here was transcribed and then cross-checked against a second pass; where a speaker could not be established beyond doubt, the line is left unattributed. Corrections are welcome on the forum.

Two armies spend this episode pointing empty guns at each other, and neither of them knows the other one is bluffing.

Cobra's bluff comes first and is the better of the two, because we are told it out loud. Destro has gone to fetch the last element himself, so it is the Baroness who is standing there when Cobra Commander asks the only question that matters: does Cobra actually have enough of the catalytic elements to do what he has been threatening for three episodes? She does not know. They have scavenged Destro's original shipment containers and turned up a handful of the meteorite metal, and the Commander decides it will have to suffice. He orders the shot fired anyway. [1]

The Joe bluff is the mirror image, and it runs on the same fuel: the other side cannot see your inventory. Breaker works out that Cobra is intercepting the Joes' ultra-secret transmissions, so when the President and the Joint Chiefs order the force assembled and surrendered, the Joes broadcast the surrender at Cobra rather than carrying it out. Stalker reads the order to camera over a tabletop of model tanks and helicopters standing in for a staging area, and the scene's best joke is that the performance nearly collapses because Gung-Ho wanders into shot playing with them. "They're kind of cute, you know. Better than an electric train set." Cobra Commander, watching a show built for him, declares victory and cannot understand why Destro will not celebrate.

Set two men bluffing against each other and the plot resolves itself, because the first one to run out of nerve loses. Cobra Commander fires early and the shot fails. He has no fuel left, and after this, no reason for anyone to believe the next threat either. Destro's reading of it in the following episode is the correct one: to Cobra, nothing does more damage than a threat they fail to execute.

Which leaves the actual prize sitting in a crater of molten lava, and the sequence to get it is the most enjoyable thing in the five parts. There is no science here worth arguing with. The meteorite comes out of the Devil's Cauldron on cables and an electromagnet slung under a helicopter, and Wild Bill narrates the plan by reaching for the only comparison he has. His old daddy taught him to dip a net for a mess of blue crab. This is about the same, except this old crab weighs about ten tons. [2] Here, and nowhere else in the miniseries, the solution to a global crisis comes out of somebody's actual life rather than out of Vandermeer's lab. The episode is right to give it the biggest set piece and the loudest music.

Destro comes out of it as the only person with a functioning plan. Neat positioning for the finale. His plan is to shell the crater wall below the lava line so the eruption throws the meteorite up where it can be netted, and no part of Cobra's war so far has been engineered this well. He executes it cleanly, then leaves with both the meteorite and Scarlett. The Joes cannot fire on him because she is in the way. He offers a parting line about meeting again and takes off, and for once the villain has flatly and unambiguously won the round!

The animation carries the volcano well, particularly the cutaway diagram Destro uses to explain the shot. This show drew technical diagrams better than its reputation suggests. But the dogfight around the plume is busier than it is clear, and the Joe and Cobra aircraft are hard to tell apart in the wide shots once everything is silhouetted against orange.

Everyone in this episode is short of something, and everyone is pretending not to be. Only Wild Bill is doing what he actually knows how to do. He is the one who gets it done.

1 ^ The beam does come down on the city, and it does not have the fuel to finish the job. Cobra Commander is the one who says so, in the next scene, in as many words: his threat has been proven empty.

2 ^ The operation is called Big Lift, and the safety briefing that goes with it is "get down too close to that lava and it's Barbecue City."

Written by the gijoe.army desk

1. M.A.S.S. Device five-part miniseries, September 1983. Marvel Productions, Sunbow Productions and Toei Doga, distributed by Claster TV Productions, a division of Hasbro Industries. Copyright 1983 Sunbow Productions, Inc.
2. Written by: Ron Friedman
3. Produced by: Don Jurwich
4. Executive Producers: Joe Bacal, David H. DePatie, Tom Griffin
5. Executive in Charge of Production: Lee Gunther
6. Supervising Director: Dan Thompson
7. Sequence Directors: Gerry Chiniquy, Nelson Shin, John Gibbs, Art Vitello, Sid Marcus, Sam Weiss, Tom Ray, Arnie Wong
8. Storyboard Directors: Rick Hoberg, Sherman Labby, Larry Houston, Lonnie Lloyd, Bob Kline, Don Shepard, Hank Tucker
9. Model Design: Russ Heath
10. Voice Directors: Don Jurwich, Wally Burr
11. Supervising Editor: Robert T. Gillis
12. Music Editor: Joe Siracusa
13. Sound Effects Editors: Richard Gannon, Jim Blodgett
14. Production Manager: Kathy Conte
15. Checking Supervisor: Barbara Donatelli
16. Creative Consultant: Jay Bacal
17. Title Song by: Spencer Michlin and Ford Kinder
18. Music by: Johnny Douglas
19. Production code: 4008
20. Originally aired: September 15, 1983 in afternoon syndication.