The Cobra Strikes

The United States is preparing to put the relay star, a satellite able to receive and send energy anywhere on Earth, into orbit. General Flagg has the G.I. Joe team probe the launch site's defences under the eye of Major Juanita Hooper of the Pentagon's Office of Budget and Accounting, and Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Stalker get inside in under a minute. At the Cobra Temple, Destro delivers three rare catalytic elements to Cobra Commander and raises the M.A.S.S. Device, a machine that can scramble matter into a beam of energy and reassemble it elsewhere. The first live test fails, so Cobra teleports an assault team into the silo instead and takes the satellite by force. Duke is captured in the fighting, fitted with a mind-control band, and walked into Cobra's Arena of Sport.

"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

"I'm gonna kick the mustard out of that crazy hot dog." -- Duke

"Not a very wise procedure, dollar-wise." -- Major Juanita Hooper

"Affirmative, Duke. You're way ahead of me, as usual." -- General Flagg

"My invention will seize the molecules of the relay star satellite, assemble them for transportation, scramble them into a coherent beam of pure energy, and send them here to us." -- Destro

"Masterpiece my foot. You've wasted millions of hard-stolen dollars, you titanium-faced turkey." -- Cobra Commander

"Premature panic is the sign of an immature mind. I have mastered the device." -- Destro

"I'm afraid our surrender has been cancelled." -- The Baroness

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.

"Not a very wise procedure, dollar-wise."

The line belongs to Major Juanita Hooper of the Pentagon's Office of Budget and Accounting, and she delivers it to General Flagg while Duke stands to one side waiting to be told whether he is allowed to break into a missile silo. Before that she has asked whether the request for the G.I. Joe team was filed correctly, and specified the form. [1] She is not written as a fool, the episode never punishes her for existing, and nobody rolls their eyes at her on camera. She has a job, and her job is to ask what things cost.

Now put that against what Cobra is doing on the other side of the cut. Destro arrives at the temple with a shipment in crates, and the first thing out of his mouth is not conquest; it is that the shipment was difficult to assemble and that he has lost time climbing to a ridiculously melodramatic location. Cobra Commander defends the architecture on grounds of secrecy and security, the way a man defends a building decision he has already been questioned about. Later, when the M.A.S.S. Device fails its first live test, the Commander does not accuse Destro of treachery or cowardice. He accuses him of overspending: "You've wasted millions of hard-stolen dollars, you titanium-faced turkey."

Which is what "The Cobra Strikes" is really about, and what a peculiar, rather wonderful thing to build a pilot on! Both sides of this war are organisations. They have budgets, contractors, procurement problems, and men who resent the men directly above them. The superweapon that is going to hold the world to ransom by Friday shows up late, over budget, and does not work the first time, because Destro got the operating temperatures wrong.

Ron Friedman uses that frame to solve a real structural problem, too. Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Stalker go over the silo defences in well under a minute, and Hooper sharpens the point rather than conceding it: brilliant commando work got three people inside, but stealing the satellite would take dozens of men and heavy equipment. She is right. Cobra's answer therefore has to be a machine that needs neither. [2] The M.A.S.S. Device is never introduced to us as a wonder. It arrives as the solution to a logistics problem the episode has just spent five minutes proving is real.

The Toei animation is at its most confident in the cold open, before any of this, when the Skystrikers come in low over the runway and Cobra's strafing run turns the apron into smoke and red flame. There is a lovely bit of economy a minute later where the jets are shown only as shadows crossing rippled sand, four dark shapes and nothing else, and it does more for the sense of a squadron in the air than the dogfight that follows. The Cobra Temple interiors are the other standout: carved serpent heads lit orange from inside the rock, with the device rising on a gantry through a ceiling that opens like a silo of its own.

Chris Latta, credited here as Christopher Latta, arrives fully formed. The voice is already the character: a man who is frightening and ridiculous in the same sentence and knows it about himself, and who carries the several moments where the writing asks him to be both at once.

It ends badly for Duke, and it should. He is taken, fitted with a control band and walked into the Arena of Sport, and the last thing the first episode of G.I. Joe shows a child is the hero being ordered to bow and obeying, because the band leaves him no way to refuse. The episode spends twenty minutes on jokes about requisition forms and then closes on that.

We came to this one for the jets and the toy-shaped hardware, and what we got was a comedy about accountants with a horror ending.

1 ^ Flagg recites it in full. An X257 requisition order, MZ-1-9, in triplicate.

2 ^ The satellite itself is called the relay star, and Flagg's line about it, that it can receive and send the most powerful energy to anywhere at any time, is the closest the miniseries comes to explaining why Cobra wants the thing at all.

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: 4005
20. Originally aired: September 12, 1983 in afternoon syndication.