@BossGriffin
Well, Cobra-La can’t destroy Cobra Commander because they use a spore to turn Golobulus’ pupil Cobra Commander into a snake and that is why Cobra Commandef and Cobra and Golobulus and Cobra-La plotted to conquer the entire planet Earth by kidnapping and/or enslaving humanity, destroying humanity and/or turning humanity into reptiles much like other Hasbro villains that could conqueror the world and/or universe too like the Decepticons, the Quintessons, the Hive, the Predacons, the Vehicons, Lockdown and his Knight Ship crew, Quintessa and her Creator army, and Unicron from Transformers, the Inhumanoids and their grunts from “Inhumanoids”, the Regents from “Battleship” and a whole slew of villains of My Little Pony including Queen Chrysalis and the changelings, Lord Tirek, Cozy Glow, Nightmare Moon, the Nightmare Forces, Daybreaker, Discord, King Sombra, Sunset Shimmer, the Dazzlings, Starlight Glimmer, the Tantabus, Bad Apple and his minions, Midnight Sparkle, Rabia and the Umbrum, the Pony of Shadows, the Storm King and his Storm minions, the Mean Six, Cosmos and Grogar.
@BossGriffin
Yeah, I liked the Transformers movie more than the G.I. Joe. It would have been a better movie if they had gone with a more standard Cobra stealing the BET plot. Like, the movie would have been largely the same but without all the Cobra-La stuff.
My brother and I used to be obsessed with G.I. Joe: The Movie. Then I got older and went many years without watching it, and it was a shock to see how poorly the real movie compared to my memory of it. The designs and worldbuilding are very creative, and a few sequences feature stunning animation, but the characters and plot and general atmosphere are just really cheesy and cartoony, and the whole thing falls apart if you think about it.
I’m still not convinced that kids would’ve been too fazed by Duke’s death, mostly because I always perceived Flint as the real main character due to his more hands-on approach.
@vile_flesh
The GI Joe movie honestly also isn’t very good. The more supernatural stuff in the animated series was always my least favourite (which is ironic because Gods Down Under was one of my favourite episodes), the movie is all about that and I didn’t like how the rest of the Cobra just seem to be fine with Cobra-La’s plan to destroy the rest of humanity and Cobra Commander is the only one who has a problem with that. You’d think at least some of them would’ve had an issue with losing all the perks of modern civilization.
@Zerowinger
Interesting. I saw both movies in the ‘80s and haven’t seen them since, not in the theater though. I do remember the Transformers movie being more epic and I rewatched that one more times.
@neo4812
The story from what I hear is that Sunbow was producing both the Transformers and GI Joe movies at the same time, and it had been intended for Duke and possibly others to die. Hasbro got wind of this and figured “hey, let’s apply that to the Transformers movie so we can have an in-universe explanation for dropping several of the figures in the future!” and told Sunbow to kill off Optimus and others.
Now, the problem is that what Hasbro didn’t realize - and Sunbow did - is that the primary audience for the GI Joe series was much older than the primary audience for the Transformers series (think 9-12 year-olds vs 4-7 year-olds), so they would be able to handle a character death. But Sunbow had not planned on killing any of the Transformers characters, since they figured both those very young kids (and their parents) wouldn’t be able to take such a scene.
So when the Transformers movie came out in 1986 and showed characters being violently killed in theaters full of 4,5, and 6 year-olds who are way too young to be exposed to scenes like that, what Sunbow feared would happen, happened - little kids were traumatized and terribly upset, and their parents were furious. They wrote angry letters to Hasbro, and in a panic Hasbro ordered Sunbow to not have Duke die in the GI Joe movie.
