Gamesmaster Island: August 2025

Sunday, August 31, 2025

G.I. JOE: A Real American Hero Ultimate FANthem!

Yo Joe!

40 years of G.I. Joe/ Real American Hero
Whenever there's trouble, G.I.Joe is there/ G.I.Joe will always be dare

Comic books, cartoons/figures made for action
Commercials made, "you want that?"/Let me get that Mobat

Breaker Clutch, Grunt and Flash/Rock&Roll, Bazooka, Zap

Shipwreck loves navy grog/Mutt came with a junkyard dog
Scarlett rocks a crossbow/PSAs, the more you know
Touch the line, you'll get a shock/Oh, thank goodness, here's Roadblock

And now you know/Knowing is half the battle
G.I. Joe!

How sick is that/Cutter's boat/the Hovercraft really floats
Stalker is from Michigan/then there were the mail-ins

Dysfunctional relationships/like Steeler and the Baroness

Arashikage, ninja bros/Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow
Dragonfly roam the skies/ No one ever really dies

Cobra B.A.T.s by the dozen/Destro and Lady Jaye are cousins

Duke, Hawk, Recondo, Doc/Cold Slither plays the hardest rock
Scrap-Iron has mixed loyalty/Major Blood writes poetry

And now you know/Knowing is half the battle
G.I. Joe!

Cobra Commander losing it/surrounds himself with idiots
Why does Cobra get beat/Because their leader screams, "Retreat!"
Xamot and Tomax/Cobra box replacing cash

No Cobra scheme's intangible/They even brainwashed animals
Darkness cubes from coast to coast/Blackmailing three different ghosts
Destro running guns from M.A.R.S./Controlling weather from the stars

Cobra-La, new emperor/This I command, Serpentor
Why is Serpentor super cray/They lost on Sun Tzu's DNA

And now you know/Knowing is half the battle
G.I. Joe!

Night Raven, Arctic Blast/Desert Fox, Snowcat
Face paint, dog tags/everyone still wants a FLAGG
40 years of awesome lore/Let's hope there's 40 more
Fighting for freedom, land, and air/Whenever there's trouble, G.I. Joe is there

And now you know/That's half the battle
"Wait, what's the other half of the battle?"

G.I. Joe!

"Cut! Alright, let's do it again from the top!"

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Pythona production models

Friday, August 29, 2025

PYTHONA (1987)

This is a lovely sketch of Pythona by legendary G.I. Joe artist Russ Heath. The standout new villain in G.I. Joe the Movie, so of course, Hasbro doesn't make a figure of her to go along with it.

A Janitor-Viper's Job Is Never Done

The Terror Drome is a ghost town, Cobra is off trying to conquer the world, could be slacking, yet this Janitor-Viper is still working hard! Red cap turned around, so casual, but still doing his job.

A credit to Vipers everywhere.

... but why are there brick walls in the Terror Drome, DIC?

SCOOP (1989)

The Stingers - Take It Or Leave It

"Take It or Leave It" by The Stingers is a great anthem song. It's in my top five songs from Jem and the Holograms cartoon.

Riot's unapologetic, cocky self-expression, as it goes, "take it or leave it"...

Don't like the way I act?
Girl, you better face the fact
You can wait a long while
I'm not about to change my style

This is me / How I like to be
Take it or leave it / I am free
How I like to be/Take it or leave it
What you get is what you see
You better believe it /Take it or leave it

You think I'm a big disgrace (hoo hoo)
Why don't you get off my case? (hoo hoo)
You say I'm the hurtin' kind
Girl, you oughta keep in mind...
This is me / How I like to be
Take it or leave it
What you get is what you see
You better believe it / Take it or leave it, baby
Take it or leave it

The Baroness - Bored Spoiled Little Rich Girl

Transformers Generations Collaborative: G.I. Joe Mash-Up – Megatron H.I.S.S. Tank included a Baroness figure as the gunner. There are two things about this.

Cobra's Pro-Social Philosophy

"People trust television! It's their friend! They believe what television tells them... about the news, the weather, or G.I. Joe! Don't you see? We control the creation of truth!"

Fan Service High:

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #50

My memory of the G.I. Joe comic series remains much more fuzzy, but one thing I knew in general, comics in the 80s had no problem with fan service.

This was previewed in G.I. Joe #50 to promote the Special Missions comic.

This moment of Lady Jaye mid-dress doing a quick change of clothes into a stewardess was something that caught my eye as a young boy, lol. This was in keeping with Lady Jaye's file card: no wigs, no rubber masks. Becoming the role.

The art was good. The clothing on the page had texture, how it should drape across her mid-change. Dynamic, created movement. Lady Jaye looked like a real person, arm extended to get the outfit on. Even in those two panels, a sense of location is provided.

And yeah, that little panty flash. That was intentionally in the preview pages of their mainline book, to get boys in turn to buy Special Missions.

Cobra Commander: American as apple pie and motherhood!

Here we see Cobra Commander tempting an economically depressed town in America called Millville.

Jobs! Free medical care! Bonses! Subsidized housing! Crime-free environment! Even Cobra Day Care! Cobra is all for the nuclear family!

Best of all, its all tax free!

One guy stands up to Cobra Commander, but its hard to stop the spread of fascist ideals when the choice these people faced was Cobra Commander's "better life" or starving.

The Lady Who Has Everything

Damn!

Rich/Privileged/Smart/Beautiful

Lady Jaye canonically was a woman who had everything going for her, then had the audacity not to be bitch, but rather be a nice, kind person. Ugh! Isn't that just the most annoying thing ever?

Lady...? Lady J... ? Lady Jaye!

In Lady Jaye's first initial appearance in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #32 (1985), her codename was originally spelled "Lady J."

This is actually her final major debut appearance, certainty not her first.

Lady Jaye was created for and first introduced in the Sunbow cartoon, where she played a prominent role in The Revenge of Cobra five-part mini-series. After that, she was released as an action figure and eventually made her debut in the comic series shown below.