Half the Battle!

#23 — Cobra La La La

It’s strips like this that remind me just how much line work went into ani­mat­ing GI Joe in the ’80s. My “art” is an extreme­ly sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the char­ac­ters and it still took me a long time to draw.  Ser­pen­tor espe­cial­ly.  Look at this freeze­frame of him.  There are hun­dreds of lines on him alone.  Com­pare that to pop­u­lar shows of today, which not only ani­mate few­er episodes per sea­son (13 com­pared to a whop­ping 65 in the ’80s era of syn­di­ca­tion) but also have the added help of some­thing called a com­put­er.  Back then, every­thing had to be hand-drawn and hand-col­ored.  Say what you will about the ani­ma­tion equal­i­ty of GI Joe, but let’s agree that what­ev­er slave labor ani­mat­ed the show worked HARD.

Any­way, this strip has to do with a very short scene in the GI Joe car­toon movie.  Ser­pen­tor tried to make Cobra-la-la-la-la-la a bat­tle cry and even as a kid, I found it ridicu­lous­ly stupid.

One last thing: There’s some­thing about Dr. Mind­ben­der with­out pants that tick­les me.  It’s my favorite part of the strip.

Now you know…

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