WOJM Special Edition #5: A look back at The Rise of Cobra

Mount up!  Technically, they don't exist.  They answer to know one.  And when all else fails, they don't.  Welcome to the NEW face of GI Joe in 2009, the Rise of Cobra.  GI Joe is still the codename of a daring, high trained special mission force who purpose is to defend human freedom against those who threaten it.  Sound familiar?  This time you heard nothing about America AND Cobra.  Why?  Well the movie world has Joe as an international force, oddly, something more akin to the cult classic MegaForce and less anything to do with the comic we grew up with.  And with no Cobra as the enemy, who would Joe fight to get Cobra to "rise"?  That would be our favorite Scottish weapons provider Destro and his MARS organization.  Well, if you were like most in the fandom at the time, your head began to hurt as Joe, was for good, yet mostly bad, changing in front of our very eyes.  While some timeless characters like Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow remained mostly unchanged, favorites like Breaker are brought back from the dead and Heavy Duty was given an accent other than that of a Chicagoan.  Toss in changing the race of Ripcord, which in itself was no big deal AND mixing in the weird Rex-Duke-Anna triangle and the fandom had about as much as it could handle.  Joe did well for one week in the theater, but for the most part the fandom turned their back on the motion picture as a failed experiment that almost killed our hobby.  In the toy world, the RoC toys sold very well, but Hasbro, for whatever reason, decided to ramp up production and flood the stores with early movie waves.  Never mind that figures from the Terminator, Star Trek, and Pirates of the Caribbean movies will still warming the pegs, Hasbro went full steam ahead.  These little mistakes undoubtedly effected what we saw in the Pursuit of Cobra line all the way down to the most recent 30th Anniversary wave.  We figured it fitting that after a few days of the GI Joe Retaliation trailer hitting, the WOJM would gather around the mics one last time in 2011 to look back on RoC, give our thoughts on the movie, the figures, the vehicles, the licensed product and give our early comparison thoughts to the new sequel.  So make the call!  Sit down and hear this special Rise of Cobra Retrospective of WOJM!  When we're finished, the world will never forget! Happy Holidays from your friends at WOJM! (the weekly streak continues)