Trivia / G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero

• Actor-Shared Background: Just like his character, Sgt. Slaughter served as a military drill instructor.
• Channel Hop: An example where production studios change rather than which channel the show aired. Sunbow Entertainment produced the "M.A.S.S. Device" and "Revenge of Cobra" miniseries as well as the first two seasons and the movie before Hasbro severed their contract with Sunbow and had DiC Entertainment take over production. DiC's version of the series began with a Five-Episode Pilot titled "Operation: Dragonfire" and ran for two seasons.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The D.I.C episodes have yet to see any form of contemporary re-release.
• The Other Darrin: In the continuation of the show by DiC Entertainment, a lot of characters ended up having their voice actors replaced, to the point that only Bob Remus (Sgt. Slaughter) and Chris Latta (Cobra Commander) stayed from the original Sunbow years through the entire DiC run.
  • Ted Harrison replaces Michael Bell as Duke.
  • Maurice LaMarche replaces Arthur Burghardt as Destro, Charlie Adler as Low-Light, Dick Gautier as Serpentor, Gregg Berger as Spirit, Frank Welker as Copperhead, Michael Bell as Major Bludd, and Jack Angel as Wet Suit.
  • Scott McNeil replaces Keone Young as Storm Shadow.
  • Michael Benyaer replaces Bill Ratner as Flint.
  • Blu Mankuma takes over as Roadblock from Kene Holliday.
  • Ed Gilbert reprises his role as General Hawk before being replaced by David Kaye in the second season.
  • Suzanne Errett-Balcolm replaces Morgan Lofting as the Baroness after the first season.
  • Lady Jaye's voice actress Mary McDonald-Lewis was replaced by Lisa Corps in the "Operation: Dragonfire" arc, who was in turn replaced by Suzanne Errett-Balcom for the remainder of the character's appearances.
  • Dale Wilson replaces Bill Morey as Mutt, before getting replaced by Don Brown for the second season.
• Recycled Script: A really odd case. "There's No Place Like Springfield" was re-tooled by the same writers into the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Future Imperfect."
• Rereleased for Free: The official YouTube channel for G.I. Joe began uploading full episodes of A Real American Hero in 2020.
• Technology Marches On: Some of the equipment from the show is much more probable now.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Instead of the DiC Entertainment-produced continuation, there was going to be a third season after the movie that would reveal that every Cobra character except Cobra Commander and the Crimson Twins (Tomax and Xamot) perished during the movie's events. The twins would start a criminal organization of their own and Cobra Commander would become a mutated creature at the end of the season and start a new Cobra organization that would've set up the season after that. Unfortunately, the proposed third season of the Sunbow series never came to be because Hasbro decided to pull the plug on it.
  • Writer Buzz Dixon stated that the episode "Cobrathon" was originally supposed to have Cobra sing a Villain Song that consisted of a parody of "We Are the World" called "We Want the World".
  • Instead of the ties to Cobra-La revealed in G.I. Joe: The Movie, Buzz Dixon's original idea for the origins of Cobra were to be established in an episode called "The Most Dangerous Man in the World", where it would have been revealed that Cobra was originally founded by a Karl Marx-type figure who ended up overthrown and imprisoned by Cobra Commander, who ended up corrupting the Cobra philosophies from their original principles. Hasbro's insistence on introducing Serpentor into the series put an end to that. Dixon would later publish "The Most Dangerous Man in the World" through Amazon's Kindle Worlds service.
  • Serpentor's origins themselves are an example. When Buzz Dixon reluctantly complied to introducing Serpentor into the cartoon, he took issue with the fact that establishing Serpentor as the true leader of Cobra would contradict the fact that all the previous episodes indicated that no one was superior to Cobra Commander. He offered two explanations to make it easier to introduce Serpentor, one proposal being that members of Cobra dissatisfied with Cobra Commander would literally create a new leader, and the other suggestion being that Cobra was really a front for a secretive organization that only Cobra Commander knew about, and which would send Serpentor to replace the Commander. Of course, Hasbro liked both ideas, so they asked Dixon to combine them.
  • Despite her action figure's having a cap on, Lady Jaye only wore a flight helmet a few times, and a cowboy hat once in the Sunbow series. The comics, and both 21st century show's she starred in avert this though.
  • There was also a scene in "Flint's Vacation" where Lady Jaye called the Harris's after seeing the title character in the background of Cobra's ultimatum video.
  • A new intro had been storyboarded and was intended to be used for season 2 of the Sunbow show. Will Meugniot stated on his Instagram there was another, fully-animated main title featuring the Defiant shuttle vehicle that was mothballed following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (the Defiant ultimately never appeared in either the Sunbow or DiC runs).