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

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Even in-universe Cobra Commander was derided as a Dirty Coward and General Failure. However, in Serpentor's first episode, Cobra was almost destroyed by the fact it didn't have the military hardware to fight the United States of America. Cobra Commander ordering retreats whenever things turned south was probably the smartest thing he could have done.
• Anvilicious: "The Greatest Evil" is yet another Drugs Are Bad episode that goes at it by showing Falcon's addiction to drive a wedge between him and Duke, a Cobra member's sister ending up in a coma, and even having the Highman ultimately meeting his end from overdosing on his own drug.
• Awesome Music: Say what you will about the DiC episodes themselves, but the opening music ("Got to get tough! YO JOE!") got you pumped! It even fit perfectly as the background music for the arcade run and gun game!
• Base-Breaking Character: Serpentor. There are fans who like him for having an interesting backstory and being at least an inkling more competent than Cobra Commander as well as fans who hate him because he owes his existence to Executive Meddling and see him as something of a Replacement Scrappy for Cobra Commander because of usurping control of Cobra from him.
• Broken Base: A lot of fans disliked the DiC Entertainment continuation, viewing it as a terrible follow up that amped up all the negative, but forgivable, traits that Sunbow series had to eleven and dumbed the series down to a much younger age group, making it more comedic with unrealistic and over-the-top stories that were pale shadows of the Sunbow episodes, with animation that rarely did the show any favors. Most, however are willing to admit that the "Operation: Dragonfire" arc decent, as was the episode "An Officer and a Viper-Man", while the episode "I Found You Eevy" is generally considered the best episode and is considered as good as some of the great Sunbow episodes. And with all that said there are also fans who find it a good show on its own even if it doesn't quite live up to the quality of the Sunbow series.
• Complete Monster (DiC run):
  • "The Sludge Factor" two-parter & "Infested Island": Cesspool, once Vincent D'Avella, was a corrupt businessman peddling poisonous chemicals as "super growth" serum, uncaring of the horrid environmental damage he caused. After being exposed to his own chemicals and dubbing himself Cesspool, the madman pretends to ally with Cobra in a scheme to hold a massive food supply hostage, only to reveal his true intentions are to irradiate the entire planet, hoping to destroy the Earth and all life on it for sheer hatred of all things that symbolize life. Cesspool later tries to sic an army of mutated bugs onto cities across the world, endangering countless innocents while he tries to mutate several G.I. Joes into his insectoid slaves.
  • "The Greatest Evil" two-parter: The Headman is a far darker villain than the common variety of Cobra agents G.I. Joe faces. A wicked drug dealer who has reduced an entire neighborhood to ghoulish addiction and agony, deliberately addicting children and using lethal force against anyone who stands in his way, the Headman soon enough introduces his new "Spark" drug to the market, the immensely potent, lethal drug driving its victims mad or into near-death comas. Intending to spread Spark on a global scale and bask in the ensuing fortunes despite the suffering it will cause, the Headman takes two of his addicted victims as hostages when G.I. Joe and Cobra team up to take him down, and attempts to douse several members of each group with concentrated Spark to horribly kill them all with the toxic chemical. Even after getting hit with the concentrated Spark, the Headman hits the self-destruct sequence for his base, trying to ensure the Joes and Cobra die as well.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Senior Cadet Sheila McDermott at the Cobra Academy, a one-episode minor villain. A Dark Action Girl who served as The Dragon to that story's major villain, Commandant McCann, she is popular mainly for providing a name and human face for the regular, usually anonymous Cobra soldiers, who was more of a "realistic" fascist true believer than a megalomaniac supervillain (though it probably didn't hurt that hers was an attractive face, either).
  • And Raven, the Strato-Viper (Cobra Ace Pilot) from one of the last Sunbow episodes. For much the same reasons, really.
• Evil Is Cool: Most Cobra characters, really; even the much-maligned Cobra Commander manages it on occasion. Serpentor might be an exception, while Dr. Mindbender definitely is.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The Cobra-La storyline is often ignored by fans. And even those who do accept the events of the film usually ignore everything that came after it, too, with a few exceptions, but for the most part the DIC series is usually swept under the rug by fans.
• First Installment Wins: There have been plenty of other G.I. Joe cartoons, but not only was RAH the first, it remains the most popular.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The idea of a terrorist N.G.O. Superpower with a faceless leader and a legion of brainwashed fanatics taking over whole countries and terrorizing the world isn't as fictional now as in the 1980s. Granted, Cobra is very different from ISIS thematically, but there are some parallels.
  • Conversely, screenwriter Buzz Dixon (himself a military veteran) has expressed dismay at the thought that the War Is Glorious nature of the show could have subconsciously fed into U.S. propaganda for The War on Terror, justifying situations such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and any number of military casualties in an effort purported "to defend human freedom against… a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.”
  • The first few minutes of "The Wrong Stuff" aged much better than the creators intended, as it has Cobra taking control of the television airwaves to get people to consider Cobra's viewpoints by way of propaganda. Cobra Commander even alters the ending of King Kong (1933) with computer technology, akin to deepfake and AI technology today. His rant about how people put their unfaltering trust in television and will believe anything they say about the news, the weather, or GI Joe, hits home much more in the age of misinformation, social media and talking heads on cable news. "We control the creation of truth!"
• Hilarious in Hindsight and/or Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Cobra Commander, in the stories where he went into politics. He generally ran a populist campaign “against” government corruption and incompetence, offering the people simple and drastic “solutions” to Washington's shenanigans and ranting against the “crooked media” and the “villainy” of the Federal Reserve. Like Pat Buchanan, he was a couple of decades ahead of his times...
  • For all the problems of the DIC series, it ended up keeping Cobra Commander's appearance as "Old Snake" in The Transformers consistent after what he went through in the movie.
  • The episode "The Wrong Stuff" features a parody of The A-Team as one of the television programs used by Cobra to poison the world's minds and ends with the B.A. Baracus stand-in asking to work for the Joes. This becomes hilariously more relevant because the later cartoon G.I. Joe: Renegades had a considerable amount of influence from The A-Team.
  • In one of the PSAs, a kid greets an unknown dog with "Hi, doggie!".
  • The premise in a 2017 film is awfully similar to the threat by Cobra's weather-dominator in "The Revenge of Cobra".
  • The Cobra Trawler helicarrier that debuted in the 2-parter episode, "Captives of Cobra", and which continued to appear in other episodes, was from a concept originally intended for S.H.I.E.L.D. and their helicarrier to appear in guest appearances in Marvel superhero cartoons being produced at the time. That idea didn't pan out, but when production of "MASS Device" and G.I. Joe started, the helicarrier design was recycled into Cobra's. Decades later, the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier featured HYDRA — which Cobra is an Expy of — having three helicarriers with which it planned to gain world domination.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • Many of Cobra's attacks are of a type that will have lasting consequences, though these are generally not addressed beyond the end of the episode.
  • For just one example, the story where they attacked New York and fired heavy artillery into the inner city, blowing down whole skyscrapers. Since nothing indicated it had been evacuated (with panicking crowds running through the streets), there should be thousands dead as an absolute minimum.
  • "Cobra Stops the World" had them cutting off the US entirely from foreign sources of petroleum, and destroying enough of domestic refining and distribution infrastructure to drive the economy to a standstill. In other words, think 1970s oil crisis on super-steroids. This will totally wreck not only the US, but the global economy for years to come. And depending on just how successful they were—Apparently very much so, since even the military forces were on critical rationing—there might even be starvation and social breakdown in the cities, when food distribution fails for lack of fuel.
  • The DIC episode "Injustice and the Cobra Way" has a few similarities with G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
• Moral Event Horizon: All Cobra leaders dive headfirst through it. Their doomsday plots will generally amount to mass genocide, but they're totally ruthless (and often sadistic) about little things, too. In no particular order:
  • Cobra Commander going I Have You Now, My Pretty on Scarlett. Not made any better by the fact that he subsequently feeds her to a thousand tarantulas. And Scarlett is an arachnophobic, too...
  • The Baroness (using mind control) trying to force Scarlett's father to kill her, and what she tries to get Shipwreck's nephew to do later.
  • And with Zartan, the way he treats Zarana. See Tear Jerker, below.
  • Averted on the personal level with Storm Shadow, who is not sadistic and can be a sort of Noble Demon on his better days. However, he's still working for genocidal fascists. In one story, he even tried to destroy his own country, Japan, for them.
  • If they hadn't already qualified separately, Cobra Commander, Destro and the Baroness cross it jointly when they laugh at a young woman about to be eaten by a polar bear.
• Narm:
  • Many of Cobra Commander's lines straddle the line between this, deliberate Smug Snake, and actually badass visionary evil. Which are which is subject to dispute.
  • Serpentor, on the other hand, is very easily classified. "THIS I COMMAND!!"
  • General Hawk's "reaction" to the giant cobra about to eat him in "The Nightmare Machine".
• Nightmare Fuel: Incredible amounts of this for a show now remembered for softness and barely-there violence, so much so that it now has its own page.
• No Problem with Licensed Games:
  • The arcade Run-and-Gun shooter game was a staple in the arcades of the early '90s, and is remembered fondly by many.
  • The two NES Run-and-Gun platformer games (A Real American Hero and The Atlantis Factor) are also considered to being great games by fans of the franchise.
• Replacement Scrappy: Serpentor, to a certain extent. While Cobra Commander was still around, many fans were irked that Serpentor usurped Cobra Commander's position as leader of Cobra and had him reduced to being his minion.
• Retroactive Recognition: Snow Job and Tripwire would be the very first voice roles of Rob Paulsen who would go on to become a very prolific voice actor.
  • Keone Young made his voice acting debut as Storm Shadow.
• Rooting for the Empire: Despite Cobra being shown to be much more blatantly evil than, say, the original Empire. Because Evil Is Cool and gets cooler uniforms than the good guys.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Serpentor's transformation into an iguana in the DiC series' "Operation: Dragonfire" arc can be seen as a satisfying comeuppance by those who see him as a Replacement Scrappy for Cobra Commander.