G.I. Joe: Operation Dragonfire

G. I. Joe: Operation Dragonfly is a five-part miniseries that serves as a pilot for what will be known as the DiC series (or G. I. Joe Series 2), a series that would go on to be the less popular of the original G. I. Joe cartoon.

Set after G. I. Joe: The Movie, Cobra, led by Serpentor, attacks a Himalayan monastery to claim the Dragonfire weapon, the monks' secret weapons from beneath the Earth. Scoop, a news reporter, becomes a Joe after saving Sgt. Slaughter, but he is secretly a Cobra spy, who is undercover as Cobra has him believing G. I. Joe are the ones who destroyed his family's home. Meanwhile, after being neglected, Baroness and other members of Cobra are now tired of Serpentor's rule, and plan to restore Cobra Commander back to human form and his former position as leader of the terrorist organization.

Yeah, once you watch this, you can see this is not done by Sunbow Entertainment, but instead by DiC. Immediately, characters are either redesigned or in different colors (one example being Destro, as while the Sunbow series had his head in silver metal, here, his head is now bronze or gold) and the show is done differently, as it uses less color to try and emulate other shows of the time, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While this is interesting, this can set off fans of the past series.

However, I have to complain about the story, as while it feels like an okay continuation of G. I. Joe: The Movie, it can get cheesy sometimes (with Cobra Commander as a snakeman and mutating monkeys into ape warriors under his command, which makes me think DiC was taking ideas from TMNT's concept of mutation to create new heroes and villains).

This is the beginning of the downfall and lackmof interest in G. I. Joe. Hasbro decided they wanted to pay less, like 60% less for the series to improve profit margins from the new toys. So they contracted DIC.

The result is terrible animation, even worse writing and just plain poor quality. Something DIC was known for. But you get what you pay for. This has little to do GI Joe save for 6 characters the rest is just garbage and stupid stories. A revamped opening theme is just painful to hear and the terrible low budget "special" effects are glaring bad. Some of the explosions are even drawn as a single color.

Just awful and hard to watch a beloved franchise sink to such low quality.