G.I. Joe: The Movie (found deleted scene of animated film; 1987)

DVD cover of the film.

Status: Found

Date found: 11 Aug 2024

Found by: Steve and Dave Mapes

A screenshot from the deleted scene.

The 1987 animated movie of G.I. Joe was originally supposed to have featured the death of the iconic character Sgt. Duke Hauser, assassinated by the Cobra Emperor Serpentor in a moment of spite. This was altered at the last minute so that Duke went into a coma instead. Even the original script still had dialogue that killed Duke off, and the reaction of the other Joes as he lays fallen is clearly one of grieving, not worry.

Why the Death Was Altered

In the mid-1980s, two teams from Marvel/Sunbow productions were assigned to create feature-length films from the animated series based on Hasbro properties The Transformers and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. The two crews engaged in a friendly competition and kept an eye on each other's work. When the Transformers team learned that the G.I. Joe team planned to kill off Duke, one of the most prominent Joe leaders, they felt challenged to engage in a bold move of their own. When Transformers The Movie came out in 1986, Autobot Commander Optimus Prime was slain by his enemy, Megatron. This death, combined with the replacement of Optimus by a character only first introduced in the movie, was not well received and plans were immediately undertaken to resurrect Optimus in the animated series' new season. This backlash did not go unnoticed by either Hasbro or the G.I. Joe film team. The theatrical release of G.I. Joe was shelved in favor of a direct-to-video release, and to avoid further backlash, Duke's death, already animated, was redubbed to say that he fell into a coma, which another dub at the film's end said he had awoken from. Ironically, this did not go over well, either.

Some fans say that a problem here was that, while Optimus Prime roughly defines the Transformer franchise, this is not the case with Duke and G.I. Joe. While a well-liked character and ironically named for classic movie tough-guy John Wayne, he was one of many leaders on the team, all capable of going on without him. The unthinkable for Prime was a gutsy move chickened out from for Duke. Since both series had been criticized for showing violence but not the real-world results, this seemed to feed the worst views of both. The connections between the two movies, meant to spur creativity, only proved to be something that kept tripping them up.

Perhaps learning the lessons of their animated ancestors, both live-action versions of these franchises killed off Duke for real and killed Optimus yet brought him back in the same film.

Release

For the longest time after the movie’s release, no sources, official nor unofficial, came forward with anything pertaining to Duke’s deleted death scene. However, this changed in 2024 when during a panel at the TFNation convention featuring Steve and Dave Mapes, they surprised the attendees with a video recorded by original G.I. Joe series and movie writer Buzz Dixon talking about the history of Duke’s death scene and why they were forced to alter his fate in the final cut. Following that, the audience were treated to hearing for the first time in nearly 35 years, the original audio of Duke’s intended death scene (courtesy from the Mapes brothers), which was reinserted back into the fully animated scene as it was meant to be all those years prior. Alongside the audio for the death scene, audio for a funeral scene that would’ve taken place after the aforementioned scene that didn’t get to the animation stage before Hasbro got cold feet was also present in that video, with the entire video being released online on YouTube shortly after the panel concluded.

Video

The video played at TFNation (scene at 3:06)

Trivia

• Michael Bell, Duke's voice actor (and a very prolific one at that) was already no stranger to an edited death scene. In 1984, when World Events Productions was re-editing the Japanese series Go Lion into the Lion Voltron, Bell voiced the character of original Blue Lion pilot Sven. In the original Go Lion, Shirogane, Sven's counterpart, met his end at the hands of the old witch Honerva/Hagar. Since Voltron restricted all direct mention of death, Sven was able to be taken to a doctor, though the Princess Fala/Allura still took over his position. In a late-season original animation unique to Voltron, Sven got to fly Blue Lion one last time (his return enabled by an animation of Shirogane's younger brother). Unlike this example with Duke, both versions of the scene are readily available, both on DVD and the internet.
• In the 2016 Voltron reboot series, Shirogane was menaced but survived a scene that deliberately invoked the original.

External Link

• IMDb page for G.I. Joe: The Movie. Retrieved 25 Nov '18