ANd like Cobra because bad guys are cool.
They have license to kill, to wear blue, red, orange, to clone people, to kill the dog, etc, etc...

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The Bad guys are ALWAYS more interesting. You can't expect good guys to try to cut each others throats, back-stab and dirty-deal. They need "bad guys" in a story just to make it interesting. That's why I can't understand heaven......who wants to live where things are perfect? PERFECT = BORING!!!

It depends how you see Cobra. If you think of them as the incapable buffoons of the Sunbow cartoon, they're just cannon fodder. I like to think of them as rather nasty. Even your basic Trooper; he didn't come with a sniper's rifle for nothing! But I do subscribe to the power of numbers. Cobra is like the Borg: when there's a lot of them, they're overwhelming. Or when there's one in the shadows and you don't know it, they'll get the drop on you. Otherwise, they're no match for the Joes.

And I agree with giTom about the chaos theory. Cobra Commander gets his kicks out of strife and accumulation of wealth and power. Who needs to sit on the "throne of the world" when you run it from the shadows?

Most people have touched on the reasons already - they have all the coolest vehicles (HISS tanks, Stingers, Night Ravens, Morays, Terror Dromes etc, etc), the best uniforms (Cobra blue = awesome), and their top brass all dislike and distrust each other. Oh, and large armies of Cobra soldiers look so cool in photographs!

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"The future's uncertain and the end is always near." - The Doors "Roadhouse Blues".

Cobra was the first highly articulated 3 3/4" bad guy army out there. Star Wars figures of the 80's had five points of movement, and the only Imperial personalities made into toys were Vader...then after years, the Emperor. It was locked storyline, too. Once it ended, it ended.

Other toy line villains, well, Skeletor never had any generic troops in toy form, and his guys were all bunglers. They were too big for them to make too many vehicles, too. Besides, guns and army men are cooler than muscle bound guys with swords and magic, at least in my book.

Anyway, Cobra was the only enemy army that you build up, men and vehicles with an open-ended story, the potential for new characters, expansion. Also, it was big as you could make it, if you ignored the media.

That's where most knock-offs failed...they lacked cool villains. CORPS took decades to add bad guys, and still no "army builders" there. All those realistic modern soldiers...whaddya do with 'em?

My fascination with Cobra came after 2002. Part of it has to do with their sheer numbers of troops AND the fact that they have a million TYPES of troops. I liked that most of their bad guys are masked too. Destro, CC, Zartan (to an extent), Firefly, Storm Shadow, etc.

As a kid I preferred GI Joe simply cuz each character was unique. My all time faves fall on the Joe side. I have to think of who I liked in terms of Cobra back then. Maybe Storm Shadow (because ninja weren't quite as popular yet)? Maybe Zartan who could change color and came with a neat swamp skiier thing.

I like the comment about CC just wanting to sew the seeds of chaos. I might play up that aspect as opposed to CC wanting to take over the world.

And he won the Nobel Peace Prize for......

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The Legendary Tom Brooks

PEEEEACE..FULLNESS???
.......HELL IF I KNOW ASK THE COMMITEE

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MY FLICKR PAGE......

IIRC, he won it for what he will do in the future in terms of getting that part of the world to peaceful terms. Or something like that. It's an odd thing, everyone agrees about that.