The cartoon.
Okay, not entirely. It's complicated. But when the regular daily series started, the stories downscaled significantly from the epic, world-threatening heights of the first two miniseries. In seeking stories suitable for the format, they had the Joes fighting @^^!@'s like Anubian Gods and the Toymaster. I was of two minds about it even back then. I would record every episode (and even felt my heart sink the first day a repeat came on, since i knew that meant the end of new eps that season), but would cringe when my Grandfather visited and saw i was recording a kid's cartoon. It just wasn't the same to see the Joes go from saving the world to saving Barbecue's apartment.
Which brings me to my next cartoon-themed rant: the 4th series characters. From their first appearance in the centerfold of GI Joe Magazine (sans code names) to the "retiring" of the first series characters in issue 33, i really resented these guys. Mainly because it seemed that they were replacing the original characters. Here we had this absolutely [LASER BLAST]' toyline and comic, and when it went into mega-saturation via the daily cartoon, the familiar characters that made it what it was were almost nowhere to be seen (barring episodes like Worlds Without End, which seemed designed to perform the same function as issue 33). To top it off, some of them even duplicated specialties already ably filled by somebody else.
To have the original guys disappear from the shelves was the ultimate in depression for me, since those swivel armed versions i'd been putting off buying for a couple of years were now nowhere to be found. The new guys on the shelves lacked uniformity and mostly didn't look military enough.
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Storm Shadow is the exception to the rule. He's the only acceptable ninja & there should be no others.
