My Crazy Youth: That Time The G.I. Joe Team Went to Ancient Greece!

I often wonder why I ended up the way I do.  How can I rent both The Master and a shitty-looking Remake of Night of the Living Dead in the same week?  How can my Instant Queue hold both Zapped and Metropolis Restored?  How can I own The Corpse Grinders II (don't ask) and The Prestige?  Well, the answer lies in my youth.

I was raised on crazy-ass TV Shows and Cartoons.  I stumbled across this one, which just happens to be a perfect example...

Yes, this is what it sounds like.  While doing battle with Cobra, the G.I. Joes are sent back in time...when someone shoots a golden coil that falls out of a space ship.  No, really.

The Episode goes really over-board less than 10 minutes in with this part where Sgt. Slaughter can translate Ancient Greek...

How can he possibly do this?  It's simple (in that it's really, really silly)...

To pile on the hilarity, some of the Joes get confused for Greek Deities/Gods.  Lifeline is Asclepius, while Sgt. Slaughter is...

Of course he is.

Trapped in Ancient Greece as well, Cobra says '^$%# causality!' and goes after some fuel for their vehicles, which I'm sure is easy to make in this time.

Slaughter, meanwhile, gets separated on the journey and takes part in one of Hercules' famous Trials.  How this relates to the Jason and the Argonauts parallel they're going for is anyone's guess.  On the plus side, Slaughter just drowned a whole bunch of cattle!

The Joes rally their forces once again and manage to shoot the coil again, which, naturally transports them back to the Present, but doesn't take the Greeks with them.  That all makes sense, because...science?

The aliens come back and reclaim the coil aka their Hyperdrive.  They apparently talk telepathically, but all of the Joes can hear them too, because...um, science again?  Thus ends this crazy adventure of the G.I. Joes!

Seriously, what kind of drugs were people on in the '80s?  Whatever they were, they really need to share them!  This is the kind of crazy that you normally only see in Japan.  In fact, they pretty much did this same premise and called it G.I. Samurai.  This takes the cake though, since they managed to work in Time Travel and space aliens.  They get bonus points for time-traveling to Ancient Greece while not even being remotely close to it!  Seriously, they're fighting over the Suez Canal and just kind of land on a Greek Isle!  Never mind that the whole thing rests on 1) random aliens appearing 2) a single laser ripping open their ship 3) said laser cutting right into where their hyper-drive coil is kept 4) somehow loosing said coil from the ship and causing it to fall 5) the coil falling onto a random Greek isle and not being damaged 6) a Cobra laser hitting it and 7) said laser somehow ripping a hole in the time-space continuum.  I hope Neil Degrasse Tyson never reads this!  The whole thing is ridiculous and silly.  Never mind Sgt. Slaughter speaking Ancient Greek, how come Augeus just starts conversing to him in English?  It's obviously a story conceit, but I'm just amazed that their is no Sci-Fi explanation for it.  Would that be too silly even for you?  As a fun side note, Hercules left the Voyage of Jason & The Argonauts when his young, male 'companion' Hylas went missing.  What does that say about Slaughter if they're being accurate.  Regardless, you owe it to yourself to check out this (and other) bizarre, acid-trip episodes of G.I. Joe.

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Next up, Spider-Man fights an obscure villain whose origin is 'crazied' up for a cartoon.  This thing just gets stranger and stranger!