Been watching the DVDs that I have of the original Real American Hero animated series lately.

You know, these shows hold up really well. The quality of the animation, most of the stories, and certainly the voice work, are all top-notch!

Even after all these years, thank you, Marvel/Sunbow!

I think animation wise we've gotten spoiled with modern technology, but for a thirty year old program, it is still worth watching. Though made by the same company, I seem to recall Transformers having more animation errors and glitches, but G.I.*JOE certainly had their fare share. It still looked better than a lot of the other shows that were out like Filmation's He-Man or the DiC shows of the time or especially Hanna Barberra.

Apparently I'm older now, as I've been told, but a lot of the Joe story lines still hold up too and wouldn't seem too different if told by some of the current action based animated shows. Yeah, some stories are ridiculous, like traveling to Ancient Greece, meeting Egyptian gods or having a giant slug live under a Scottish castle, but most of the stories hinge on that slight plausibility.

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If you watch the behind the scenes feature of the Community GI Joe episode, they say that they wanted to recreate the GI Joe cartoon using the same cel animation style the original used, but discovered that no one does that these days, since all of the animation companies have switched to digital. Kind of sad, really. I'm not saying that you can't make good animation digitally, or even that the old way was better, but it's sad that an entire artform has more or less gone extinct.

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A sad-but-very-true point, Darko.

I tried re-watching recently, but the stuff that bothered me then (i.e., everyone shooting lasers, not using the weapons the figures came with, for the most part, and exploding planes always having a parachuting guy flying away) still bothered me now.

It's also funny how well I recognize the voice actors from the 100s of other shows they've done.

I was just watching The MASS Device a few days ago (for a few customs, of course). All these later, it's still fun. It's one of the few things that defy the "you can't go home" rule.

Sunbow's overall storytelling, writing and storyboarding holds up better that most later GI JOE cartoons. The action scenes were often over the top, but they were fun to watch. Dic's GI JOE actually made action scenes boring a lot of the time. Sigma Six's story lines were pretty blah from what I remember, something-something-giant-robot...congrats, you made giant robots dull.