Sgt. Savage and his Screaming Eagles

This review was comissioned by @krinsbez.


The early nineties multimedia revival of THERE WAS ONLY EVER THE CARTOON G.I. Joe was successful enough that tie-ins, spin-offs, and crossovers were inevitable. Some of these, inevitably, were more successful than others. "Sergeant Savage and his Screaming Eagles" was never quite given a real chance on account of Hasbro committing to a franchise reboot right after its toys and comics started coming out, with the pilot of its planned animated series never even airing on TV and only becoming available on VHS after the fact.

That said, the toys themselves didn't appeal that well due to a mix of (comparatively) boring character design and just plain enshitification of Hasbro's action figures that was setting in by then. The animated pilot, meanwhile, despite being produced by Sunbow studios just like the enormously successful animated series, was...well, as you're about to see, saying that it lacked a certain something that GI Joe TAS possessed would be an understatement.


The first thing I noticed about the Sgt. Savage pilot is how homogenous and ugly all the characters are, especially compared to GI Joe Classic. Remember all these colorful designs, unique silhouettes, and memorable visual details?

Okay, now look at this:

It's not just the more homogenous, pseudo-realistic uniforms either. Every single male character in this pilot (and there's only one female character who's onscreen for maybe two cumulative minutes) has almost exactly same silhouette. Which would be bad enough on its own if that one body type wasn't "gorilla person." All the way down to the grotesquely gigantic hands and puny heads that get lost on the Great Shoulders Plateau.

What's extra irritating about that aesthetic choice for this story in particular is that the titular Sergeant Savage is supposed to be a roided-up supersoldier created by a villain's mad science experiments. It actually makes sense for him to look like a barely-human muscle monster. But everyone else looks exactly the same, so that appearance ends up doing nothing for a character that it would otherwise serve well.

The character in question, Sergeant Steven Savage, is Captain America. When I say that he's Captain America, what I mean is that he's an elite special forces squad leader from World War 2 who got frozen, was declared MIA, and then discovered and thawed out decades later to serve his country again when it is menaced by the same nazi-aligned supervillain who he fought back in the forties.

What I don't mean when I say he's Captain America, on the other hand, is that he has any of the pathos, charm, or idiosyncrasy that various depictions of Cap have been imbued with by their authors. He's just a grimly determined military badass of few words. Flashbacks to the war reveal him to have always been a grimly determined military badass of few words. His reactions to being a man out of time are extremely minimal, and that entire backstory seems to only exist in order to a) leech off of Captain America's popularity and b) be an extremely thin justification for a few new WW2-themed toys (more on this in a minute).

So, the plot. A GI Joe team somehow stumbles on an old secret laboratory in East Germany that hasn't been opened since 1945, inside of which is a cryocell containing a mutated Sergeant Savage, long thought dead. He and his "screaming eagles" had been probing a rumored blacksite deep behind enemy lines when one of the eagles, a Corporal Krieger, betrayed them to the enemy. An enemy that seems to have been packing power suits and laser guns to their field camo and Brownings.

Fucking nazis with the fucking superscience in the fucking secret labs amirite.

The entire team was wiped out, save Savage, who they decided to use as a guinea pig for some reason. I guess they kept him under for the entire time they were doing that, because when GI Joe thaws him the last thing he remembers is his squad being wiped out and Krieger smugging at him from behind a row of not!HYDRA power suits.

I really do mean not!HYDRA, incidentally. The not-exactly-part-of-the-normal-reich-heirarchy cell running that lab and inventing that futuristic bullshit ended up surviving the war and becoming one of several organizations that would later combine under the banner of Cobra. So yeah. It's ersatz Marvel Comics lore all the way down.

As they wake Savage up, a robot that looks like a more advanced version of one of those proto-Cobra suits breaks into the facility and tries to kill him before he can finish thawing, which gives Savage a good chance to show off the super-strength augs the bad guys tested out on him. Unfortunately for him, his superstrength and toughness are very unreliable, constantly turning themselves on and off without warning, and he's having other health complications from them that could result in premature aging among other life-threatening issues.

Unfortunately for us, these issues - including the unreliable superstrength that seems like a perfect recipe for drama and creative problem solving and tactics - will all be forgotten the instant that there's a serious battle to fight.

:/

That's later though. For now, GI Joe commander Hawk orders Savage confined to base until the doctors can finish their medical bugfixes. And also tells Savage that he's now responsible for whipping this team of incredibly strong, educated, and totally undisciplined (to the point that they ignore direct orders and act like literal schoolchildren) soldiers into shape. Which he has him do in a big junkyard full of scrapped vehicles and machinery without additional supervision, despite the fears for Savage's health.

After Savage whips them into shape (by literally beating them up until they stop behaving like 12 year olds in adult bodies), they find some WW2 era vehicle hulks laying around the scrapyard and - using the genius educations in various fields of science and engineering that they all have - decide to repair them and refit them with futuristic weaponry and engines to help their new commander feel more at home. Thus, the new Screaming Eagles team is born. And thus, we try to milk some new toy tanks and fighter planes out of Savage's backstory.

I kinda wish they just did what the first MCU Cap movie did, and had the pilot (and planned first season) of this show be *entirely* backstory. Would be a much less forced way of doing what they apparently were trying to do.

Regardless.

By total coincidence, Savage's recovery and reanimation happens at the same time that GI Joe is coordinating with a European aerospace company to build a new communications satellite. And Savage recognizes the man Hawk is talking to on the viewscreen as none other than Krieger, the man who betrayed his team to proto-Cobra. He hasn't aged nearly as much as he should have, and he calls himself Dr. Stromm now, but it's definitely the same guy.

Naturally, Hawk doesn't believe Savage when he tells him this. Which I liked at first; Hawk is kinda playing the *role* of the unreasonable strawman bureaucrat overseer here, but you can see how from his perspective it really seems much more likely that Savage is just groggy and traumatized and seeing the man who ruined him everywhere. Everyone is behaving reasonably with the knowledge available to them, and I was looking forward to seeing them work it out using reasonable arguments and investigation. Unfortunately, that's not what happens.

Instead, Savage gets his hands on the remains of the robot that tried to prevent his awakening (erm...how did he get access to this highly sensitive piece of captured enemy tech when the GI Joe base staff are all supposed to be keeping him away from sensitive stuff due to his health issues?) and has the one female character computer whiz lady hack into its onboard computer (erm...why the hell didn't Hawk already order her to do this as soon as the robot was disabled?). She easily finds a mountain of evidence directly implicating Dr. Stromm's company. Which Savage and the new Screaming Eagles team then immediately take their schizotech biplanes to go act on alone and unauthorized, instead of bringing this new evidence to Hawk like an actual person would do.

Remember how trust and transparency were an important part of the winning ethos in "The Pyramid of Darkness?" Yeah, that was cool.

Meanwhile, Krieger/Stromm (who apparently became the leader of the "IRON Army" organization and also an immortal cyborg between the 1940's and now, whereas before he seemed to just be one of their agents) is cutting ties with Cobra Commander. With this new satellite and the secret techno-bullshit he just tricked the Joes into helping him with, Krieger is ready to do his own world domination scheme without Cobra Command or its other subsidiary organizations demanding a slice.

On one hand, if they're going to start this off with IRON Army splitting away from Cobra, why even link them to Cobra in the first place?

On the other hand, given that Cobra's leaders do this to each other every weekday and then grudgingly make up after every single time, maybe I'm reading too much into this scene. Maybe the plan was for this particular GI Joe sub-organization clash with this particular Cobra sub-organization for the whole series, with their respective levels of autonomy often shifting due to GI Joe expansion/reorganization and Cobra internecine bullshit.

Anyway. The Screaming Eagles attack the launch site. Krieger, or "General Blitz of IRON Army" as his supervillain moniker apparently goes, rips his Dr. Stromm costume off to reveal his nazi-ish uniform and cybernetic body. The fight is short, so-so, and doesn't capitalize on Savage's weaknesses and instability in any interesting ways you might have hoped for. The day is saved, but the villain gets away, presumably to come crawling back to Cobra Commander for the umteenth time. If there's supposed to have been a resolution/reconciliation scnene between Savage and Hawk, they put it off for the second episode that never got made.


On top of the ugly and samey character design, and the writing that isn't nearly silly and psychedelic enough to get away with being nonsense like the mainline GI Joe series did, the music in this pilot is also lacking. Nothing like the bombastic wind and drum sections that brought every blessed moment of "Pyramid of Darkness" to life, that's for sure. It might have come from the same studio, but I get the feeling that not many of the same people worked on these two projects.

The "not silly enough" problem really reared its head with the introduction of the new team. I feel like if those guys were introduced in the mainline animated series, the absurdism of "elite supergenius commandos who act like lazy middle schoolers" would have been played in a really clever and amusing way. Here, it just wasn't. Likewise, much like the fake comics that I made up as a weird piece of performance art way back when, I feel like the ties to real world history and geopolitics are trying to ground a story that would be better off airborne.

Looking at other nineties SatAm series, I can't really say that this pilot is bad by those standards. Just, they're really low standards, and I can't say that it's especially good by them either. I can definitely see why this might not have ever caught on even without the external factors working against it. It just doesn't measure up, on pretty much all fronts.