I think that GI Joe "jumped the shark" when the writers sat down in a meeting and agreed to the creation of Serpentor. While in a SciFi venue, the single composite clone incorporating all of histories greatest military minds has some merit, GI Joe was military adventure fiction. This was the single greatest mistake in the storyline but there were more.

Other "jumping" moments for me were; The "mass" killings of old favs like Breaker and Doc, The increasingly outlandish characters like Raptor or Raptor Boy or what ever with an unlikely Pogo thing, BF2000 (nuf said), Ninja Force, Eco Force, you name it Force.

Then, as I mentioned, there was this bend toward making GI Joe more and more SciFi/X-man. I like SciFi. I like Military fiction. I even like Military SciFi. But the original premise of GI Joe was a counter terrorist force. I can't see the Pentagon, Congress, or the President risking national resources not to mention their careers to fund a budget as tremendous as the one that paid for a space shuttle, an aircraft carrier, an enormous sand crawler, ultra-futuristic testbed fighting machines, or a roster of soldiers that would make what started as a small team of specially trained and skilled soldiers into a battalion strength special operation unit.

Uh...sorry. I loved GI Joe as a kid, but I have always felt a little betrayed by Marvel and Hasbro over their loss of the original vision. Marvel generated stories which were elaborate but less and less probable/plausible. the creation of Cobra Island or the Cross-over with the Transformers being a perfect examples.

Then the toy line seemed to generate a rather lot of singular one-time only figures and equipment. It took nearly 20 years to get a Quinn figure (who while killed rather early in the series, had more soul than many of the characters who followed).

Just my two cents.

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