Paramount released The Invasion of Cobra Island as viral ad for film. It features the high-tech battles fans have always reenacted with their own toys, with added special effects, and lightly mocks some of the cartoon's conventions, such Snake Eyes' awkward silence and Cobra Commander's costume changes:

[via Screen Rant]

Things of note: first off, check out the torture chamber, with the two doctors (some sort of Cobra Commander transformation?) Poor Duke looks like he's about to get a faceful of nanomites.

Next up is the creepy Neo Viper arm in the cobra box ritual. Turns out getting bit by a Cobra does nothing for the Viper crew.

Also in the gallery are snap on Wolverine-esque arm blades, a ping pong match with anti-Coba Commander paddles (love the attention to detail), an underwater fortress battle, and lots and lots and lots of Baroness and Scarlett fighting scenes, because who doesn't like a little lady-on-lady violence. Plus we love miniature versions of things, what else does everyone spy?

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra will be out August 7, 2009.

[Cinematical]

Optimus Prime Pepsi Thirst Convoy
Hey, remember that time that Optimus Prime got really drunk and signed that sponsorship deal with Pepsi...? Yeah, neither did he. Until the lawyers came to make him follow through on his end of the deal. The success of Transformers when they were first launched led to various "variant" versions of familiar toys - You could mail in cookie coupons to get a Jazz toy, for example, who was made much more acceptable to parent-conscious corporations by removing the Martini logos from his doors (This Prime, however, is much more recent; he's a Japanese toy from 2005, released in America in 2007). Us, we're still waiting on a Sony-branded Soundwave.

Lucky Draw Convoy
This ultra-rare - Reportedly, only 10 ever produced - Optimus Prime was the result of a contest to find a new color scheme for the Autobots' leader. Surprisingly, this actually won. Can you imagine what the others must've been like? The Lucky Draw Transformers - almost all of which were prizes in contests, hence the name - were mostly repainted versions of widely-available toys, released for the most part in Japan, and widely sought after by American collectors. It may help if you're color blind, of course.

Trainbot Raiden
Primus bless whoever thought that there was some dynamic potential in making a train turn into a giant robot, considering how dull modern trains look - well, unless they're Astrotrain - but the wonderfully-named Trainbot Raiden was six trains that combined together to make one giant robot, Voltron-style. Released in Japan in 1987, who wouldn't want one of these?

The Blue Bluestreak
No, it's not a particularly redundant-sounding Marvel superhero from the 1960s, but instead a version of the Bluestreak toy who is... well, blue. The generally-released toy was actually painted silver - and later releases of the toy had the character renamed Silverstreak - but because the original catalog featured a blue version (and the painting of the robot on the toy packaging, for that matter) was colored blue, an urban myth was born. Are there real Blue Bluestreaks? Potentially - but there are those who'll refuse to believe it.

The Red Slag
Much like Bluestreak, this is a differently-colored version from the toy that a generation knew and loved, but there's one significant difference: There's photographic proof that this one existed. Just like the Blue Bluestreak, this toy matches his box art coloring, but anyone in the US looking for one would have to look north - This was a Canadian-only release, for some unknown reason.

Fortress Maximus/Grand Maximus
Fortress Maximus - or Fort Max to his friends - was only the largest Transformer ever, but at the time, the most expensive. But did that matter to its intended audience? Of course not! Released towards the end of the line's popularity in the US, and with a detachable head (thanks to the still-confusing Headmasters gimmick), the toy has become hard to find in America, but not as hard as Grand Maximus, a repainted version of the toy sold in Japan as Fortress' more colorful brother, kind of like Ultra Magnus in reverse.

Action Masters Elite
Let's get this out the way right now: The Action Masters subset of the Transformers line? A completely bad idea. For those of you who don't remember the Action Masters, this is their gimmick: They were Transformers that didn't transform. You'd think that someone, somewhere at Hasbro might have realized that that wasn't the greatest gimmick for a toyline called "Transformers," and that might have been the reason behind the Action Master Elite line... who were Action Masters who did transform... or, to put it another way, Transformers. Sadly, the Action Masters were enough of a bad idea that they temporarily killed the franchise in the US, leading to the Elite toys never being released over here. So, if you find one of these cheap, treasure it... while also hating everything it stood for.

G1 Jetfire
To anyone who followed the Transformers comic book in the '80s, Jetfire had a special place in our hearts because he was created by Buster after Optimus left the creation matrix in his head. But even for non-comic nerds, Jetfire was special - For one thing, he wasn't really a Transformer, but a licensed Macross toy added to the line to meet demand for new characters by a panicked Hasbro, and for another, he had three forms, not just two... but the licensing deal didn't last, and so neither did the toy despite how cool it seemed. The one to look for is the initial Transformers release, complete with Macross markings as well as Autobot insignia.

The Dinobot Tapes
Yes, there were Autobot cassette Transformers. Even stranger, these Japan-only toys were also Dinobots and Combiners. Why did no-one ever tell me about these when I was a kid? I would've killed for these - and also for Blaster, the Autobot tape player that quickly became my Must Have toy when I learned of its existence as a kid (Note to Hasbro: if you have one just lying around, I can be bribed. Just saying).

Generation 1 Unicron
Called "the holy grail" for Transformers obsessives - as well as one of the ugliest toys never made by fans - this prototype for an unreleased toy of the villain from the 1986 animated movie tries its hardest to make a ball with limbs and a head look threatening, but still fails. Maybe if he'd actually have been able to sound like Orson Welles, it would've been better, but even then, I'm sure that would've just led to more fat jokes.

Research and additional reporting by Sarah Hope Williams.

Announced on Friday, the new network co-created by Transformers and GI Joe owners Hasbro and Discovery Communications (owners of the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and the Science Channel, amongst many others) will launch next year, replacing Discovery Kids with a channel... well, based on toys, according to the official press release:

Both the network and the venture's online component will feature content from Hasbro's rich portfolio of entertainment and educational properties built over the past 90 years, including original programming for animation, game shows, and live-action series and specials. New programming will be based on brands such as ROMPER ROOM, TRIVIAL PURSUIT, SCRABBLE, CRANIUM, MY LITTLE PONY, G.I. JOE, GAME OF LIFE, TONKA and TRANSFORMERS, among many others.

This isn't the first time that Discovery has sold out; last year, the company did a deal with Oprah Winfrey that's changing Discovery Health into the Oprah Winfrey Network. This does, however, represent not only a new low in kids programming (at least according to Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood) but also a whole new source of genre entertainment. I don't know whether to be excited or appalled.

After showing the previously revealed test animation for Resolute, supervising director Joaquim Dos Santos explained that the new show (visually inspired by Ghost In The Shell) will not only be more violent and "adult" than the original, but also more realistic in its weaponary. Ignoring the laser guns of the '80s cartoon, the new show will use real-life tech projected ten years in the future: "Our idea is to be realistic for what actual soldiers will be using in five to ten years."

While Resolute is clearly being viewed as Hasbro as an introduction to GI Joe for new audiences, Dos Santos added that they're definitely not out to alienate old audiences, saying that the show's being created to be the show that you wanted to see when you were a bloodthirsty fourteen years old in the 1980s: "It really is for the fans."

That was the continuing theme during the panel, with Joe comic writer and movie consultant Larry Hama joining in:

From the very beginning, even after the first issue of the comic, I got lots and lots of letters, hundreds of them. I realized it had to be interactive. If the fans didn't like it, it was gone. It's because of you, it's your story.

Talking about the upcoming movie, the producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and writer Stuart Beattie (himself a fan of the 1980s comic series and toy line) discussed the problems with having so many characters. Di Bonaventura started by saying,

When we did Transformers, we had to find a human way into the story. With GI Joe, there are a lot of humans.

Their solution to this problem was twofold. Firstly, having multiple character arcs throughout the movie playing out against a very basic plot, and the second... well, more movies, as Beattie explained:

I'm big on simple plots and complex characters... I tried to model the movie on Raiders of The Lost Ark. Instead of ten four minute action sequences, we have four ten minute action sequences. I'm serious; there are only four action sequences, and they just keep getting bigger and bigger... They're such rich characters, I wanted to make sure that they were best represented... In order to deal with all the characters, we thought sequels would be the best way to go.

The team were very clear about The Rise of Cobra being the first of a planned series, as when di Bonaventura discussed the massive budget for the movie:

Paramount gave us more money to make this first movie than they did on Transformers.

The best news about the movie came when someone asked why Christopher Eccleston's Destro is being portrayed as the main villain. Won't there be any movie version of Cobra Commander? Writer Beatie paused, smiled, and then answered:

Well, the movie IS called 'The Rise of Cobra', so I'm sure you'll see Cobra Commander in there.

Of course, I expect we'll see a lot more of him in the sequels.

The new hour-long season (Yes, you read that right; 10 5-minute episodes with an additional 10-minute season finale) will have a flavor familiar to fans of DC Comics' Vertigo line thanks to writing from, amazingly, grizzled comic veteran Warren Ellis and animation based on the artwork of 100 Bullets cover artist Dave Johnson. Joe fansite Hiss Tank got to see the one minute promo presentation at this weekend's Joecon, and judged it to be good:

It really was what you've been waiting for from these childhood toy lines as an adult. As they described it in the panel, while you were playing with these toys as a kid, or even watching the shows and reading the comics back then, what we saw today is what we THOUGHT we saw back then. And what we expect, and why the new versions of the old stuff doesn't play with us now. But, this new direction, PG-13 based adult themed entertainment, should fill that gap, and will be focused upon in the upcoming years, for Joe and all brands it fits with.

No decision has been made on how the cartoon will be released yet; apparently webisodes, TV and straight-to-DVD are all options at this point.

New G.I. Joe Resolute Animation for 2009 - HOLY CRAP [Hisstank.com]

Here's the movie's premise: the G.I. Joe team, led by Duke (Channing Tatum), fights for freedom wherever there is trouble. And their arch nemesis is Cobra Commander and his Cobra Force. The movie is based on a Hasbro line of toys, but also on a comic-book series from the 1980s, which had the Joe squad working out of "The Pit."

CC2K has an early review of the movie's script, and apparently it includes:

• "Accelerator suits," which allow the G.I. Joe squad to run faster, jump super-high, smash through walls, and shrug off bullets.
• A "nano-bomb" that the Cobra Commander wants to launch — which launches a swarm of nanites that eat all of the buildings and machinery, without harming any of the people. (And how do the nanites know when to stop eating all the non-organic matter? Will this be explained at all?)
• The Neo-Vipers, super-soldiers enhanced by nanotech, so they can't feel pain or remorse. (And maybe they can actually regenerate from injuries? It's not clear.) A mad scientist, known only as the Doctor, creates these soldiers for Destro, who's horribly disfigured after a fight with Duke. Destro wears a mask made out of nanotechnology, which allows the Doctor, aka Commander, to control his mind.
• hawt babe Scarlett (Rachel Nichols, see pic above) who is a virgin, despite wearing breast-exaggerating armor (which can turn invisible.) Marlon Wayans' wacky sidekick character Ripcord has the hots for Scarlett, who says she'll date him if he can shoot her on an obstacle course. He fails to hit her, and later realizes he was actually shooting real arrows instead of "training arrows." Also, Dennis Quaid plays "Hawk," their leader, and The Rock is rumored to play Shipwreck, another one of the good guys.
• a weird backstory involving a romance between Channing Tatum's Duke and Sienna Miller's evil Baroness. They almost got married, and now she's a Nazi or something. The Baroness says things like, "Deep down, you're still the man I fell in love with." And "Do it, Duke. You've already killed me once."
• futuristic killer ninjas, as we already mentioned a while back. [CinCity2000]

Did he go albino somewhere along the way, or the did movie just feature his botoxed and tanned Hollywood cousin? Somehow, rendered in plastic, the thing just doesn't terrify like it did in the film. Maybe if it had a little Hud action figure (complete with camera) that it could terrorize, that might amp up the believability. But after seeing these images, we're going to hit the reset button. Maybe next time, Cloverfield... although we still want the Statue of Liberty head accessory. [Thanks David!]

Fans contacted Lucasfilm to ask them about this rumor. Lucasfilm executives managed to respond before the Hasbro investor call was even over. They didn't deny that a theatrical release for Clone Wars was a possibility, but said no decisions had been made yet. But given that no TV network has yet picked up the PG-13 rated animated Star Wars, a high-profile movie launch could make sense.