Way before the booty shorts that said “Executive Producer Dick Wolf” and Law & Order started their multi-decade run, a Saturday morning cartoon was quietly capturing the zeitgeist by subtly detailing battles with the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) and censoring music. Unsavory messages from a rock band? Influencing the youth to do a band’s bidding? That group was Cold Slither, the brainchild of the (obviously fictional) terrorist organization Cobra and the archenemy of the titular good guys in G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero.
On December 2, 1985, episode 51 from the first season of G.I. Joe aired to the masses. Cold Slither tells the story of Cobra going through a fiscal and personnel crisis after G.I. Joe raids a vault containing everything from gold coins to the Mona Lisa. Cobra Commander enlists his favorite gang of mercenaries, the Dreadnoks and leader Zartan, to create Cold Slither, a program that “creates rock ‘n’ roll music which inserts subliminal messages which will lull people into a trance and make them totally subject to [Cobra’s] will.” Way back then, a young Gerardo Martinez and Gus Rios were glued to the tube—albeit separately—planting a seed that would be sown four decades later.
Though the PMRC might have been an inspiration for the episode, it’s clear that motorcycle culture and metal were definitely an inspiration for G.I. Joe’s creators. From Zartan’s face paint to the shirtless vests, long hair, ponytails and denim, the Dreadnok mercenary team (who rode motorcycles) was clearly meant to mimic biker gangs and hard rock music. “I don’t recall any bands that were current at the time that I was inspired by,” recalls episode scribe Michael Charles Hill, “but I was inspired by songs from two of my favorite albums dating back to the early ’70s, such as Deep Purple’s Machine Head and T. Rex’s Electric Warrior—with a little Jim Morrison added to the mix. But mostly I was attempting to write a Cobra anthem.”
Intention and execution are two different things, as the band was clearly portrayed in a light that was indicative of the then-current musical landscape. “If we were to go back and ask the people that worked on the toy line in the ’80s, you’re gonna find out that there’s a lot of them who were heavily into Slayer, Metallica, Maiden—you see the influence,“ states Martinez, co-founder and managing partner of Reigning Phoenix Music. “If you look at the Dreadnoks themselves, they’re a mixture of this post-apocalyptic Mad Max thing with early-’80s, like, W.A.S.P., Motörhead, Plasmatics and more. It’s 100 percent because people at Hasbro were into heavy metal. Over the years, I bonded with one of the most instrumental people in Hasbro, and he helped me get this whole thing moving: Jerry Jivoin. He confirmed it. One of his favorite bands is Helloween, and he is a fan of Slayer and Metallica. We kept in touch and he was literally the person who I spoke to about doing something with Cold Slither.”
The road to the Cold Slither band started around 10 years ago with a chance meeting with Jivoin, a retired Hasbro exec, at San Diego Comic Con, and eventually Ben MacCrae and Michael Cohn at Hasbro. “When the Cold Slither episode was gonna be 30 years old, around 2015, was when I first brought it up,” recalls Martinez. “So, I went to dinner with Jerry and he brought it up with Derryl DePriest, the godfather of G.I. Joe in the ’80s. They spoke about it and they loved the idea. They passed it along, and it took some years because of some major restructuring; then one of his protégés picked it back up last year. They put me in touch with all the right people at Hasbro, who were all super excited to make this a reality. Obviously, after that I called Gus. I could hear him almost shedding a tear. We had both been fans and had been discussing the idea from the beginning.”
Gus is Gus Rios, the Left to Die/Gruesome drummer who first came in contact with Martinez while drumming for Malevolent Creation, discovering their shared (and very intense) love for G.I. Joe. Rios was well-versed on the entire idea, loved the episode and the concept, and was more than ready to put it in motion, staying true to the original idea and shaping the band based on the original blueprint. “I went on a hunt for more of the backstory of the band that was not as fleshed out in the cartoon,” recalls Rios excitedly. “I wrote the lyrics and the titles based on Dreadnok lore, which inspired what I was hearing in my head for the song.
Since it was 1985, Rios went for a specific sound native to the time and musical trends of the era. “It’s a heavy metal record—certainly not a death or thrash metal record. There’s a sprinkling of hair metal in there, some Bay Area speed metal/proto-thrash, and a little W.A.S.P.; I think I was hearing the first Guns N’ Roses record in my head, but we all love Poison, Ratt, Mötley Crüe and all that stuff. As far as the vocals go, I remember taking Zartan into consideration and thinking he wouldn’t be an ’80s-style glam rock singer; he would have a gruff, lower register.”
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For the execution, Rios played all the instruments and looped in collaborators that were down for the cause. “Matt Harvey is my right-hand dude, and he’s also a big comic and G.I. Joe guy, so he could get into character. I trust him musically maybe more than anybody else on the planet. At some point, I became a bit overwhelmed with writing all of the record, so I hit Matt up to help me out. Ross [Sewage], the bass player from Exhumed, he’s a Joe nerd like me. He’s got the collection; I think he even has a social media page that’s just G.I. Joe photography. He’s a bona fide ‘one of us.’ The drummer [Andy Selway] is a touring vet from KMFDM and friend of mine locally who’s British and has a mohawk. Like a real-life Dreadnok.”
If Rios sings in an accurate register to Zartan, the songs were made in their image and they even enlisted a Dreadnok lookalike, then how far does this quest for authenticity go? “I’ll be wearing a red wig and corpsepaint, just like Zartan, and I recently tried running through the songs with everything on,” laughs Rios. “Everyone is all in on the outfits.”
Judge for yourself when Cold Slither make their debut at San Diego Comic Con 2025, appropriately enough with a limited action figure set, G.I. Joe Classified Series #163, Dreadnoks Cold Slither: Band of Vipers Tour. So, with the band set to debut alongside the action figures, and Cold Slither truly committing to the bit, just what names will they sign for on the packaging? “The other day I was asked what I would write if someone asked me to sign a record,” chuckles Rios. “Voice actors will sign their real name, and then underneath will write their character. I’d probably do that. We’re devoted to these characters and this band.”
All of this attention to detail and importance of authenticity to the source material begs one crucial question: Are there any subliminal messages on the LP? “I don’t possess that technology,” says Rios with a smile. “But you’ll know for sure if we start touring with Metallica.”
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