No Surrender Cinema: Rambo: The Force of Freedom
The year was 1986. Pee Wee was about to welcome the world into his Playhouse. Four ghostbustin’ guys from New York were about to move from the big screen to the small screen and show the world that they were the real deal. Good, clean, wholesome fun could be provided by Pound Puppies, Popples, and a host of other animated series bursting at the seams with sweetness. You had your Flintstone Kids, your My Little Pony, and then you had…Rambo!
Yes, you heard me right, Rambo. That Rambo. The former POW with PTSD. The Green Beret who stood his ground when a sadistic sherriff “drew first blood”. Back in 1986, the very same year that Chuck Norris would fight a ninja in space, the iconic character brought to life by Sylvester Stallone was given the green light to become an animated action hero that captivated kids around the world! Join me for a No Surrender Cinema that reflects back on Rambo: The Force of Freedom!
Compared by many to GI Joe, Rambo: The Force of Freedom removed the character of John Rambo from the darkness of his past and positioned him as the leader of a team of heroes, each gifted with a particular set of skills. With the blessing of Col. Sam Trautman (the only other character from the more mature Rambo media who crossed over to the cartoon), Rambo and his crew have carte blanche to do what it takes to eliminate the threat of SAVAGE (not Randy…this is a group of Specialist Administrators of Vengeance, Anarchy, and Global Extortion), who are led by the evil General Warhawk. There’s a villain with a metal right hand (Gripper), a mechanic voiced by Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (or Shredder, who you ask), not one but TWO ninjas, one good and one bad, who are twin brothers (TWINJAS!)…this wasn’t just a Force of Freedom, this was a full-on assault on children’s imaginations, pushing them towards the toy aisle to grab some of those hot new Rambo toys!
Rambo: The Force of Freedom was a rather controversial choice for a cartoon, given that the source material came from a novel about the horrors of Vietnam (and even used the same music and mimicked the trailer of First Blood, Part II for the cartoon’s intro). Still, it managed to outlast Chuck Norris’ Karate Kommandos by 60 episodes! You would think that the one where the star embraced the absurdity of starring in a cartoon and ran with it would have been the more successful of the two, but Rambo Fever was running hot and could not be stopped! Even with objections from Sylvester Stallone, who hated seeing the character he portrayed on film being turned into a super-soldier for children, Rambo: The Force of Freedom endured, becoming the first ever cartoon to be based on something R-rated, running for 13 weeks in first-run syndication until the pushback from protesting parents put the kibosh on any more episodes past the initial 65.
While I have watched the entire run of Rambo: The Force of Freedom in my heyday, looking back at each episode would make this NSC hella long. Instead, I’ve gone back into my vault and decided to select a few random episodes to talk about!
First Strike: Because we can’t use First Blood, right? I mean, this is supposed to be for the children! Anyways, First Strike is the first episode, and the first part of a five part miniseries that was used to premiere the show. General Warhawk and his SAVAGE goons attempt a hostile takeover of a country named Tierra Libre (I thought that was the luchadore movie with Jack Black?) and it’s up to Rambo and his freedom fighting friends to stop them! The action is pretty sanitized (watch the scene where Rambo’s ally Kat reveals herself; the villains take one hit and then oversell like they’re Shawn Michaels at Summerslam 2005), which is due in part to production having mapped out their game plan for this series by avoiding what GI Joe was doing. You know, the cartoon where nobody died and everybody landing safely when they were ejected from an exploding plane? Rambo was trying not to do any of that!
I’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge the all-star voice cast that was on hand for this show; Neil Ross (Shipwreck from GI Joe, among a host of other notable voice roles) did Rambo’s voice, which at times sounds like John Travolta with a stuffy nose. Robert Ito of Pray For Death fame, who also voiced Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid animated series, voiced both Black Dragon and White Dragon. I mentioned James Avery as Turbo earlier, and we also had legends like Alan Oppenheimer and Peter Cullen putting in work.
Speaking of work, it’s time for me to get back to work and talk about a few more episodes!
Beneath The Streets: A gang leader named Mad Dog, who is affiliated with SAVAGE, takes his cronies to plant a bomb in the sewers! Since we’re still a year away from the Ninja Turtles being able to protect their turf, it’s up to Rambo! Mad Dog makes things personal when he and his crew jump Rambo’s war buddy Wrongway, who happens to be a city worker that’s in the sewer at the time of the bomb being planted. This episode gives us several sewer fights (including Wrongway kicking ass for a few minutes before the numbers game gets him), Rambo being shot at as he’s eating lunch, and a Vietnam flashback that explains the bond between Rambo and Wrongway! This one is one of my favorite episodes for sure, mainly due to the urban setting and villains that would look right at home on the receiving end of Paul Kersey’s gun.
Enter The Black Dragon: Rambo stops a SAVAGE assault (including nailing Havoc and Nomad, who looks like General Adnan from early 90’s WWF, with a Keith Cooke-esque jump kick) and attempts to vanquish Warhawk once and for all until he’s ordered to stand down by Trautman. Tired of Rambo’s constant interference in his plans for global domination, Warhawk recruits a ninja named Black Dragon to assassinate him! Since Rambo conveniently happens to be off the grid becoming one with Mother Nature, the ninjas lay seige upon the mountains where he’s vacationing and try to make them his final resting place! With ninjas coming out of the woodwork, Rambo booby-trapping his surroundings with whatever he can find, and a final battle that creates the origin story of Black Dragon’s hatred of Rambo, this one has always been a must-see episode to me.
Did I mention that in most episodes, when Rambo is gearing up for a final showdown or something of equal importance, the opening intro footage that copies the First Blood, Part II trailer is shown? It’s a bit like the old Incredible Hulk cartoon, where all of the transformations were just the same two or three Banner reaction shots leading into the reveal of The Incredible Hulk.
The Ninja Dog: Say what now? ABC Family gave us that goofy Karate Dog movie 20 years ago, so was Rambo really that far ahead of his time? Unfortunately, this is one of those episodes where the name promises something it can’t deliver. Yes, we get ninjas (both White Dragon and Black Dragon are in this episode), and there is a dog, but there is no “ninja dog”. The whole plot has to do with a MacGuffin that ends up hidden in the collar of Senator Thorne’s dog, and the bad guys go after the dog so that they can get it. There’s no ninja dog, just a dog named PeeWee that Rambo and Friends have to protect (along with the Senator and his son), and a feeling of disappointment in my heart.
Rambo: The Force of Freedom was the first of what would be an astounding amount of R-rated material that morphed into children’s programming in the years that followed. The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles paved the way for Troma’s masterpiece of gore The Toxic Avenger to become Toxic Crusaders, Robocop would go from being brutally gunned down in the original film to getting a dozen episodes of his own animated series, and even The Cryptkeeper would take some time away from HBO to enjoy 3 seasons as host to 3 seasons worth of kid-friendly scary stories. That’s not to mention all of the Rambo toys that were flying off of the shelves between 1986 and 1987.
I’ve often talked about how, as a kid, I was allowed a lot of freedom to be able to see various films meant for older audiences, so to look back at something like Rambo, which went in the opposite direction, was a treat. Although I’m lucky enough to have the series in my collection, the official DVD’s are now out of print and fetch a pretty penny on eBay and the like. There are plenty of clips and some scattered full episodes on Youtube and Dailymotion from what I’ve seen, but your best bet if you’d like to check it out for yourself is to venture over to the Internet Archive where you can watch the series in full.
I hope this little dose of action nostalgia has jogged a few memories out there, and I’ll definitely be taking more time to enjoy the rest of the episodes that I haven’t watched in a while. While most will always remember Rambo as a one man army fighting against some of the most nefarious enemies ever put on film, it’s pretty cool knowing that at one point in this crazy world of ours he stood side by side with He-Man and GI Joe as an animated inspiration for a whole generation who probably had no idea of his cinematic exploits.
