And knowing is half the battle!

"Living heroes have a tendency to become idealistic after a revolution. They have no concept of the mundane practicalities of government. Dead heroes, on the other hand, are much more malleable."
--Major Sebastian Bludd

This is the place where pop culture and politics collide in unexpected ways.

First, just a little bit of background: G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was a Hasbro toy line from the 1980s, based on an earlier line of larger figures Hasbro produced in the 60s and 70s. The line was planned to be in the same scale as Star Wars figures (roughly 3.75" tall), as these sold a lot better than the 12" figures that had been popular. (Due, I imagine, in no small part to the smaller figures costing less and allowing people to buy more.)

After deciding to produce this new line (around 1981), Hasbro contacted Marvel Comics to produce the backstory for the characters and a tie-in monthly comic book. An editor at Marvel, Larry Hama, perhaps the most underrated writer in the entire history of comic books, dusted off a proposal he'd created a couple of years prior about a team of commandos led by Nick Fury, which had never been approved by Marvel. He changed around some names and costumes, and the initial version of the Joe team was born. Unable to find a writer willing to write a book based on a toy, Hama wrote the series himself, and his 13-year run on the title is legendary.

For, unlike the entertaining but ultimately childish cartoon, the G.I. Joe comic book was, for the most part, semi-realistic. The characters acted like real soldiers and terrorists, even the most vile villains had reasons for being what they were, and, perhaps most shocking to those who never read it and only saw the cartoon, they even died in the line of duty. The characters' names were usually names borrowed from servicemen with whom Hama had served in Vietnam (or, in at least one case, an artist on the comic) or puns and jokes (the first names of the original three Dreadnoks were Tom, Dick, and Harry; their last names, Winken, Blinken, and Nod). And, not surprisingly, Hasbro, who developed the looks of characters before they had names and personalities assigned to them, often based likenesses on real people. (The most famous instance of this, not counting guys like Sergeant Slaughter who were supposed to actually be celebrities, was Tunnel Rat, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Hama himself.)

So, this may be the longest "little bit of background" in human history. Anyway, I was recently discussing the original toyline with a friend, specifically exactly when it "jumped the shark." There'd always been some goofiness, particularly in the costumes of the various Cobra elite. (Dr. Mindbender has got to be one of the weirdest-looking characters ever designed, regardless of how cool his concept was: a mild-mannered orthodontist who tinkered with brainwave manipulation to alleviate pain, tested his prototype on himself, and was transformed into the most maniacal mad scientist the world had ever seen.) One name came up quickly: Cesspool. Cesspool was introduced long after we'd both stopped buying the figures, but, because of the way the Hasbro/Marvel agreement worked, he had to appear in the comic, which we were both still reading at the time (1991). Cesspool was the leader of a group of Cobras called the Eco-Warriors, who wanted to pollute the entire Earth. I'm not sure why a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world would actually want to destroy the world first, but you can tell that Captain Planet was not considered at the time to be nearly as lame as he really is.

So I looked up Cesspool's filecard. Almost immediately, I was struck by a more than passing resemblance to a real live person (aside from his ridiculous scars). And the first sentence sounded a lot like it could be referring to an actual corporation for which said real person once served as CEO: "CESSPOOL was the Chief Executive Officer of a huge multi-national corporation with vast holdings in oil refineries, chemical plants and mills."

Uncanny, isn't it?

Of course, there's an obvious problem with this comparison: Cheney didn't become the CEO of Halliburton until 1995; the Cesspool figure was released in 1991 and therefore was probably designed in 1990. However, I'm not familiar with Cheney's voting record in the Senate, or with environmental decisions he might have made or influenced during the Nixon administration, and I've spent too much time thinking about this already to look them up to see if there might be something in his history that could've indicated to some Hasbro designer the monster he would become.

In any case, I have a word of advice for Destro: If Cesspool invites you to go hunting, tell him you and the Baroness have plans for a romantic getaway in Borovia.