1 out of 5 - Would Recommend: Sgt. Savage & His Screaming Eagles

The Screaming Eagles…or the Howling Commandos. Hard to tell.

Welcome back to 1 out of 5 – Would Recommend, where lately I’ve been really into IDW’s Hasbro Heroes Universe. I’ve been fascinated by the way it uses the metaphorical whole buffalo, and as a result we’re watching 1994’s Sgt. Savage & His Screaming Eagles today!

What’s The Plot?

Back in 1944, Sargent Robert Steven Savage was one of the biggest badasses on the battlefield…until his men were betrayed by one of their own. Kidnapped by the I.R.O.N. Army, Savage’s DNA was altered and he was cryogenically frozen for fifty years. Rescued in the present by G.I. Joe, Sgt. Savage whips a crew of unruly soldiers into a high tech fighting force to take the battle to Blitz’s robots!

General Blitz, a kind of Robot Nazi M. Bison.

Who Made This Beautiful Garbage?

Hasbro. By 1994, after an impressive 12 years of continuous production, the battle between G. I. Joe and Cobra was growing a little stale. Hasbro’s first attempt at a decade-appropriate revival was the short-lived Sgt. Savage & His Screaming Eagles, which consisted of two waves worth of toys (scaled with the previous Joes, albeit with expanded torsos), one pilot episode released on VHS (available on YouTube, which is how we’re watching it today), and two mini-comics (penciled by comics legend Joe Kubert). Savage would carry over into 1995’s G. I. Joe Extreme, as well as the current IDW series Revolutionaries.

Five Reasons to See It

I’m not 100% sure what General Blitz’s endgame was in betraying a man, turning him into a super soldier, and leaving him cryogenically frozen in an unguarded bunker for fifty years. He may as well have left a note saying “Bob, Please be my arch nemesis. Your traitor, Garrison “Blitz” Krieger” pinned to Savage’s shirt.
For some reason, the usually brunette Lady Jaye is blonde here.
His Royal Airness, Robert Savage.
Savage is given a squad of uncouth, meatheaded ruffians to whip into shape. Uncouth, meatheaded ruffians who happen to be engineering and computer science geniuses. They refit a bunch of scrapped WWII-era vehicles with modern sci-fi tech and uncover the I.R.O.N. Army’s plot, all under the nose of the current G. I. Joe squad.
Sgt. Savage gains the respect of his new unit by beating the tar out of them…in a game of 1 on 6 basketball.
“You know what they say – old soldier never die, they just…fade away.” – Said by a man who neither died nor really faded away.

Recommendation

This one-off is raw 90’s cheese and readily forgettable…making it all the more astounding that IDW has made it a pivotal piece of connective tissue in the Hasbro Heroes Universe – albeit after a LOT of cleaning up.