responds by creating a contest to determine who would be the next Commander: whoever murders the most Joes takes on the role of Commander. A ruthless agent named Krake wins the competition, largely by revealing that he had killed and replaced one of his rivals with Zartan, doubling his kill score and showing the initiative to break the rules to win. The new Commander orders the open invasion of the Southeast Asian nation of Nanzhao and successfully convinces the world at large that Nanzhao was a brutal regime that profited off the international drug trade; in reality, the invasion is a front for acquiring the country's massive gold reserves and driving up the price of heroin, a drug that Cobra itself deals. The Commander then slaughters the Cobra Council and assumes full control of Cobra. Animated series Sunbow The Sunbow cartoon did not explore how Cobra began. It was only in G.I. Joe: The Movie that it is revealed that the organization was a front runner for a 40,000-year-old underground civilization called Cobra-La, whose snake-like inhabitants were driven underground by the advent of humankind. Cobra Commander was, in actuality, a member of this underground race. He was tasked with creating an organization that would overrun the world at large. This revelation, though, contradicts what was established in the first season of the series. It is also revealed that the creation of Serpentor was an initiative by Cobra-La: through the use of a biological mind controlling device, they implanted the idea into Dr. Mindbender's mind. The creation of Cobra-La was an unintentional side effect of Hasbro's demand that the heretofore unintroduced Cobra Emperor Serpentor be inserted into the series, despite the fact that Cobra Commander had long been established as the one-and-only head of Cobra. Series story editor and writer Buzz Dixon offered two possible storylines to make it work: one had the senior Cobra leadership, fed up with Cobra Commander's constant failures, deciding to literally build a better leader. The other presented Cobra as being a front for a vast, secretive and far more sinister organization whose leadership finds Cobra Commander lacking and sends Serpentor as a replacement. Hasbro, liking both ideas, had the series writers combine both concepts. The writers despised the name Cobra-La and had only originally intended to use it as a working name to be replaced by a "real" name in the finished product; they were