1982 Cobra Commander photo by Wes Rollend
I’m pretty sure this hasn’t surfaced previously. Commonplace is Cobra Commander’s weird blow dryer/flashlight/laser pistol-thing.
1982 Cobra Commander photo by Wes Rollend
It came with his 1982 straight-arm figure, and the 1983 swivel-arm retool, and the 1984 mail-in hooded version of the character. (Embarrassing trivia: My brother and I never knew the gun fit into CC’s back! I figured this out in 2008, meaning I should probably call off this whole book thing.)
1982 Cobra Commander photo by Wes Rollend
From 1981, here’s Greg Berndtson’s control art for the weapon in question. This was drawn concurrently with Ron Rudat’s figure turnaround.
And here’s Cobra Commander’s other weapon, the one that wasn’t ever produced and did not come packed with the Cobra Commander action figures!
Know of any other designed-but-scrapped weapons?
A Real American Book! 
That “other” weapon looks remarkably like the grenade launcher pistol molded on the chest of the ’82 Cobra Trooper. Man, it would’ve been really cool to get that in an accessory form. The hairdryer is nostalgic, but not my favorite pistol by far.
Very cool. It looks vaugely similar in shape to a gun released with Heavy Water and many other Spytroops era figures in 2003.
While many pitched ideas, sketches, and names that don’t pass muster do resurface later on, I think this one’s a coincidence, particularly with so many years between the two. I was unfamiliar with HW’s gun, but I just took a look at yojoe and you’re right, there is some similarity.
I like those gun sketches a lot. Did you enlarge the image or did Greg draw them to fit on a standard page of paper. Every other weapons sketch I have ever seen was drawn at a 2:1 scale on the page. Anyway, they are beautiful and I am jealous.
Am I crazy or does it look like a silencer attached to some sort of large magnum gun? Or like… a silencer on a flaregun? 😛
Looks like the grenade launcher that was packaged with Ambush. I wonder if that’s the same design, just released about 7 years later.
I like that the caliber of the weapon is even noted. Attention to realism and detail is what made G.I. Joe, and the designers, especially in those early years, were masters at that. The move away from realism as the line went on was very noticeable to us as kids, even if we didn’t know about the design process and so on. And we didn’t like the change!