Audience-Alienating Era: The figures were 5 inches tall, sporting at best five points of articulation (a large departure from the much more poseable Real American Hero, and even Sgt. Savage, figures), and looked like Liefeldian wet dreams.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Several episodes in the first season had rock music sequences at random moments. Not only did the music completely replace the rest of the audio, but the confusing, looping editing used for them wouldn't look out of place in a YouTube Poop.
Complete Monster: Iron Klaw is the maniacal leader of SKAR (Soldiers of Khaos, Anarchy and Ruin), using his public guise of Count Von Rani to cover up his heinous acts. Iron Klaw abuses and threatens his own minions into submission and regularly endangers innocents in his schemes for power, never hesitating to test out a new weapon or acquired Kill Sat on entire cities. In one of his most horrific crimes, Iron Klaw subjected dozens of captured men to experiments that left them mutilated monstrosities that he abandoned to die, and when the sole "success", Wreckage, lost his memory, Iron Klaw manipulated him into believing America was behind his trauma, and uses him as a weapon that he discards as soon as he runs out of usefulness. Iron Klaw's grandest scheme comes when he invades a meeting of dozens of world leaders and infects them all with a deadly plague, using them as hostages to enable his takeover of America, and, when Iron Klaw's attempts to gain control of America's nuclear weapons to use in a conquest of Earth fails, he orders the world leaders be burned alive and their screams broadcasted for all his enemies to hear.
Evil Is Cool: The SKAR characters are generally more liked than the Joes introduced in Extreme due to their hammy personalities and flamboyant designs. Quite tellingly, every references made to Extreme after its cancellation focus on Iron Klaw and SKAR,
Interestingly, Kirk Bozigian's (the manager of A Real American Hero and Sgt. Savage) main objection to Extreme was that he found the villains "boring".
Growing the Beard: The second season has stronger writing and removes the sillier elements.
Narm: The live-action segments that introduced every episode of the first season. Actors picked out more for their physique than their acting ability lipsync their lines which are then dubbed over by the series' voice actors, coupled with CG and a few instances of poor costuming (Black Dragon suffers excessively from this) make these intros incredibly hard to take seriously.
Special Effect Failure: The live-action intros feature some rather crude CG for the vehicles. Even their producer lamented the conspicuousness of the models, stating he wanted real cockpit props build for the aircrafts instead.
Lloyd Goldfine: "[The CGI], however, missed the whole point, since we were supposed to be bringing the characters and experience of G.I.Joe: Extreme to life, not replacing cel animation with CG animation. But I couldn't get them to build or shoot those sequences while we were shooting, and once we were wrapped all I could do was to try and make the best openings I could with what I had."
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Numerous mentions a Greater-Scope Villain were dropped in Season 2 but went nowhere. Considering writers had confirmed the Greater-Scope Villain in question was going to be Cobra, and a Season 3 would have explored the relationship between Cobra and SKAR, the fact that no direct hints were made and the show wraps up neatly feels like an incredibly wasted opportunity. Imagine if the Season 2 finale revealed Cobra Commander was back and ready to resume his plans of world conquest where SKAR had failed?
Iron Klaw is the main villain the military team the G.I. Joes confront in this comic miniseries, and handily the worst. The leader of the terrorist group Soldiers of Kaos, Anarchy, and Ruin, or S.K.A.R., surpassed in rank only by the Duchess, Iron Klaw murdered his way to the top position of the group, and is a horrific boss, murdering his henchmen for everything from accidentally touching him, to simply assert his ego. After murdering the Duchess when she slowly shows disgust for his homicidal plans for world domination, Iron Klaw murders a man, taking out many of his soldiers in the same instance, to steal his political position, and proceeds to steal the powerful crop hormone known as Ferti-gel, poisons it, then plans to spread it across numerous countries to plunge them into famine and drought in order to blackmail the world with his massive supply of food. Even when forced into an Enemy Mine situation with the Joes against Red Scream, Iron Klaw takes every opportunity to betray and try to murder his "allies". Iron Klaw was a complete sociopath who was only concerned with his own personal power.
Inferno is a psychopathic Mad Bomber who, though only a minor servant of Iron Klaw in the present, is revealed to be a truly wicked individual in his backstory, shown in the short arc From the Ashes. Using his pyrotechnic skills, Inferno bombed more than half a dozen military bases, killing dozens of innocent American soldiers, and follows it up by blowing up an American intelligence agency, killing more than thirty people. After bombing the recently-created G.I. Joe base, wiping out most of the starting Joes, Inferno goes on to try and kill the President of the United States with an explosive during a mass funeral for his own victims, fully aware of the dozens of military families present as well.
from G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.