Any G.I. Joe fans here? I watched G.I. Joe The Movie, or Action Force as I knew it when I was a kid, a few days ago. I was a bit of a fan as a kid, Transformer mania having died down a little in the UK in the wake of Transformers The Movie bombing and the 3rd season of the TV show losing its way a bit. Nobody liked Rodimus Prime over ol' Oppy, I guess!
I decided to look up the G.I. Joe movie because the hilarious G.I. Joe public service announcement parodies from a couple of years back rekindled my interest in the original series. There were a few connections between the production of Transformers the Movie (which I love and watched again recently), and G.I. Joe the Movie according to the interviews on the TF Movie DVD that I got for my birthday. Having never watched the movie before, I started it up in anticipation. Would the memories of collecting the action figures (Anyone who calls them "dolls" gets a chop from my kung-fu grip hand!), reading the ludicrously complicated Marvel comic or the thrills of watching the A-Team-esque no character deaths cartoon come flooding back?
Firing the movie up, I was welcomed by this bizarre sight - G.I. Joe the musical anyone?
And here's the the equally cheesetabulous UK version - I was surprised how different it is:
So, OK, good for a laugh, but it was a good indicator of the quality of the rest of the movie, i.e. dire. It was sort of fun seeing characters that I used to know when I was a kid, and now I know who the hell Sergeant Slaughter is from having watched WWE over the last few years (it wasn't that big a deal in the UK when I was a kid), it was fun seeing him in his prime, too.
Compared to Transformers the Movie, G.I.Joe the Movie felt like no one really cared about its production; the animation and art aren't nearly as detailed as TF the Movie, the music is just carried over from the original TV show, not to mention the musical cues ripped off from the TF TV series, and sound effects from Star Wars!(^_^)
The story veers away from the military cartoony fiction of the old series and comics. I remember how the comics would have footnotes in the panels telling the reader the names of the weapons the characters had and what they could do, for instance. The movie goes into weird science fiction/fantasy territory. In a major retcon for the series, it turns out the bad guys, Cobra, a terrorist army who've been trying to take over the world from episode one, are in fact borne from a secret race of weird looking creatures that had all but died out and still remained hidden somewhere in the Himalayas, as you do. Kinda strange how they had this guy:
They also had Don Johnson play a crass, womanising officer called Lieutenant Falcon, but he's crap (^_^). One cool video game connection is Michael Bell, who played mainstay hero Duke in G.I. Joe. Video game fans will know his characters Raziel from the Legacy of Kain series, as well as The Fear from Metal Gear Solid 3.
Always-screaming Cobra Commander is often good for a laugh because he's so cowardly. But in the movie, he gets turned into a friggin' snake! OK... (^_^;
Seeing this scene made me realise I actually had seen this movie once as a boy. For some reason seeing Cobra Commander getting turned into a snake scared the brown sauce out of me and I couldn't bear to watch it again! I guess playing Biohazard and Dead Rising has toughened me up since then (^_^;
G.I. Joe the Movie was a nice trip down Memory Boulevard, but ultimately, it's a pretty bad movie. They even brought Duke back from death in the movie with some hastily redubbed dialogue (something about that he'd come out of a coma) so that the producers didn't have to face the backlash they did when they killed off Optimus Prime in the TF movie! Crazy (>_<)!
I've never played any of the G.I. Joe video games that were made, mainly for the NES, but I would like to check out this one from the arcades which seems to play like the into-the-screen stages on Contra and S.P.Y.: Special Project Y:
Looks pretty cool, huh? Well, it's almost 4:30 in the a.m., so that's enough random G.I. Joe-ness for now! Anyone else got some 80s cartoon skeletons in their closets? (^_^)
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