GI JOE IS OVER THERE

"So... G.I. Joe meets the 'Global Test.'"

Nostalgic modern media types have a problem. Too many of their childhood memories, their favorite childhood toys are so painfully un-PC. You can't give your kid the stuff you grew up with, that would be just... wrong! I mean, cap guns? Toy soldiers? Children might get the idea that violence is sometimes needed. Take G.I. Joe, the action figure (boy's doll) personification of the US soldier. A Real American Hero! So jingoistic, so patriotic, so violent!

We have to tone that down, it just doesn't fit today's modern leftist dogma, it's so un-PC! There's a new movie coming out, a GI Joe movie that will almost certainly be awful, but the movie is taking a deliberate turn away from the toy's long past:

The studio's live-action feature film version of G.I. Joe will no longer revolve around a top-secret U.S. special forces team but rather an international operation.

In a follow-up to their confirmation that Stephen Sommers will direct G.I. Joe, Variety offers this new description of the team: "G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film."

G.I. Joe is Belgian now. They are global, not American! Why the change?

Hasbro and Paramount execs recently spoke about the challenges of marketing a film about the U.S. military at a time when the current U.S. administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are at a low-point in global polls. When a studio makes a film as expensive as G.I. Joe will likely be, they want to know that as many people as possible around the world will want to see it. In other words, G.I. Joe -- "A Real American Hero" -- is a tough sell.

This isn't the first time G.I. Joe changed, originally he was just a grunt, just an infantry soldier. He had soldier's stuff. It was in the 1980s that the whole COBRA enemy and secret strike force stuff began, with A-Team firepower that went everywhere and hit nothing. But at least they'd kept the American soldier concept. Now? Can't have that.

Cassy Fiano at Whizbang looked at this with a deep sigh:

Nothing is sacred to liberals. Nothing patriotic or American is worth preserving. And I'm sure it never crossed their little liberal minds that perhaps if Hollywood made movies in the vein of those released during WWII, in which America, the military, and our soldiers were portrayed as strong, patriotic heroes, rather than today's military movies in which the United States is always the bad guy, war is always "wrong", and our soldiers are morally corrupt, people wouldn't have such a negative outlook on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the mainstream media should get that memo, as well). They could be supportive and make movies that showed America, our troops, and their mission in a positive light. But that would go against the liberal agenda. What's even worse is that one of the scripts they had was evocative of the patriotic G.I. Joe, but they chose to go with a script that was less militaristic, described as "X-Men meets Mission: Impossible".

Of all things to turn into a liberal fantasy, why did they have to choose G.I. Joe? From what it sounds like, they are taking everything that was great about it, and the Real American Hero line, and ruining it. I mean, this is worse than making G.I. Joe an "eco-warrior" in the early 90s. It is a sad indication of where our country could be headed when making a patriotic movie featuring a Real American Hero is considered a tough sell, and shelved so easily.

She does bring up a good question - why even make a G.I. Joe movie in the first place, and if so, why change it so significantly? Commenters discussed this:

It isn't that its a tough sell. Its that de-Americanizing it doesn't draw any negative press.

Nothing much public will be made of it and parents who remember GI Joe will expect it to be the old GI Joe. So they won't avoid it. They may not notice, but those who do will be ticked but there will be nothing that can be done.

Basically the US market is easy to be taken for granted especially if the negative press would require the press to have any affinity to America.
-by jpm100


You know what I find kind of odd? That they worry more about overseas markets than domestic.

It's not like we've had a whole lot of war movies - either pro or con. Perhaps it's because the war in Iraq, expensive as it is, percentage-wise is nowhere near the cost of wars in the past. Perhaps because a lot of folks have deluded themselves into thinking this is an optional war, and not important enough to even pay attention to.

We've come a long way from WW2. And Hollywood's come a long way from Frank Capra's "Why We Fight".

I hate to say it - but the freedoms that we enjoy aren't anywhere near so threatened by fighting the WoT as they would be by not fighting it. We've already seen instances of media being forced to apologize/retract/abase themselves for content that isn't liked by Muslims. (And I have noticed that if Christian groups don't like something, they're told basically "Tough S**t". Could it be a lack of headhacking Christians? Perhaps a dearth of angry mobs? I remember the modest furor over "Last Temptation of Christ" - and Christian groups were basically laughed at. Goes to show there's nothing like a few well-publicized murders to get the proper respect for your beliefs. /sarc)

How long would it be, with a continual low-level threat from the Muslim community about 'inappropriate material' before Hollywood starts self-censoring all content? There's already a trend in the news that if a person's picked up for suspicion, and the person is Muslim, their religion isn't mentioned. But you can be darn sure if someone was picked up for plotting to bomb an abortion clinic, if they were Christian their religion would lead all other data...

Hmmm. All things considered, I guess it's kind of hard to have a war movie when you don't dare describe who the enemy is.
-by JLawson


At least Hollywood produced the Transformers this year and showed the military in a good light. It felt like a 2½ hour recruitment film for the Air Force. It was great seeing practically the entire inventory and that the Air Force saved the day. As a Soldier said, "The whole thing was action packed and I loved seeing the A-10 'bringing the rain' the way they always came to help us out while I was in Iraq. Some of my fellow Soldiers and I were talking about it's funny that with all the movies out there, it took a movie about alien robots invading the planet to get the military stuff right."
-by DSkinner


Brace yourself. I've just read the fall preview of movies from Entertainment Weekly, and the slate of anti-war movies is incredible. Reese Witherspoon plays a woman whose Egyption husband is sent to a secret torture camp in "Rendition." In "The Brave One," Jodi Foster plays a woman whose Arab-looking husband is murdered by rightwingers. There's some horrible looking thing starring Robert Redford and Tom Cruise that is all about the evils of Bush and the Iraq war.

May they all fail at the box office just like every other anti-war movie has failed. May the studios lose so much money they go out of business, may the writers have to work at McDonalds, may the actors have to beg for roles in B list horror movies.

They can make "G.I. Joe," but Americans don't have to see it. They made a Superman movie where he didn't stand for "Truth, Justice and the American Way" and it bombed, too. Idiots.
-by Frazetta_Girl


Here's part of what's wrong.
A lot of you youngsters see GI Joe as Cobra Commander, Destro or even Sgt. Slaughter, for god's sake.
Those aren't GI Joes. Those are shrunken, 4 inch, multi national, non-partisan pseudo soldiers. Perfect for fighting 80s style non- denominational faceless bad guys with unidentifiable pseudo guns.

Real GI Joes were foot tall American soldiers, sailors and Marines with copies of real guns, grenades and combat equipment. Real Joes fought real bad guys like Russians, Germans & Japs.

The long slide towards turning Joe into a pussy started with the Adventure Team Joes, a fuzzy haired, bearded homo looking character that had "exciting" adventures like finding a mummy or some such crap. Not killing mummies, finding mummies.
From there he just got smaller and smaller, just like the balls of the people running the country.

In a real GI Joe movie, Joe would hunt down Osama and bring his head back to Washington in a bag.

Anything else is just typical Hollywood liberal feelgood crap.
-by Ray

Remember Captain Planet? In the 1990s, WTBN under uber leftist and Christian basher Ted Turner put out one of the most woeful cartoons this side of Hannah Barbera's 70s work featuring five international kids with elemental powers (earth, fire, water, air) and one with the elemental power of...heart (?). They could combine to summon the Captain who would save the day from evil corporate executives, polluters, and developers. The show was the worst kind of clumsy and patronizing propaganda, it was weak even by the standards of cartoons.

More recently, Dino Squad has come from the minds of animators at CBS, with kids who turn into different dinosaurs led by a scientist professor and fight an evil velociraptor bent on causing global warming so the age of the dinosaurs can return. I kid you not. Presumably the raptor and the kids in dinosaur form are mutants unharmed by the cooler planet at present. Missing is the question of why global warming is bad if it results in the return of previously extinct creatures.

So, why these kinds of efforts? I mean, aside from the compulsion by many on the left to force their opinions on everyone else and change society to fit their ideals, why so often targeted at children?

Because you can't reeducate adults, they know too much, are too skeptical, have too much information, and will question you. It's the same reason the military prefers young men over older men - because the older men may laugh at the drill sergeant, but the younger men are terrified of him. Because if you convince kids of something they will hound their parents until the parents give in, at least in the case of most modern parents. If you can terrify and convince kids of something young, it may be decades before they learn the truth - if ever, depending on how well you control the information as they age.

I don't care much about G.I. Joe, I never owned one, never wanted one. What would I do with a doll? I played with Lego and blocks and tinker toys and the whole outdoors, not with action figures. What I do care about is the sad capitulation (at best) or deliberate assistance (at worst) of Hollywood to bash America, their clear and strenuous efforts to avoid anything that might remotely support the war on terror, to oppose any idea of presenting the US in a positive light, and their complete and almost pathological avoidance of having any bad guys that are Arabic or Muslim.

The bad guy in this movie is Scottish? What happened, did they have a meeting and decide that the only ethnic group that wouldn't complain is the Scots - or at least if they complained no one would notice, because it's more or less constant anyway? What does he do, drink fine Whiskey and hang on to his money better than the Belgians? Does the Scotch burr somehow engender feelings of evil in movie execs? Were they so traumatized by fearless scenes of heroism and self-sacrifice for the cause of liberty in Braveheart that they feel compelled to attack the nation in response? This is just pathetic.

GI Joe, Movies, Political Correctness, Cartoons