Serpentor the Rogue Neocon and GI Joe the Brainwashed Ingénue
GI Joe is a real American hero — and that might be a bit of problem for both Paramount Pictures and Hasbro.
Their relationship would appear to be on extremely solid footing: Paramount and Hasbro are both riding high this summer, enjoying the $633 million global box-office haul of the toy maker’s smash hit, “Transformers.” But now, efforts to turn Hasbro’s GI Joe into a motion picture are proving particularly fraught.
Deciding whether to make “GI Joe” at all, let alone how to market it, is nettlesome thanks in large measure to an unpopular American president defending an unpopular war: In a July USA Today/Gallup poll, a record high of 62% respondents had called the invasion of Iraq “a mistake.”A month later, that view is 57%, more or less where it’s been for over a year.
Overseas, the view is even more dire. “Not only is there worldwide support for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but there also is considerable opposition to U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan,” the Pew Global Attitudes Project found in June. So the prospect of sending more soldiers — albeit celluloid ones — is a complicated task at best. “There are always challenges,” said Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer. “GI Joe is not just a brand that represents the military; it also represents great characters.”
For crying out loud, the Cobra Organization was headed by Cobra Commander, a man in a trench coat and silver mask, and Serpentor the Cobra Emperor, a man in a snake suit.
If they can’t bring themselves to make the American soldier prevail over evildoers dressed like snakes, then they got serious problems.
Related funfact: only one person ever died in GI Joe (that I saw, anyway). An elevator door opened with someone in it and Cobra Commander, in a mood over something and standing in front of the elevator, shot him in the chest. Everyone else, even the bad guys, no matter how often they got shot down, always parachuted out of sight and, presumably, into safety.
