The Four Color Media Monitor

Paramount's decision to dumb down their upcoming GI Joe movie by turning them into an international task force with nothing to do with America, if at all, has made more headlines recently on FOX News (via Church and State):

The popular all-American comic-book military man and action figure dating back to the 1940s is undergoing a significant transformation for the Paramount Pictures-distributed "G.I. Joe" film, which begins production in February and is scheduled for release in summer 2009.

No longer will G.I. Joe be a U.S. Special Forces soldier, the "Real American Hero" who, in his glory days, single-handedly won World War II.

In the politically correct new millennium, G.I. Joe bears no resemblance to the original.

Paramount has confirmed that in the movie, the name G.I. Joe will become an acronym for "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" - an international, coed task force charged with defeating bad guys. It will no longer stand for government issued, as in issued by the American government.

The studio won't elaborate, saying filming hasn't begun and details are still in the works, but the behind-the-scenes rumblings are that the producers have decided to change the nature of G.I. Joe in order to appeal to a wider, more international audience.

The word is that in the current political climate, they're afraid that a heroic U.S. soldier won't fly.

Oh please, do tell me about it. Paramount is only agitating the situation more than need be. Even when the toys, some of which my younger brother owned years ago, were sold in some overseas countries under the name "Action Force", they still kept the American tone, and you knew that the various action figure characters who were of American backgrounds were just that, mainly because the profiles on the boxes said so! They sold well and nobody objected to the commando team's being of American origin.

Joe's transformation, however, isn't sitting well with diehard fans and military types.

"I find it outrageous that they'd want to drop everything American" from the character, said conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston, who wrote about the rumors this week on Newsbusters.org and his own blog. "That's nuts."

Retired Army Col. David W. Hunt, a FOX News military and terrorism analyst, called the scheme to make a whole new Joe "a shame."

"G.I. Joe is a U.S. guy," Hunt said. "What are we going to call it - Global Joe? International Joe? It's kind of stupid. It's ridiculous that they're doing that."

Yes it is, and if they go along with it, then nobody with common sense anywhere in the world should waste their money on the upcoming movie.

A Navy spokeswoman said the studio and film's writers have already approached people at the Pentagon for input.

"They had talked about what would be the best way forward, but without seeing a treatment we don’t know yet which way it’s going to go," Lt. Stephanie Murdock, a project officer in the Navy Office of Information West, told FOXNews.com. "We're definitely open to assisting them when they get around to asking us."

But with no script in hand, she said, it's hard to gauge how the military feels about the characterization of G.I. Joe.

With the news of Paramount's intentions of dumbing it down by taking out the franchise's American origins, I don't think it'll be that hard to tell. Just ask Blackfive.

In fact, by making a whole issue out of it to begin with, that's how the movie studio is only making things worse, and in the end, not pleasing anybody. More on the subject from Sister Toldjah, Stop the ACLU, Moonbattery, Screenrant, Protein Wisdom.

Labels: politics