Good day blog browsers and hagiographers of the hokey! Apologies for the lateness on this one. Welcome to another bonus post on the Pound Shop Flix blog, this time devoted to the animated cartoon feature length special: GI Joe: A Real American Hero: The Movie.
Those of you who read the blog a few weeks back will remember I tackled the modern, live action take on the world of GI JOE. It was, I felt mostly devoid of the charm and fun of good GI Joe product. GI Joe: A Real American Hero: The Movie (GIJ:ARAH:TM) on the other hand has that shit in spades. Its campy, colourful and silly–in fact it’s almost too much…

Consider how you might watch the 1966 Batman series for its knowing barminess, or how you might watch one of the lesser 80s Arnie films with your tongue wedged in your cheek; appreciating it despite (or perhaps BECAUSE of) the fact that you, intelligent and sexy reader, know it to be absurd? That is how you should approach GIJ:ARAH:TM. In truth, I don’t know if you’ll get anything out of this film if you don’t already like GI Joe, or have an affection for this kind of 80s cartoon. But if you do, it’s a bit of a treat.
The plot follows the Joes and the villainous COBRA tussling over custody of the Broadcast Energy Transmitter (BET); a nonsense thingymajig which can supposedly solve the worlds energy crisis, or in the wrong hands, destroy humanity. Standard enough GI Joe fare. But this is a feature length movie dammit!

So yes, the film goes above and beyond what you might expect from an episode of the cartoon series. There are so many ideas in this movie. The Joes are all here, along with a band of new recruits, Lt. Falcon: a screw up trying to make good- whose also Joe leader Duke’s half-brother- is central, Sgt Slaughter (the wrestler who also appeared in the cartoon as an animated version of himself) and his Renegades appear too. On the other side there’s Cobra-La: The ancient hidden civilisation of snake people who created Cobra Commander and now have an arsenal of fungal warheads which will devolve humanity back to the status of apes with the help of the BET. It’s just a runaway train of wacky ideas.

Indeed this onslaught of deranged creative fury presents something of a problem for the audience, in that anyone NOT familiar with these ideas BEFORE coming into the film would likely feel pretty lost. For the kids it’s aimed at though it’s loud, fun and broad enough in it’s character strokes to be entertaining. And for grown-ups like me who should know better, it’s a wildly over-the-top dive into a time before our post-modern, ironic gaze exposed the sheer absurdity of this sort of thing.

Plus Burgess Meredith, The Penguin from the 1966 Batman show plays the villain, which is tremendous.

One final point, this film had an exceedingly high number of flashes/ flashing lights in it. If you’re epileptic I would exercise caution with it. They probably wouldn’t make it like this were it released today.

3 stars! *** (But more like 2 if you’re not a GI Joe fan).

I’ll be back with another post this week to set up this week’s film, in a return to the blogs normal format.

-Tom