Took forever, but last month I finally rented the second GI Joe movie. As I watched it, I wasn't thrilled to death with it, but I could see if i was 8 it would have been really cool. Something weird about it was, sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

I got a Sunbow movie. Now I know you can argue with me on various points, but the plot, the kidnapped president, the weapons, the showdowns, it was basically a Sunbow cartoon made into a movie. Which is exactly what I thought I wanted, but then I was just "Meh" on the movie itself. Weird.

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Yep. It was as nonsensical as the worst of Sunbow.

I'd rather have had something more like the comic--even if it meant being entirely 6-degrees of Snake-Eyes.

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Hasbro needs to bite the bullet and turn the rights over to HBO or Showtime if it wants something really solid. Forget selling toys (in the short run) and let a really good Game of Thrones paced product develop.

Base it thematically on the first 50 issues of the Marvel run and it would certainly have the potential for mass appeal. If a large crowd can follow Dexter, a large crowd would follow GI Joe.

Once you make GI Joe good again, the parents will expose (okay, force) it on their children, who will then want the toys.

Do parents expose their children to Game of Thrones and Dexter, though?

If you want exposure to the children, you need to appeal to children. They need to spend money to make money. Pour money AND confidence in a GI Joe cartoon (the latter was practically nonexistant for Renegades). Maybe even make it less military-oriented to appeal to a broader base. Put the GI Joe name aside for a bit and resurrect Adventure Team or Ninja Force, I dunno.

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While I would have preferred something along the lines of the Ghost Recon Alpha short, that doesn't work for a line aimed at selling toys.
Its just like Transformers. There's no real sense of horror when a main character, or city for that fact, gets destroyed. There can't be. They can't get an R rating. Parents don't take kids to R movies. They just don't.
I'm not sure how to square the circle. Maybe a spin-off movie or something.

You can go 2 directions.

1. Market to the people that like it now and turn it into a 30+ year old target market property, and cash in now.

2. Market it to kids in the hopes that you can cash in both now and on the third wave of nostalgia in a decade or two.

Hasbro has always taken the kid route. I suspect that they will continue as such.

- R

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This needs to happen.

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Fatal Fluffies and battles against overgrown vegetables definitely are a higher level of nonsense than anything in either Joe movie. I also didn't see an F-14 fly into space or stop on a dime to land on a beach. And imo, Retaliation was way beyond RoC. It astounds me how often it is compared to the silly aspects of Sunbow. Sunbow may need rewatched. I think it may be one of those time and rose colored glasses things.

Notpicard, not sure if you are reading my original post in the way I intended, but I was implying they got the best of the Sunbow cartoon down. It wasn't the silly excess of the old show, but the good parts. I just am not part of the target audience.

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My meaning was less directed at any specific comment and just about Sunbow comparisons in general. Since the movie was released, this has been a consistent comparison. I have read it well over a dozen times. I can see a "the best parts" comparison since Retaliation is not the gritty, mature-audience movie many people seem to want. Since I was a comic fan and I don't feel that the mood of the comic can fully be brought to 2 hours, I am happy with it.

In many ways, I think what Joe really needs to fully go mainstream is a live action show that is still kid-accessible. Maybe a cartoon would be better, but it seems to me that kid audiences have become more responsive to live actors. Cartoons may have become a wall in the box that GI Joe needs to be thinking out of.

They make big budget movies to please both kids and adults and they fail.
Collectors don't recognize their childhood heroes and kids simply don't care.
The movie entertained me, but it failed to create a new generation of fans and the bad distribution combined with the movie date being reported killed the toy line.

Marketing should stop believing that a blockbuster is enough to push the brand. TV spots, a weekly cartoon and merchandising are needed to bring back the brand into a popular toy line. Renegades had great potential, but it seems Hasbro didn't want to invest in it.

With kids playing CoD and similar games, they probably thought that GI Joe was too watered down.
So perhaps the brand should focus on adventure and exploration with the return of the Adventure Team.
Something mixing the classic Thunderbirds, Rescue Heroes and Jackie Chan adventures. Explore the world to find some lost treasures, rescue lost scientists and battle evil poachers/spies and mysterious creatures...
Exploration vehicles for every terrain and cool gear for your team. Fun for the whole family.

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Agreed. I'd love to see the Adventure Team. Definitely needs sci-fi, but still grounded and realistic. Almost Indiana Jones meets James Bond.

Ninja Force just might work. I could easily see a Legends of the Arashikage cartoon now.

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Yes, parents do expose their parents to Game of Thrones and Dexter. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. Of course, not all parents do this when the kids are super young. Kids get exposure to what their parents like. That's my two cents.

I do like the idea of setting the "GI Joe" brand off to the side and pushing the sub brands for a few years. That's a great idea that would lay the groundwork for bringing it back as a big event.

Well of course. The sooner the parents' parents have a heart attack from the content, the sooner the parents get the inheritance.


And yet there's no smash hit Dexter toyline and no smash hit Game of Thrones toyline.

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Also, if you use the Cobra-La introduced in Devil's Due's Black Horizon Joe/TF crossover comic, these guys would be perfect as adversaries of Adventure Team!

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