I was living in Germany in housing set up by the U.S. Army when the 1980's wave of G.I. Joe hit.  I was barely old enough to get a couple of 12" action dolls (from Battlestar Galactica) in the late 70's but the 3 & 3/4" action figure craze than Kenner kicked off with Star Wars led to a full-on obsession with G.I. Joe by 1983.  My first G.I. Joe figure was not Snake Eyes or Rock n' Roll--it was Grunt, the plain old infantry guy.  He had a helmet and a machine gun and he looked like my dad when he was all dressed in his Army greens.  The military folks on base were going through some sort of Germany-wide combat exercise so I saw my dad dressed in fatigues and boots every day, so when the first wave of G.I. Joe figures hit the shelves at our local PX, I got the guy who looked most like my dad.

If you had told me that these figures were just made for Army brats, I would have believed you.  There was no cartoon or comic book yet--just the toys with the ID cards on the package and the pictures of the other figures that I could look for.  Next, I got Stalker, and eventually the others.  Collecting G.I. Joe figures became the hobby--moreso than even playing with them.  I'm sure that I made forts out of blankets and I remember once getting a Snake Eyes figure stuck up on some kid's roof when the make-shift parachute didn't open, but mostly what I remember about the toys was the act of buying them.  When I was back stateside, monthly trips to Toys R Us or the mall were often preceded by a telephone call that I would beg my mom to make to see if the stores had the new Storm Shadow or Zartan figure.  Showing up at one of those stores, racing for the action figure isle, and flipping through carded figures on the endcap to find the one buried Zap or Firefly, or Barbeque was great fun.  All of the excitement about finding and unpackaging the figures overwhelmed what I would actually do with them once I had them in hand.

The first comic book I ever bought was G.I. Joe #9, the one with Scarlett hanging out of a helicopter.  I was a few months late to the party, but I eventually got every issue back to number 1 (though I had to settle for a second printing of the rare issue 2) and I kept with the series up until about issue 65.  When I went to my first comic book convention in Virginia, my main goal was to score a copy of G.I. Joe #27, the second part of the Snake Eyes origin.  To this day I still have that book in my collection, along with #1.

The comics, the toys, the cartoon--my world sort of revolved around that stuff from 1982-1987.  I finally gave up interest in the toys when I thought that I was too old to have toys anymore, but I always kept tabs on the franchise--watching as they tried to revitalize the concept with G.I.Joe Extreme after the horribly failed animals and aliens and wave after wave of stupid ninjas.  I don't recall if any of that was really all that worthwhile (I'm guessing it wasn't that great) but I've always had a fond place in my memory for G.I. Joe, going back to the days when the toys worked to draw out my fantasies about what my dad's world was all about.

Two decades later, G.I. Joe has finally been given the big screen treatment, and it succeeds as a big budget spectacle wrought from the mind of a 10 year old boy.  It's almost as if the film had been put together by a 10 year old with a fetish for cool military stuff but with no concept at all of how guns and jets and even computers work in the real world.  That the movie is a completely childish fantasy doesn't really bother or surprise me.  That it winds up straddling the line between that 10 year old's vision and a movie set in the real world, does.

What I guess I used to love about G.I. Joe was how it worked like a super hero comic book, but with normal(ish) people.  Other than Zartan, there weren't really any characters in the Joe universe that had seemingly superhuman abilities, they were just well-trained and heavily-armed Army Men.  They were like the cool, idealized version of my dad, but they got to have great adventures and they got to fight nefarious bad guys who weren't ever as much of a threat as the real bad guys (the Russians--hey, it was the 80's!)  G.I. Joe was pure escapism.  It was ninja fights and guys with masks and cool helmets and every character was at least a little unique because that's how they sold the toys.  what I found lacking in a big way in the G.I. Joe movie was that sense of wackiness of Gung Ho fighting in a blue jean vest and Zartan leading a biker gang with chainsaws.  The movie was silly and it threw reality to the wind recklessly, but it still tried to make the costumes and vehicles and sets seem kind of real.  I wanted the Village People version of the G.I. Joe squad, but what I got were barely characterized cool kids in black body armor who all seemed pretty interchangeable when the story was over.

I think that there are two ways you can go with a G.I. Joe live action movie, if you're determined to make one.  The first is to make a straight-up cartoon with a hissing Cobra Commander, legions of Cobra troops in blue military uniforms, lazer guns, and the rag tag group of Village People Joes who have to stop them.  This is mostly the direction that the movie took.  On the other hand, you can take the concept of an elite military counter-terrorism force a bit more seriously, give the characters some gravitas and back story and drama that relates to why they are in the Joes organization, and give them real villains to fight.  G.I. Joe could be a little more grounded, and it could play out like The Dirty Dozen meets The Fast & The Furious, and this movie TRIES a little of that too.  The problem is, you can't have both in the same film.  The basic divide is between Tim Burton's Batman and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.  Burton made a live action comic book and he didn't stop to make sense of any of it.  Nolan took the idea of Batman and made a real crime movie that just pushed the boundaries of reality enough to make Christian Bale look cool in a cowl.  Both are completely valid, fun, and worthwhile approaches to the same subject, but if Burton's Batman were a little more grounded or if Nolan's a little more over-the-top, neither would work.  With G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra that was the problem.  The film was a little too stupid to be taken seriously and a little too stiff (thinking about the costumes and the approach to Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, and Zartan specifically) to be fun.

Everyone seems to be saying that this is a dumb but fun two hours spent at the movies.  I wish that I could agree about the 'fun' part.  I grew up on and then grew out of G.I. Joe, and I guess that there's just not enough of that 10 year old left in me to find this kind of entertainment... fun.  Maybe the problem is me; that I spent all those years collecting the toys and comics and not really realizing that the story behind them was ultimately stupid but fun.  I'm not sure.  I do know that I've got my old G.I. Joe comics out of the box and I'm about to dive into them to see why I ever cared in the first place.