I recently went to see the new Transformers film, Rise of the Beasts. I'm not going to write a review of it, as I'm struggling to find a vein. It's a very adequate movie, that does everything it chooses to do in a mediocre and inoffensive manner. One thing it did do though was tease a shared universe with G.I. Joe, Hasbro's toy soldier brand. That's had a few movies too, but those didn't gain traction like the Transformers have. Say want you want about the Transformers films, but everybody has heard of them. G.I. Joe is also going to be part of the new Transformers comic series by Skybound, echoing the Revolutionaries thing of 2017 and the much more obscure Unit: E of circa 2013. Hasbro seems to want G.I. Joe to be a thing. They seem to want it very badly. More generally, they want to have a shared universe with all their properties, but they seem to see G.I Joe as the key part of those plans. So, the Joes are set to piggyback off the success of Transformers. Speaking purely as a Transformers fan this always bemused me, as Transformers fans are a group famous for not liking the human characters that convention demands be there. I'd imagine fans of Kaiju movies have similar feelings. But, let's put Transformers aside, let's try and separate that as much as possible from the discussion. Instead, let me discuss the reasons why G.I. Joe may not be able to be a worldwide success.
G.I. Joe has actually been around for a very long time, the first prototype being made in 1963. It started out as an attempt to make dolls for boys, by adopting a military theme and using the somewhat euphemistic term “action figures”. Yeah, we don’t have time to unpack that just now, but if you’re getting a vaguely, shall we say, conservative angle? Well, you’re not actually wrong, war toys generally aren’t left wing. G.I. Joe gained significant-if-cyclic success, including international licensees such as Action Man, but it wasn’t until 1982 we got what is largely considered to be the definitive iteration, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. This reworked the concept from doll-sized toy to a 3.75 inch scale in imitation of Kenner’s Star Wars toys, something that lowered costs and allowed for easier implementation of vehicles. They also took the opportunity to add fiction to the toyline, but of a kind that stepped away from specific, real world organisations. Even in the early days, war toys had periods of being unfashionable or politically unpopular. This gave us G.I. Joe as an organisation, rather than simply an individual, versus the terrorist organisation Cobra, and endless toyetic war materiel. That toyline ran for 12 consecutive years, and has had several revivals since.
With the historical place of G.I. Joe established, I feel that there are two massive and unavoidable barriers to the franchise being a global brand, the inescapable real-world connection and the ubiquity of the “toy soldier” concept. Basically, if you don’t know the fiction, G.I. Joe struggles to have a unique selling point versus any of number military-themed toys. And if you do? G.I. Joe looks like a tone-deaf recruitment ad, something of intense interest to stereotypically patriotic Americans and ageing 80’s kids, but of lesser interest to the world at large. Please, don't anybody yell at me about putting politics in your toys, it's baked in. G.I. Joe is patriotic military fiction made by the USA. Such things do not travel well. If country Y makes something that casts it's military in a positive light, the rest of the alphabet are not gonna be predisposed to like such things, and may very well look to their military for such needs. Perhaps the only kind of patriotic military fiction with multinational appeal is one where you are slaughtering Nazis. This is because the primary function of a military is to, well, kill people on the other side of a border. I shouldn't need to give examples, this is a self-evident truth of human history. And Hasbro knows this. It is why G.I. Joe was rebranded into Action Force, and other names for foreign markets. It is also an implicit reason why G.I. Joe got reworked in the 80's with a He-Man style naming scheme. They needed a bunch of baddies to fight whom weren't obviously another nation. So they made a home-grown terrorist organisation called Cobra. It worked, for a time. We largely would not be talking about G.I. Joe if it hadn't found a niche. It had found a way to do military toys without the baggage of real world groups, and real world bloodshed. Then the War on Terror happened. I will not be flippant or otherwise downplay those events, but I will gesture towards the tragedy associated with that time, the scar it left on the American national character, the effect it had on international politics, and its substantial body-count. With that in mind, the idea of a toyline about an American special forces group hunting terrorists seems in poor taste. It also seems a bad thing to try to work into a cinematic universe which is trying to be an international success.
At this point, a disagreeing reader might ask why it matters what foreigners think? Perhaps you feel that I’m overthinking it, you’re cool with G.I. Joe's overall vibe, and think its fine for your children. Maybe you used the term “snowflake”? You do you. But it matters if you want G.I. Joe to be some kind of big international cultural touchstone, as Hasbro so clearly does. G.I. Joe is unavoidably tied to the reputation of the USA. That is a highly variable factor. It's brand name is no more than a term for a US infantryman, followed by the phrase “A Real American Hero”. You look at its contemporaries and you realise how weird that is. Everything else was a step or two removed from real life, still products of their time, but not bound to it. This is why they've been so open to reboots. GI Joe? Not so much. Its not impossible to do patriotic American stuff that sells elsewhere, see Captain America for example, but he benefited from being a time-displaced Nazi-puncher. Everybody loves a Nazi-puncher. Top Gun maybe? NCIS? But otherwise examples are few. If you take out American militarism, what's left? And what goes in the hole left behind? According to Hasbro & Skybound, the answer to the latter is "be a human response to Transformers", akin to Sector Seven and NEST from the Bay Films, at which point you' d be asking why they'd call it G.I. Joe? And yes, I am aware of G.I Joe: Renegades, not a bad of way doing it, I acknowledge, but that didn’t stick, did it? Not all things can be timeless successes, and G.I .Joe could very well be fated to be a mainly American thing. And there's nowt wrong with that. America is a big market, and people do like tanks and army men. Although, that’s also part of the problem.
Having dealt with my more inflammatory takes on the G.I. Joe, and resisted the temptation to reference Team America: World Police, and I’m now going to talk about the other barrier, its issues with a Unique Selling Point. It comes down to the fundamentals of a toy based property, the actual toys and their issues with ubiquity. Let us consider the humble ball. Its a classic feature of play and sport. The concept is thousands of years old, and while there are variations and reinventions, were talking about something fundamental to culture at this point. A ball is something you can pretty much get anywhere and is made by any number of companies. Logically, there should be a premier ball brand, like whatever the World Cup uses, but would people the wider population give such a thing any thought at all? Its everywhere, and therefore not acknowledged or considered in any depth. The play pattern of G.I. Joe is in a similar position. While the concept of “action figure + vehicle” is a relatively recent one, toy soldiers have a history going back to at least the 18th century, and even as far back as 2500BC if we consider “tiny representation of a warrior” to be the same thing. Not only has this sort of thing been around for an almost geographical timescale, there’s a great many companies doing pretty much the same thing as G.I. Joe at various prices. What innovations G.I. Joe brought are now the standard. Military-looking action figures are an established thing. They seem to sell without a cartoon. And if you like military-looking stuff, there’s plenty of it that’s based on actual militaries. And if you want military stuff that isn’t based on real stuff, you can go to Star Wars or Warhammer 40K. I mean, there’s some nasty stuff in those two if you look seriously at ‘em, but they aren’t hobbled in the first place by their own names. If you are not already invested in G.I. Joe as a concept, what are the toys bringing to the table? Does G.I. Joe have a unique selling point? I find myself wondering if it does.
None of the above is me suggesting G.I Joe is somehow bad. There’s positives to be found most things, and its entirely possible for talented creatives to make G.I. Joe a success in modern times. But what’s going to get in the way of G.I. Joe, is, frankly, G.I. Joe. And Hasbro asking £105 for this.
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