Cutting Joe Down to Size

Another piece of my childhood shrivels and dies. First Kellogg’s bans Toucan Sam and the other cereal-based cartoon characters (the Food Nazis strike again) and now this. It’s bad enough Stephen Sommers, the director of the insufferable Van Helsing and mediocre Mummy franchise, has been tapped to direct the live-action feature film based on the Mattel toy, but now it seems his identity as a symbol of American heroism and bravery will be dropped entirely.

That’s right. G.I. Joe will now be “G.I. JOE” an acronym for “Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity” and ‘Joe’ will no longer be an American soldier but a member ‘international operations team’.

The reason for this decision comes down to two factors – greed and shame. According to Paramount, the studio producing the live-action adaptation, the film would be too difficult to market internationally if ‘Joe’ was an American soldier because of the Iraq war. The international box office receipts are the equivolent of crack to the Hollywood studios. They can release slop which makes only half its money back domestically yet still eke out a profit, more often a pretty decent return, when the world-wide totals come in. This is just the latest example of liberally-biased movie studios who live and work in America and enjoy all the freedoms and comforts it provides being ashamed of being Americans. Let’s not forget when the producers of ‘Superman Returns’ dropped ‘…the American way’ from the famous catch-phrase, ‘Truth, justice, and the American way’.