We rented a romantic movie for the Valentine’s Day long weekend, but before I left the rental place I snuck G.I.Joe into the pile. I’m not really huge on movies that glorify military action or violence, but I grew up with G.I.Joe action figures undertaking daring missions in my sandbox, so I thought it might be fun to watch and reminisce. (I even had the G.I.Joe Base, which my parents got me as a graduation present in Grade 2. Cobra never once conquered it.)

So the movie was okay – it sortof lived up to it’s end of the bargain – lots of explosions and absurd vehicles and weird bad guys, but in being a “grown up” G.I.Joe, it kindof lacked a few of the “oldschool” touches I think it needed. They kept a bunch of esoteric Joe details in (the base in Egypt) but left out a bunch of the major ones that any kid growing up in the 80’s knows.

For starters, everyone knows that G.I.Joe only flies one kind of jet, the ultra-American Navy variable-sweep-wing F14 Tomcat. (Hoo-rah!) All of G.I.Joe’s vehicles are green or white and their missiles are always orange. Their vehicles are bristling with hugely oversized guns, which fire an unlimited number of laserbeams that never hit anyone, but cause spectacular bad-guy helicopter crashes that starts an avalanche or a bridge collapse right in the nick of time.

Cobra commander -always- gets to the control panel of his doomsday weapon first and screams “You’re too late to stop me, G.I. JOE! Muah ha ha!” and activates the supercannon, but discovers that the resourceful second team of soldier misfits have deactivated the core while he was monologuing. As they descend on him he jumps into an escape rocket which launches him into high orbit and a self destruct mechanism destroys the evil base just moments after the Joes escape.

Give me a hundred million bucks and I’ll build a gigantic sandbox and show you how it’s done.