You wouldn’t think it would take too much to make a good G.I. Joe movie, right? The concept’s pretty simple: you’ve got the Joes, an American military unit filled with people who each have their own gimmick fighting a terrorist organization also filled with people who each have their own unique, and also a legion of faceless soldiers and/or robots. Just make them fight! And yet, even though directors The Mummy‘s Stephen Sommers and Wicked‘s Jon M. Chu squeezed plenty of that goofiness into their films, no G.I. Joe flick has managed to connect with the public.
Paramount is hoping to right that ship by going to a famous superfan. Comedian Danny McBride has written a new G.I. Joe movie with his The Righteous Gemstones collaborators Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri, and he’s gone back to the cartoons for inspiration. “You’re following Duke and a group of other Joes,” McBride told Josh Horowitz. “There’s that town in the comics, Springfield, which is a town that’s secretly all Cobra. That is where our film takes place.”
Even longtime G.I. Joe fans who don’t read the comics will find the name Springfield compelling, and not just because it reminds them of The Simpsons. Springfield comes from the 1985 two-parter “There’s No Place Like Springfield,” written by comic book legend (and Howard the Duck creator) Steve Gerber.
The episode begins with the naval-themed Joe Shipwreck getting… uh, shipwrecked, and waking up in a sedate hospital. The nurse and doctor explain that he’s a married man, who used information given to him by a respected scientist to help the Joes defeat Cobra once and for all. With the war over, Shipwreck’s free to return to his family in the suburban town of Springfield. Despite the domestic bliss, Shipwreck cannot shake the feeling that something’s wrong, nor can he understand why his wife and neighbors keep asking him about the secret formula he gave to the Joes.
