I Wanted To Leave A Trail Of Dead And Mangled Bodies

Well, not too many dead and mangled bodies, but a few.

One of the things that bothered me about the very first G.I. Joe mini-series was characters escaping from what would otherwise be certain death in real life.

Unlike the movies you don’t have big fireball explosions go off near you without it doing significant damage, often fatal.  I’d been in the Army long enough to know the weapons that the military uses aren’t glorified fireworks but deliberately deadly high explosives.

But Hasbro -- for entirely understandable reasons -- didn’t want the realistic effects of modern weapons shown.

I argued for realism, pointing out we didn’t have to fill the screen with carnage, but if we killed off one or two non-product characters a week it would impress on kids that war wasn’t a big game.

Hasbro agreed, but still said no.

So I snuck a body count in.

Whenever I wrote or edited a script for the series, I tried to have somebody seriously injured to the degree they needed medical help (even if they got better by the next day’s episode), or else have Duke or Flint mention in a matter of fact way that the Joes had sustained X percentage of casualties in a battle, “casualties” meaning dead and wounded in military parlance.

I don’t think Hasbro ever caught on, but I hope it stuck in the minds of enough of our viewers that it made them more cognizant of the human cost of combat as they grew older.

Of course, they okayed Duke’s death for G.I. Joe: The Movie and actually animated and recorded the scene as written, but in the blowback after bumping off Optimus Prime in the Transformers movie, they hastily re-dubbed the moment to explain Duke was just in a coma.

(Of course Optimus, being a robot, could and eventually would be repaired and returned to the product line, while Duke, a human being, logically could not, so Duke’s death actually had some dramatic weight.  The problem was the Transformers movie audience were younger kids who typically had to be taken to the movies by their parents.  I can just imagine those poor moms and dads, sitting there watching what to them must have been an incomprehensible swirl of animation and noise, suddenly having to deal with hysterical, weeping children and not having any idea what caused it.)

Hasbro wasn’t being venal in all this, they were conscientiously trying to make a good product for their audience.  As part of that effort -- and to make the Joes more palatable to parents and various critics of kid vid at the time -- they launched their famous “…and knowing is half the battle” public service announcements.

These were sincere little vignettes to help kids with real problems they might face, but as I said done mostly to demonstrate there was some pro-social value to the series.

They once asked me to come up with some ideas for these PSAs.

Once.

I said, “Well, since we’re doing a military themed show, shouldn’t our PSAs have some sort of military tie in to them?

“For example, tell the kids when they make their molotov cocktails to fill the bottle a quarter full of powdered soap first.  This way when it hits the burning gasoline will stick to the target.”

There was a long pause and then they said, “Okay, has anybody besides Buzz got any ideas for PSAs?”

© Buzz Dixon