PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological* (2) sociological, psychological*
In my review of THE FACE OF FUMANCHU I wrote:
The only literary virtue of racist fictions is that they give the writers a motivation to create the most delirious forms of evil they can imagine, and then project them onto the representatives of what has been termed (rather simplistically) “the Other.”
In this post I’ll be dealing with two
animated films, both of which were spun off from cartoon teleseries
properties. None of the iterations of these
properties focused totally upon racial/ethnic myths after the example of Sax Rohmer’s “Fu
Manchu” novel series. Still, I surmise that modern
Marxist ideological readings would see objectionable content
in both franchises, though for different reasons in each case.
The history of the G.I. Joe
telecartoon franchise is relatively simple.
Though the “G.I. Joe” line of masculine toys (later dubbed “action
figures”) dates back to 1964, the property did not beget an animated
cartoon until said toy line was reinvented in the 1980s. In that version “G.I. Joe” became the name of a
group of American-based anti-terrorist specialists. Though the organization maintained the
semblance of a hierarchy like that of the U.S. Armed Forces, the individual
“Joes” sported names and costumes more comparable to superheroes than to
soldiers. In an earlier era such a group
of eccentric adventure-heroes probably would have squared off against
Communists or crime syndicates. But
1980s telecartoons were strongly influenced by the so-called “political
correctness” meme. Thus G.I. Joe’s main
opponent was a “terrorist organization” named Cobra, though unlike most real-world terrorists Cobra had no ties to
any nation or ethnicity. Since the Joes
included a diverse representation of races, creeds, and colors, they could be
safely labeled “American.” However, to
impute any ethnicity or national origin to the villains of Cobra—the fanatical
leader Cobra Commander, his weapons-maker Destro, and many others—might have
drawn criticism that the show was stigmatizing real peoples by making them the
targets of heroic wrath in a kid’s cartoon.
G.I. JOE—THE MOVIE breaks slightly
with this program. For the first time in an animated "G.I. Joe" cartoon, it’s stated that the Cobra organization has its origins in a mysterious
place called “Cobra-la,” patently a jokey invocation of the famous “Shangri-La”
Tibetan paradise of the James Hilton novel LOST HORIZON. Thematically the weird denizens of Cobra-la
have less in common with Hilton’s saintly Tibetans than with Fu Manchu. Just as the mad Chinese doctor specialized in
making weapons out of all manner of bizarre plants and animals, Cobra-la’s
people—who are not literally Asian—also produce all manner of weird genetic
mutations, most of which are weird man-eating plants, colossal insects, and
anything else that suggests a more primitive, and hence more grotesque,
civilization. Early in the story
Cobra-la’s ruler “Golobulus” (Burgess Meredith) appears before the leaders of
Cobra. He announces that his people have
long been the power behind Cobra, and that they’re taking over thanks to Cobra
Commander’s many blunders. For good
measure, Golobulus causes Cobra Commander— formerly a native of Cobra-la—to undergo an
evolutionary regression, gradually transforming him into a snake with partial
human memories.
The Joes only find out about the
new players in the game when the Cobra-la agents lead a successful raid on a
new Joe super-weapon, an energy-transmitting device. A new character—name of Lt. Falcon (Don
Johnson)— is partly responsible for the raid’s success, having sluffed off his
duties to chat up a lady friend, who is in reality a Cobra agent. Falcon’s failure becomes the “B-story” of the
movie, as Falcon—brother to regular character “Duke”—must redeem himself by
undergoing intensive retraining.
Fittingly, given that G.I. JOE is a cartoon version of the military,
Falcon receives his retraining from “Sergeant Slaughter,” a new character in
the JOE universe though he was based on the persona of a popular wrestler of
the period, one who dressed up like a boot-camp topkick. In addition, Falcon’s boot-bunkmates include
a guy who dresses like a basetball player and a female martial-artist who does
her best fighting with her eyes closed.
At this point, any references to the real world of military behavior
begin to seem almost “camp.”
Falcon does finally shape up and
fly right. Perhaps in dererence to the stature of the movie star voicing him,
Falcon gets to be the hero who principally triumphs over Golobulus, although
the climax pretty much gives everyone in the populous regular cast the chance
to put the slug on a bug, or at least a bug-using evildoer. Though the regular teleseries was only
sporadically inventive, I have to credit the animators on this project with
having reached the same delirious heights of inventiveness seen in the Sax
Rohmer novels. Most amusingly, as if to
invoke (very indirectly) another “Eastern” enemy, the inhabitants of “Cobra-la”
go into battle yelling the name of their country, using the same sort of ululation
that some Americans associate with Muslim terrorists.
In short, G.I. JOE—THE MOVIE
manages to have its cake and eat it too.
The heroes wrap themselves in the vesture of Americanism, though to be
sure the JOE ethos celebrates a multicultural America. Their enemies indirectly suggest the “mysterious
East,” but they seem non-ethnic at first glance. Cobra-la itself is one with
the bowels of the Earth, prolifically producing monsters as did Greek
earth-goddesses like Gaea and Echidna.
The action is always fast and furious; a lot of live-action
adventure-films could take a lesson or two from this cartoon. And though none of the characters possess any
depth, the villain Cobra Commander provides some affecting moments. To avenge his mutation by his masters, he
allies himself to the Joe named Roadblock when the latter becomes blinded. This brings about a strong visual sequence as
the snake-man rides the blind Joe’s back, telling him where to go and how to
carry vital intelligence back to the good guys.
The franchise JONNY QUEST presents a more complicated case, since it
went though more iterations. The
original 1964-65 teleseries appeared during what some might call the last “bad
old days” of American pulp entertainment, before political correctness took
hold in the 1970s. As I said before, at
no time was QUEST specifically about racial concepts as was Fu Manchu. Rather, QUEST was the embodiment of boys’
adventure fiction. This meant that the
titular hero Jonny and his entourage—father Benton, older companion Race,
same-age buddy Hadji and dog Bandit—were forever bouncing around the globe
having harrowing exploits in every clime that suggested exotic allure. Of the four humans in the entourage, only the
East Indian boy Hadji was “non-white,” though happily the animators were
foresighted enough to make Hadji sound like a real boy rather than exclusively
an exotic stereotype. I don’t know that
any societal watchdogs of the period protested when the mostly-white
Quest-group had run-ins with marginalized nonwhite peoples in episodes like
“Pursuit of the Pohos” or “A Small Matter of Pygmies.” In that era, the watchdogs were more
concerned with the “monkey-see, monkey-do” effects of fictional violence.
However, though the original 1960s series remained popular in televised reruns
for many years, political correctness made it unlikely for the next two
incarnations of the franchise to show new versions of the Quests beating up on
pygmies. The Asian evildoer Doctor Zin,
the Quests’ only recurring antagonist— who was essentially the show’s tip of
the hat to Fu Manchu—did survive, but as JONNY QUEST VS. THE CYBER INSECTS
shows, he did so only in what might considered a “deracinated” form.
CYBER, the last telecartoon
produced from the QUEST franchise, takes its cue from the previous teleseries
from the 1996 reboot-series, noteworthy for introducing a girl-character to the
Quest-team: Race Bannon’s teenaged daughter Jessie. In contrast to the JOE film, both the
animation and the story-pacing of CYBER is sluggish and unremarkable, except
for one sequence. The opening of the
telemovie shows Jonny and Hadji dashing pell-mell through a thick jungle,
chased by numerous hostile-looking tribesmen, many of whom wear huge masks
suggestive of those worn by native African tribes. The boys dodge their
pursuers, clamber past the fence of a deserted village, and try to steal a
brilliant sapphire from the hands of a giant pagan idol—
Then the filmmakers—who seem to
have had some notion of recreating the “bad old days” of the original
series—pull the rug out from under the viewer.
It’s revealed that the suspenseful chase was not a matter of literal
peril, but that the two boys were undergoing a test of manhood in accordance
with the culture of the tribesmen.
Despite the quasi-African look of the masks, the natives turn out to be
an unspecified tribe of South Americans, and the ritual is taking place under
the scrutiny of Jonny’s father Benton and guardian Race.
This inversion of old pulp-clichés
is not bad in itself. It’s only bad when
it seems forced and obligatory, as I showed earlier in my review of the CONAN THE ADVENTURER cartoon, where a tribe of black African cannibals created by
Robert E. Howard are predictably rendered as white guys. In similar fashion CYBER dispels the boogieman
of alleged racism by depicting the tribesmen as predictably wise and
beneficent. However, this is a petty
crime next to the film’s rewriting of Jonny Quest, for he fails his trial of
manhood due to being an irresponsible hothead. “Classic Jonny” was indeed
impulsive, but more often than not, he showed good judgment in perilous
situations.
Again, there’s nothing
intrinsically wrong with making the hero a “square peg” that must be hammered
into society’s round hole for the greater good.
Lt. Falcon in the aforementioned JOE movie gets
some modest mileage out of the trope. But as CYBER chugs along—revealing the
insidious Doctor Zin’s plan to conquer the world with the help of giant
bio-engineered insects— the script doesn’t have Jonny reach his new
understanding of “team spirit” with any insight. He just keeps making impulsive mistakes until
at one point, he finally gets it together.
The other characters—who were also simple but vivid types in the classic
version—lack any of their old vivacity, with the script giving none of them any new tweaks or developments.
I said that Doctor Zin may have been intentionally “deracinated.” By that I meant
that while his original incarnation is clearly Asian, in CYBER Zin looks like a
cadaverous old man, and I'm not sure one would note his Asian heritage if one had never seen the character before. It occurred to me
that it’s a little ironic that in his last (thus far) cartoon appearance, Zin
is associated with insect-monsters, much as Fu Manchu was associated with
insidious creepy-crawlies like scorpions and centipedes. However, in contrast to the way G.I. JOE
makes occasional references to matters Eastern, there’s no strong evidence that
CYBER’s producers had recalled this facet of
“oriental evil,” so it may just be a fortuitous coincidence.
The film ends with Jonny and Hadji
finally completing their South American trial by fire, insisting once again on
the value of cooperation with mind-numbing insistence. As a last fillip in the direction of
political correctness, though nothing has been said about the trial being a
guys-only thing, Jonny invites Jessie to share in the triumph, in order to
perpetuate warm fuzzies all around.
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