Life Lessons From A Megalomaniacal Madman

I used to say that I hardly watched "GI Joe" when I was a kid, but it turns out that I watched more "GI Joe" than I gave myself credit for.

For the uninitiated, "GI Joe" was about a group of American soldiers who had their own specific specialties that would be used in highly improbable situations to save the world. There was the sailor, the demolitions guy, and the one who could heal paper cuts. When the president of the world was delaying the signing of a "freedom for everyone" act, it was that paper cut guy who came to the rescue! Oh, and GI Joe's nemesis was a worldwide terrorist organization call Cobra whose commander was named... can you guess? Cobra Commander! They, like GI Joe, had their own planes, tanks, aircraft carriers, and laser beam shooting satellites. If today's "War on Terror" were fought against Cobra, I don't think we'd stand a chance, especially since the paper cut guy retired last year.

Moving on...

GI Joe: The Movie grossed me out a bit, but it was cool and also a growth experience. In the movie, it's revealed that Cobra is just a branch campus of a greater organization, Cobra-La. Cobra-La was actually a whole other world in some remote part of Earth where people used giant insect creatures as tools. It was like the Flintstones, except with much more slime and lots of segmented eyes. Plus, the people were part insect or part reptile or part both. Cobra-La's leader, Golobulus, was this muscular guy with a giant reptile-egg-thing where his legs should be. It's later revealed that he's actually half-snake, like the Little Mermaid but without the fin or the red hair, and that egg-thing was basically a dress. A disgusting membrane-dress. And Golobulus wanted everyone on Earth to appreciate his gut-wrenching fashion sense, so he commissioned satellites to activate spores that would turn all humans into half-snakes. It's like Golobulus's cousin said, "It's not easy being green."

So why was this movie a growth experience for me? Well, Cobra Commander, no longer the top dog snake in the eyes of GI Joe, gives Golobulus some sass so Golobulus punishes Cobra Commander by testing the spores on him. At first the spores do very little, but eventually Cobra Commander goes blind and starts losing his humanity as he becomes a full-fledged giant snake. As his last act of humanity, Giant Snake Cobra Commander saves a GI Joe to show that though he was physically de-evolving, he had still grown.

It was this plot line that affected me most because I remember being about nine years old and feeling bad for Cobra Commander. That was likely the first time I sympathized with an antagonist. All of the other antagonists at the time were easy to hate. Skeletor: always evil. Megatron: always evil. Shredder: always evil. Cobra Commander: evil until uber-evil came and beat his ass and then turned him into a monster.

Those other villains showed the world was black and white, good and evil, forever. Cobra Commander, who was painted not only as GI Joe's foe but also the whole world's enemy, showed a world that is many shades of gray, where the hunter can become the hunted, and where the ones you hate can become the ones you sympathize with. For all of GI Joe's lessons about crossing the street and sharing, it was Cobra who taught me about the granularity of the real world where there are bad guys and there are really bad guys, so the "regular" bad guys might actually have more in common with you than you think. You know that jerk at work who's always jerking around with his jerk face and his jerk attitude? When there's a hostile takeover bid from Snake Spore, Inc., that jerk will suddenly become your friend as you work to keep from becoming unemployed or, worse yet, half snake. And hopefully after the Snake Spore Crisis is over, you'll still be friends -- but he'll still have that jerk face.

Whoever says that television and movies don't teach kids anything useful should watch the GI Joe: The Movie to know that it's possible. And it's important to know that because knowing is half the battle.

Also an excellent piano teacher.

What ever happened to Chester Cheetah and the Twix rabbit? They're roommates in rehab.