How come G.I. Joe doesn't reach relevancy like Transformers do?

Question

How come G.I. Joe doesn't reach relevancy like Transformers do?

Why didn’t Inhumanoids?

Robots are cool, humans are cringe.

Transformers is at its core a very simple concept that has a lot of room for all kinds of stories. Plus it's obvious to even an outside observer who knows noting about the franchise what it's about. There's nothing you can realistically misinterpret about "giant space robots who turn into cars". It sets the tone simply by what it is. Plus, giant space robots are a concept that's easy to translate for non-American audiences.

GI Joe is maybe no less simple, but it's also a lot more generic in concept. Soldier dudes who fight terrorists? That's just another dime-a-dozen Hollywood action movie. To someone who knows nothing about the franchise and has no nostalgia for the toy commercials, what's the point? Plus the cartoon roots of the franchise are a lot more jarring to someone with no context. Why don't they act like actual soldiers? Why are all the villains so silly? And so forth. And despite multiple attempts to make them more international, GI Joe is inherently a very "America, fuck yeah!" concept which makes it harder to sell to non-American audiences.

I liked that one anon who said something about how shit like COD and maybe even MGS replaced G.I Joe in a way, Transformers is easy to get everyone to like even with giant robot saturation, but G.I Joe got replaced by shooter games and what not. Idk if it's true, and i feel like i can poke holes in it, but generally i think it's a convincing theory.

G.I Joe got replaced by shooter games

Had Hasbro been smart and got into the game business, GI Joe could've been a household name standing alongside CoD and Battlefield.

Eh, maybe. Games based on existing IPs rarely catch on in a significant way, and Hasbro being Hasbro I'm sure they would've found a way to fuck it up.

Personally i liked the way that one animated series was handling it, bigger emphasis on the spy/agent (in a bond way i guess) aspect compared to open warfare. Actually pretty much just a simplified version of the normal dynamic, sort of like how nu-Joe in Skybound and even the other Joe comics were doing. Very agenty, very secret warfare so to speak, more commandos and shit or whatever.

Games based on existing IPs rarely catch on in a significant way

The High Moon Transformers games were huge. Spidey's also almost always done well game-wise.

Had Hasbro been smart and got into the game business

Like Nintendo

Spider-Man and Batman are two of the only ones that really caught on and managed to sustain a franchise, and they were both already popular in the mainstream before getting their games. Transformers was a nice game but I wouldn't say it really caught on in a mainstream way.

The Cybertron Duology was a big deal at the time. It was Gears of Wars but with Transformers.

Because army stories were fun, when you were a kid and thought it's just good guys beating bad guys, every time. Then 9/11 happened, everyone, even kids realized there's nothing fun about being in army, and it lost interest.

Robots on the other hand will always be cool, until we can build better ones on our own. Once fiction becomes reality, it loses relevancy.

How come G.I. Joe doesn't reach relevancy like Transformers do?

Pretty sure GI Joe was literally Marvel's biggest selling comic at a time. It reeached its relevancy and that relevacy passed.

Then 9/11 happened, everyone, even kids realized there's nothing fun about being in army, and it lost interest.

Bro what? Did you forget when CoD and Battlefield were the shit for years? Kids liked military shooters plenty.

Yeah, play it where they can feel like heroes themselves. Not read about some guy punching another dude in snake outfit.

Not read about some guy punching another dude in snake outfit.

You still claimed 9/11 made kids turn away from military stuff. They didn't. At all, since CoD and Battlefield were HUGE

It's 80s equivalent of Power Rangers: you don't give a single shit unless you were a kid watching it during its heyday.

Because kids like playing with robots that transform into cars more than they like playing with generic soldiers with guns and occasionally swords.

Again, Hasbro should've moved onto video games like Nintendo did.

They did back in the 1980 and were a much better seller going for over a decade uninterpreted. They look like they were going to be a huge hit again in the 2000s and then the Iraq war kick off and fuck everything up.

Fun note: GIJoe movie was suppose to be first but the 2003 Iraq war made them kick it down and start with Transformers which was suffering from lower sales from Energon and Cybertron toys at the time.

They tired three times and they all went bad.

I always wondered why the soldier characters in the original 2007 Transformers movie weren't GI Joe characters like Duke and Roadblock. Would have been a good way to introduce them.

They couldn't contract some good studios to make their shit? Or scout for talented devs to do it in-house?

Hey kid, I'm a computer
Stop all the downloading

Hard to say. Expanded universe stuff like that wasn't seen as a good idea before the Avengers film happen and imo attaching the two brands together is just awful because it always pulls the Transformers front and center for their larger than life presence and mucks up the Military themes. Keep them apart.

Snake eyes is the best part of all the G.I Joe movies. The entirety of Cobra coming in second imo.

They couldn't contract some good studios to make their shit?

They did but no one is a fan of just letting Hasbro hold the keys to the product when they're pouring the resources into it.

Or scout for talented devs to do it in-house?

A talented dev is just going to go make what he wants rather than waste time making your wet dream happen.

You don't know how any of this shit works, do you?

How come G.I. Joe doesn't reach relevancy like Transformers do?

The short answer is probably 911. You can't really make cool terrorist anymore. Nor show human badguys with as much skill and weapons as the Americans.

School cartoons helped kill the action adult genre. Anime put the nail in the coffin by providing that kind of cartoon for cheap. Gi Joe as a concept goes back to adventure pulp books and comics where a boy or adult male would explore a jungle and fight some evil businessman or tribe or voodoo guy and find gold or treasure. Think tin tin or doc Savage or Johnny Quest. GI Joe is the fantasy of kids who read or watched that stuff and had dad's or older brothers in the army from 1939 to 1985. Little boys have no idea what the military does and build up these fantasies of their dad walking through the jungle defeating evil solders discovering treasure. That's a big part of why stuff like GI Joe has nothing to do with what real servicemen do. It's a child projection.

Kids aren't reading this stuff and projecting it upon their dad or brother. They watch anime with 1 on 1 fights.

Transformers servives because they can keep changing it while keeping the main characters and toys.

Season 1 g1 is superhero shit. Everyone has powers. There are doomsday weapons.
Season 2 is star trek, star wars, and a little bit of superhero stuff
Season 3 is mostly star trek and some space horror. New characters don't get new powers. Blurr was the last one to get a power and they started writing him mid season 1.

Beast wars comes in and knocks it out of the park with writing similar to an anime, focusing on a small cast.

Them being aliens or robots shields them from a lot. You will notice that even marvel movies avoid using evil terrorist as villains and tend to use giant masses of aliens, demons, robots, etc

The 9/11 thing is the biggest bullshit excuse because it's the opposite of what happened.
9/11 made people(including kids and teenagers)gravitate more to REALISTIC military depictions
When army stuff is in the news and media everyday...GI Joe came off as cheap and kiddie in comparison. Or more sci-fi military in the vein of GI Joe like MGS has a more gritty feel to it.
Here's the ultimate thing to think about with the franchise- the 80's series was itself a reboot to modernize it. Make it closer to heroes popular in the 80s. Then they just..doubled down on the 80's take in the 2000's, making it more like superheroes than the realistic military stuff that was popular.
Hasbro was trying to sell kids this stuff in a post MGS/Call of duty world. It didn't register as military stuff to them anymore, more like offbrand superheroes.

Third worlder here. I loved GI Joe when I was a little kid and it didn't bother me it was militar propaganda because other heroes like Rambo were the same.

Same, didnt really bother me since i was focused on the cool shit like tanks and ninjas.

you have a chance to spell it out if you think you do

They did but no one is a fan of just letting Hasbro hold the keys to the product when they're pouring the resources into it.

If they're footing the bill, then they ought to produce the product. That's how contracting works.

A talented dev is just going to go make what he wants rather than waste time making your wet dream happen.

With what money? You think that shit grows on trees? They NEED big companies like Hasbro to put bread on the table. Especially decades ago when indie wasn't a thing.

Then they just..doubled down on the 80's take in the 2000's

making it more like superheroes than the realistic military

That's not what doubled down means. Them changing to be more superheros isn't them doubling down. Doubling down would be would be closer to what Devil Due did.

Also it was selling really well but the issue was Hasbro was wanting to pour into the future films so they shifted resources and both Joes and Transformers were repurposed. Transfomers had what is now called the Classics line for one year while Joes got the 25th Anniversary which was suppose to only be a one year project but sold so well they kept it going long after the originally planned 25 figures and it was selling great, until that weird ass 2009 film and that crash and burned so bad it basically took the brand with it.

Guessing kids weren't buying this shit since there wasn't a cartoon for them to give a fuck.

I'm not following your reasoning. There was two DVD/CN movies and the 25th line was selling great. The live action movie did mediocre and the toys sold bad and they never really recovered.
Many think if the movie never happen we would have seen a real return to the decade long ARAH brand with that planned robot wars line for 2007.

It’s boring

as noted it wasn't 9/11 but the Iraq War and all it did was change what movie got made first. What killed it was a mix of Rise of Cobra and The mess called Hub. Joes always sells warmly Hasbro is just really bad doing anything right with the brand.

They NEED big companies like Hasbro to put bread on the table.

Hasbro is a puddle compared to the rest of gaming publishers and you said a talented dev, which wouldn't need to work with an upstart toy company that has a long history of being very hard to work with in TV. Look at the horror stories told about Transfomers Prime, and Beast Wars. If you were really good at making games would you want to work under a company like Hasbro vs any other major gaming publisher?

Look at BG3, Hasbro made them waste six months in rewrites and programing which ruin the 3rd act of the game because Hasbro demanded changes with the Dead Three being directly involved and wanted sexual elements changed. It went so bad Swen Vincke openly stated he won't make any major DLC for it and is just doing what is contractual of them.

Hasbro just likes making things worse, it's in their blood as a company, look at the name of who they have chosen as their current CEO.

Clearly if it did great it’d not be as relatively obscure as it is today

That's not true at all Fantastic Four was one of the best selling Comic Books in the 80s into the start of the 90s, come around 1995 no one would believe that and even now when people share comic sales of the 1980s many get surprised how well it did.

There was two DVD/CN

I was a kid then and I don't remember that shit. Loved the first Transformers though and remember when Animated came out

Fantastic Four was one of the best selling Comic Books in the 80s into the start of the 90s

Bro, comics were niche THEN. They were seen as nerd crap.

This game was so bad but I played the shit out of it anyway out of love for BW and for the OST. The giant Skriix were scary as a kid. They screeched, they moved fast, and they instakilled you up close.
As an adult I think there was some hidden development drama behind the game's creation. The things that were "wrong" in the game (voices, music, environments, plot) were owned by Mainframe. So maybe there were plans for something better but negotiations broke down, or one size raised issues during the development and Mainframe's influence was removed, leaving a hollowed out game.

Bro, comics were niche THEN

one comic sold on average 450,000 copies in 1987.
A big seller would hit the millions of issues sold
Today 450 is a big seller. They are niche now and were actually more relevant then.

comics in the 80s and 90s

niche

in 1992 Spawn #1 sold 1.7 Million copies
biggest selling book in 2024 was Absolute Batman #1 with 450k copies sold

one comic sold on average 450,000 copies in 1987

Bro, that's ass.

I mean GI Joe in the 2000s didn't do that well with kids in particular, like what anon mentioned.
Two pack-in DTV movies and a cancelled show on 4kids isn't much
One thing people don't mention s that GI Joe had an active adult fanbase in the 2000s already. I think it's possible many of those sales were adults armybuilding toys..not necessarily kids. Because as far as most kids in the 2000s, most were like
and just never saw the 2000s media