Community Review: Season 5 Episode 11 “G.I. Jeff”

A mostly animated parody of the G.I. Joe cartoon series. “Um… okay, sure,” I thought to myself, as nowadays I just tend to roll with shit. This is one of several alternate universe episodes this season after all: the one where the floor was lava, the one where the campus turned into a dystopian land of people being ranked socially by a phone app called “Meow Meow Beans,” and the episode where an “ass crack bandit” was on the loose putting quarters in people’s butt cracks. Those are merely the ones I can think of off the top of the dome. So anyway… the G.I. Joe parody.

SPOILER ALERT: Joel is not actually an animated G.I. Joe. I could go into why he is imagining he’s a G.I. Joe… wait, no, I will do that now. It’s his 40th birthday, so he drinks a bottle of Scotch, and takes bogus youth pills from Korea town. This causes him to go into a… whatever, and imagine he is in the animated G.I. Joe universe. Interspliced with Joel and the rest of the gang in cartoon Joe-land are commercials of Joel and the gang as action figures, which is of course a way to play around with the fact the animated Joe show was designed to sell action figures.

Much like the animated version of David Slade’s film Hard Candy was designed to sell those lovable toys, such as the Hayley toy, with a bottle of Windex. No that wasn’t really a… right, so yeah.

Is It Good?

It’s pretty funny, but the “alternate universe” card, or the “just short of an alternate universe” card, has been played too much. A once-in-a-while episode where the characters are in a new scenario which is a parody of this movie, or that cartoon, is wildly entertaining. However, when our characters are dressing up every other episode, that’s when the special quality of it starts to fade. I liked this episode. “G.I. Jeff” was funny, and for a change the moral seemed to be one which resonated: don’t dwell on your age, just live your life. So, I’d probably go back and watch this one again. However, as it plays in the order it has aired in this season… I don’t know, man. At least it wasn’t fucking puppets again. Not, like, fucking puppets, but fucking…puppets… you know what I mean.