Originally published at: G.I. Joe-Transformers crossover film rumored | Boing Boing
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I remember there was at least 1 comic crossover series back in the day.
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There’s been quite a few now. Marvel US and UK did separate ones in the 80s. The UK one never got printed in America but the American one did end up in the British comic years later when they were running out of reprint material.
In the early 2000s when Devil’s Due had the GI Joe license and Dreamwave the Transformers one they did some kind of cross-license thing. Devil’s Due did I think three series, and Dreamwave collapsed after the first issue of their second series came out.
More recently, IDW had the license to both and even though their early stories were clearly wholle separate, they eventually retconned it so the events of the GI Joe comics happened in a timeskip where the Transformers were absent from Earth for years, and now they’re back the Joe team will be part of the force trying to defend Earth from them. There was a lot of crossover between the two comic series at this time, GI Joe characters were regulars in Transformers, and Skywarp was even a member of a GI Joe team for a while.
The movie crossover ideas started around the same time. The IDW comics also crossed over with ROM: Spaceknight, Micronauts, Action Man and MASK as a kind of prototype for a shared cinematic universe, and given Transformers and GI Joe both has movie franchises, one wildly bigger than the other it stood to reason to use one to promote the other, but nothing’s come of it to date.
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This could be fun. I’m looking forward to seeing how the writers (post-strike), manage to juggle the difference in scale between the two properties. I’m put in mind of when the CW had Barry Allen come to Oliver Queen’s rescue in the Green Arrow; and the Flash just brushes aside the League of Assassins like they are nothing.
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I remember the Transformers cartoon where they dealt with Cobra Commander as an old guy called “The Snake”
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it’s the same target market so it all makes sense.
if they wanted to grow their audience, i’d vote for josie and the pussycats meets the transformers… get the autobots in the band, battle of the bands scott pilgrim style, on the opposing side: starscream would make a perfect frontman ( for a metal band obviously; they are made of metal after all ) - so much potential
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The only way I would watch a GI Joe-Transformers crossover flick is if, during the UUUUGE battle set piece where the Joebots doubleteam the Snakeliptacons with a metric f*ckton of BOOOM! WHIZZZ! SCREECH!! POW, the movie cuts demurely to a coffee shop some distance away so Arcee and Lady Jaye can enjoy a 20 minute conversation on the many fascinating properties of slime molds.
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At this point we’ve had more live-action Transformers movies than very young me would have ever thought possible, but there were two complete failures of GI Joe films – which should be so much easier to produce. I don’t get it, and for that reason I don’t think they can successfully pull off a crossover. I guess there’s also the question of their creating a new shared universe or wedging it into the current TF continuity somehow.
For the most part, all of the crossovers mentioned by @lorcan_nagle have been bad or at least not very good. I liked the shared universe approach used in the later Marvel years that explained how Megatron became his Generation 2 form. Some of the other crossovers have been interesting. But I’d say the best was the most recent by Tom Scioli for IDW, which pretty much treated the properties like toys – with the dreamlike storytelling a child would use in playing with all of the toys together. It’s more standout in its approach than anything else. Even better when he released the single-issue movie edition that further distilled than approach in an abridged retelling. I can’t recommend them enough.
That’s all to say that I think the best way to pull this off is to have a truly creative approach to combining the properties. More than just “action movie, big booms, much CGI.” The idea is fun. We should be able to have a fun movie or three.
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That Tom Scioli one was so weird and wonderful.
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Renegade Game Studios recently released a rulebook describing how to create crossovers between three of the main settings for their Essence 20 RPG system. Their suggestions for how to incorporate G.I. Joe characters, Transformers characters, and Power Rangers characters into the same gaming campaign seemed reasonably plausible.
Though perhaps pulling Power Rangers into this crossover wouldn’t be the best of ideas given how the 2017 movie flopped.
One suggestion they give in that rulebook for crossover plots is “Second is Best”, where “Goldar, Destro, and Starscream recognize that their superiors expect their eventual betrayal. However, Rita, Cobra Commander, and Megatron could never plan for their lieutenants to exchange schemes and attempt to overthrow them with powers they never expected.”
I could see Destro and Starscream surprising Cobra Commander and Megatron and forcing them to flee their strongholds, leaving the Joes and the Autobots scrambling to react to this power shift. Though perhaps that would be good as a second movie, after a first has established the alliances between COBRA and the Decepticons and G.I. Joe and the Autobots.
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