The Powers-That-Be in the film world continue to strip-mine the pop-culture of my youth in order to find new film properties to develop. The latest? a live-action GI:JOE, based on the 80s 3¾ inch line.

Given today’s political climate, Hollywood’s track record with these kind of properties (I think Transformers was an exception – any movie with big giant robots fighting in it already has an obvious advantage), and the fact that the director is Stephen Sommers, I pretty much wrote this one off.

See, I was a big fan of this one. Not so much the cartoon series, which was kind of lame (not that I didn’t watch it religiously), but rather the Marvel Comics series, which was surprisingly well-written for a book based on a toy line, running for almost 10 years and 155 issues in the main series, plus another few dozen in spin-offs. GI Joe got me into comics. This was the first and only comic where I had an honest-to-goodness subscription! I still have all my issues, and occasionally scour eBay and convention tables to fill the holes in my run.

Call me a nerd all day long, but there was no way were they going to make a coherent movie that lived up to the comic canon.

Then yesterday, I saw this, the first image of Ray “Darth Maul” Park in his Snake-Eyes togs:

I’ll be damned if that doesn’t just look just about perfect. They’ve got the Arashikage ninja-clan symbol there and everything.

This movie’s still probably going to be awful, but I have a small undercurrent of optimism: First, this shot looks really good. Secondly, the production has Larry Hama, the guy who wrote both the lion’s share of the comic run, and all the original file cards on the toy packaging, on the payroll. He’s probably more “fan goodwill ambassador” than actual contributor, but it’s a nice nod, and maybe he might be able to keep things from getting really bad.

Dare I hope for something that doesn’t completely suck?