Somewhat lost in the shuffle of news reports regarding the official launch of Hasbro and Discovery Kids’ “The Hub” kid’s network were some good comments that came from Margot Loesch, President and CEO of The Hub.  GeekTyrant.com caught the press conference, and summed up the quotes quite nicely.  Talking about rebooting G.I. Joe and Transformers, Ms. Loesch had this to say:

“Absolutely, we look forward to it. They’ve got some engaging characters, some great stories, and it’s really sort of come full circle. When we were producing the shows years ago, we knew that we had something special with some of those programs. It’s fun to reinvigorate them now, reinvent them and come back and bring new programming.”

From the sounds of it, they’re looking to build upon the franchise’s success, but won’t necessarily be tying the new animated series directly to the film universe, which is cool, I think.  It’s always a tough line to walk with cartoons based on a covert ops military team who use weapons to kill terrorists on a regular basis, but I think that the animated universe can still be fun and engaging without being overly violent.  It sounds like folks at The Hub think so, too:

“This is for kids and their families. We really think that there’s going to be some broad appeal. Clearly, from a content perspective, we don’t want to air anything that’s inappropriate for kids age 6-12, but is the storytelling going to be engaging for you and me? Absolutely. When we sit in a room and write stories, we’re doing it to entertain ourselves. We’re trying to challenge our own imaginations. That’s why I don’t think we’ll disappoint the old fans, we won’t disappoint the teens.”

It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.  I’ve long said a G.I. Joe cartoon would be tough to pull off, but not impossible.  There doesn’t have to be death and killing, just don’t over-stupify it.  Recent animated fare like Spectacular Spider-Man, and Wolverine & the X-Men prove that you can make good cartoons that don’t cater to just the kids’ audience.  We’ll see if they can succeed in the same way with G.I. Joe.  Thanks to friend of GeneralsJoes m6d for the link!