Creature Commandos and the Righteous Joy of Watching Nazis Die On Screen
Sometimes, it's just nice to imagine that people admit Nazis still exist and want them stopped.
“James Gunn thinks I’m a Nazi.”
That thought shot through my mind when I interviewed him in October about the animated series he produced, Creature Commandos. I had asked Gunn what I considered a fairly sensible question about the third episode of the series, in which GI Robot (brought to life with an incredible voice performance from Gunn’s brother Sean) gleefully guns down Nazis, of both the 1940s German and 2020s American variety.
Given the way Gunn’s boss David Zaslav has been willing to sacrifice everything from the legacy of HBO to completed movies for the bottom line, I was surprised that he could make a superhero show unequivocal about the evils of Nazism today and yesterday. But when I asked if he got any pushback, Gunn laughed, as did the stars with him, Frank Grillo, Steve Agee, and Maria Bakalova.
“Did I question the decision to kill Nazis?” he asked incredulously. As I babbled to clarify my question, he continued, declaring sarcastically, “Yes, I’m very brave to be so anti-Nazi.”
To be clear, I don’t hold any of this against Gunn. It was a Zoom call during an endless train of junkets for him and I don’t do very many interviews. I’m sure someone else would have asked the question with more clarity and got a cleaner response.
Still, I’m kinda happy with not only how the interview turned out (you can read it here!), but also with how the question caught Gunn. Nazis want to exterminate whole groups of people. They have never gone away and are emboldened again in America, ready to commit whole new genocides. Of course, they should be wiped out in a superhero show.
After all, that’s what power fantasies are for.
Nazi Killing Across the Ages
“Are these Nazis?” GI Robot asks Rick Flag Sr. (Grillo) toward the climax of Creature Commandos' third episode "Cheers to the Tin Man.”
Much of the episode flashes back to the Robot’s first days in World War II when he was sent to the Western Front alongside Sgt. Rock (Murray Sterling) and E-Z Company, fellow mainstays of DC war comics. Although the grunts initially mistrust GI, the robot wins them over when he blows away a German platoon that has them hemmed in. “Three cheers to the Tin Man!” they declare at a post-battle pub visit, inaugurating the best time in GI’s life.
It’s a bittersweet section, as the happiness and camaraderie that GI enjoyed gives way to years of loneliness, mostly because no one else has much interest in killing Nazis after the war. Not only did GI find his place when he was killing Nazis, but it's also his programming. He literally lives to kill Nazis. Not even Will Magnus (Alan Tudyk), creator of the Metal Men, seems to understand.
On one hand, we understand the skepticism GI earns. He’s being paranoid and single-minded. Even taking into account the fact that the United States recruited former Nazis into Operation Paperclip to help us win the Space Race, it’s bad practice to walk into every room assuming that it’s filled with Nazis. There’s something terrifying about the POV shot of GI’s targeting system scanning a crowd, crosshairs resting on anyone who might harbor fascist tendencies.
Then again, maybe GI had a point. After being deactivated in the ‘70s, GI comes back to life in the 1990s, where he’s been purchased at auction by a collector of memorabilia. His new owner Sam Fitzgibbon seems like a decent guy, not just because he’s voiced by a delightful Michael Rooker. Everything GI does delights Sam and the two lonely war enthusiasts seem to have finally found someone who gets them.
But then Sam takes GI to a meeting in Hub City (the Question’s stomping grounds!), filled with people “interested in a better country.” Despite Sam’s innocuous description, GI knows what he sees when he enters a hall filled with white men of various ages, some in military gear, some in hunter’s orange, some in soft sweaters. These are white supremacists. Or, as GI sees, Nazis. So he blows them all away.
The massacre puts GI Robot in jail for decades, until he’s recruited by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) into Task Force M, the Creature Commandos. It also sets up the climax of the episode, in which the Commandos find themselves pinned down by the Friends of Themyscira, militarized men who hate Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island because it’s only for women. Once again, these Men's Rights Activists don’t look like the German soldiers that he once fought, but GI knows what he sees. And as soon as Flag confirms that they are indeed Nazis, GI lets loose.
“Three Cheers to the Tin Man” is directed by Matt Peters and just written by Gunn, but fans of Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad will recognize the architect of GI’s attack scene. Set to “Coin Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls and punctuated by the gleeful laughter that Sean Gunn gives his character, the scene is all excessive, joyful carnage.
Excessive because of the animated gore effects, but joyful because Nazis are dying before they can hurt anyone else.
Fantasies and Fascism
Superheroes have of course had a long, complicated relationship with fascism. The genre may have been born in the run-up to World War II, beginning when two Jewish boys drew from the Moses story to create Superman, Champion of the Oppressed, and may have flourished with Captain America punching Hitler and Batman and Robin pulling guns on Mussolini.
But superheroes are fundamentally power fantasies, stories about an individual enforcing their will through their great power. Heroes are often exceptional, making extra-legal decisions to create order in a chaotic state, and protecting their city’s friends while expelling the enemy. You don’t have to read the works of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to find these concepts terrifying.
It’s no wonder that The Boys has become one of the most incisive works in this age of New American fascism with its fascist Superman Homelander.
With Creature Commandos, we get to see superheroes as anti-fascist, at least on a surface level. To be sure, there’s a lot of discussion to be had about how seriously we want to take the idea of praising a literal killing machine that uses an arbitrary set of markers before executing people for the state. There’s more than a little fascism in that type of action too.
But the Nazi murder scene in Creature Commandos isn’t about philosophizing or analyzing. It’s not the final statement on how we deal with the fact that fascism keeps popping up in the West or that new generations, from various races, have embraced Nazi ideals in the form of Donald Trump.
No, it’s all excessive joy, which stems directly from the fantasy on screen. We cheer when we see GI Robot slaughter Nazis across the ages less because we wish real violence on real people and more because it confirms something we’ve known and feared. Like GI Robot, we’ve pointed at people like Trump and Vance, and “the Decider” George W. Bush before him, and said these guys are Nazis. And just like GI Robot, we’ve been told we were wrong.
So when GI confirms that White Supremacists, Men's Rights Activists, and other members of the American Right are indeed Nazis, we hoot and holler with joy. We knew it, and now someone else does too. Even better, they get stopped immediately, before they can gain more power and kill more people.
No Laughing Matter
Part of the reason that I don’t worry about Gunn’s laughter at my question is that he obviously gets it. “Three Cheers to the Tin Man” shows that Gunn knows that Nazis are alive, well, and thriving in America today, even if they don’t always wear easily identifiable swastikas.
Dealing with Nazis is going to take a lot more than cartoon robots killing them on a TV show. But just recognizing that they exist is a pretty darn good, and pretty darn rare, start. And if one of my favorite directors laughs at me in the process, well, that’s fair.