Sgt. Slaughter has a movie in development, and he announced it himself

An announcement like this normally arrives from a studio, on studio paper, with a release window attached and a publicist’s phone number at the bottom of it. This one arrived on a Thursday afternoon from the man himself, posted to his own Facebook page, and it finished by asking the people reading it to leave a comment so that he would know they were there.

Robert Remus, who has been Sgt. Slaughter since the seventies, wrote to what he called his wrestling and G.I. Joe fan base: “This Is Robert Remus, AKA: Sgt Slaughter & I Am Very Excited To Announce, That A Live-Action Movie, A Story Based On My Fictional Military Character, Is In The Works.” He described it as something he had visualised and worked at for years, he asked people to watch the teaser and to share it, and he promised that more information would follow. By early evening the post had drawn 858 reactions, 136 comments and 177 shares.

The teaser itself is real, and it has been sitting in public for nearly a week. It is called “Slaughter: The Origin Story (Sneak Peak)”, and it has been on YouTube since August 28, on a channel named Sgt Slaughter Movie Official. The premise, in the production’s own words underneath it, puts a reckless drill instructor in 1983, haunted by fighting in Cambodia five years earlier, stripped of his combat role and posted somewhere forgotten, until a hostage crisis on Diablo Island obliges his government to send for the one man who will not follow the rules. Beneath that sits the tagline: the hat stays on [2]. Beneath that again sits one flat line of copy: officially licensed motion picture currently in development [1].

Here is what all of it adds up to. Nobody is doing this for him.

The channel hosting the sneak peek had 82 subscribers when we opened it this evening, and the film’s Instagram account, created for the announcement, is running at a single post. The Facebook page’s own contact block still points at a different YouTube channel, Slaughter Daughter, run by his daughter, who has been posting road trips and wrestling talk with her dad on it for years. The teaser went up on August 28, the day after Remus turned 78, and it sat there unremarked until he wrote about it six days later. He is doing the publicity himself.

What the announcement does not say

It does not name a licensor, and that word is the most interesting one on the whole page. The Sgt. Slaughter who drilled recruits on Saturday mornings is a Hasbro character, the Sgt. Slaughter who wrestled is not, and the teaser’s own hashtags reach for G.I. Joe and for WWE without settling which of them is being licensed to whom. It does not name a studio either, unless a hashtag counts as naming one, and it names nobody in the cast at all. The title card puts a young man in the campaign hat and the mirrored sunglasses, jaw set, smoke rolling behind him, and the production has not said a word about who he is.

It gives no date, and the card says as much in plain English. Projects in development stay in development, and a fair number of them stay there permanently. But the 1983 setting is a shrewd choice for anyone who cares about this character, because it sits before Hasbro ever put him on a card, before the mail-away, before the cartoon, back when he was a drill instructor and none of the toy-aisle machinery existed yet. Whoever wrote that logline started with the drill instructor and not with the Joe team.

The Slaughter you can put on a shelf tonight

Two of his Classified figures are in stock at Big Bad Toy Store, and one of them is close to the man on that title card. Classified Series #129 Deluxe Mad Marauders Sgt. Slaughter is down to $22.74 from a $34.99 list, 35 percent off, and he arrives with the whistle, the drill instructor baton, the sunglasses, the campaign hat, the duffel bag, a pair of dumbbells and a set of boxing glove hands. Hasbro packed that one for the Slaughterhouse and not for the battlefield, and the title card has him dressed the same way. The #173 two-pack with Felix “Mercer” Stratton is in stock at $59.99, with 26 accessory pieces split between the two figures. Both listings were read this evening, and on both of them the Substandard package grade shows as sold out while BBTS Mint has the live add to cart [3].

Hasbro product photograph on a white background of the G.I. Joe Classified Series #173 two-pack, Sgt. Slaughter in a tan shirt with a bandolier and Felix Mercer Stratton in a red vest, standing among the set's laid-out accessories: two alternate heads each, spare hands, a beret, a campaign hat, a red helmet, sunglasses, a baton, knives, a backpack and a rack of rifles and pistols

If you would rather hold out for the big one, the Sgt. Slaughter and Triple “T” set is still on preorder at Hasbro Pulse for October, and NECA’s Ben Cooper costume-kid Sarge covers the sillier end of the same shelf! The archive entry on the character himself has the rest of it.

Whether any of this becomes a film is a separate question, and the answer this evening is that nobody outside the production knows. But he has a title, a tagline, a licence he has not explained, a finished sneak peek and a fan base he trusts enough to ask directly; most passion projects never get that far. He turned 78 last week.

Notes

The line reads “Officially Licensed Motion Picture Currently in Development” in the video description on YouTube. It appears nowhere in the Facebook post, which describes the project only as being in the works.
The teaser’s soundtrack is credited on the YouTube page as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”. Whether a project in development has cleared that song, or whether it is placeholder for a sneak peek, is not something the page addresses.
The #129 was at $19.24 and 45 percent off when it came up here on August 4. The discount has narrowed since then; the list price has not moved.

Sources

Key art: Sgt Slaughter Movie Official, via the film’s YouTube channel. Figure photography: Hasbro, from the gijoe.army archive.