Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, has shared on Friday’s episode of Six Seasons and a Podcast that he has ruled out recreating the iconic paintball sequences in the upcoming Community movie, according to Deadline.
Community’s paintball episodes became some of the most loveable episodes, as they parodied popular films such as Die Hard, the Star Wars films, A Fistful of Dollars, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, via Deadline.
Harmon shared his concerns about recreating the magic from the paintball episodes. “We did a lot of episodes where you are joyfully locked into a construct that isn’t a traditional sitcom narrative, but is rather through the lens of David Fincher or Martin Scorsese. There were a lot of special episodes that were kind of like genre homages. The paintball thing was one of them. We tried to do a bunch more paintballs, and they were all perfectly wonderful things to do, but would anything ever capture the joy of the original paintball episode,” Harmon tells Deadline.
Harmon also shared his concern that including paintball or Dungeons & Dragons are unacceptable due to the increase in school shootings. He tells Deadline, “You’re running around with guns in a school, which was never a good idea on TV even back then. How can we do that in a way that’s acceptable? You sit down to write the movie and you’re like, ‘So, we’d do that right?’ Because it’s so emblematic of what made our show special and the triumphs we had, the things we contributed as a show. Or we’d play Dungeons & Dragons for 90 minutes. I kinda gotta rule that out — maybe a better writer wouldn’t.”
The Community film is based off of the original Community television series, which followed the story of Jeff Winger, played by Joel McHale (Deliver Us from Evil, Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World), a suspended lawyer, as he is forced to enroll in a community college with an eccentric staff and student body. The movie is a continuation of the series, taking place after the sixth and final season of Community. The sixth season ends with the students finally going separate ways, leaving Jeff Winger alone at the college.
Along with McHale, the movie is confirmed to include original cast members Alison Brie (Glow, Sleeping with Other People), Danny Pudi (Ducktales, Star Trek Beyond), Gillian Jacobs (The Box, Choke), Ken Jeong (The Hangover, Crazy Rich Asians), and Jim Rash (The Way Way Back, Sky High), via Screen Rant. Donald Glover (Atlanta, Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Yvette Nicole Brown (Drake & Josh, Avengers: Endgame) are not confirmed to be in the movie.
All six seasons of Community are available to stream on Netflix and Hulu, and the Community movie is set to release in 2023, via Looper.