10 Greatest Ever Community "Concept" Episodes

9. GI Jeff

Community Christmas
Sony Pictures Television

This episode faithfully and affectionately celebrates GI Joe, with most of the episode taking place in Jeff's head, which happens to alternate between an impressively accurate take on the 80's cartoon and an equally accurate take on the toy adverts that inevitably came with those 80's cartoons.

Sadly growing up in England in the 90's makes a lot of what made this episode so great to the GI Joe fans a little harder to recognise... that said, I can still appreciate the concept, and the way characters like Annie and Abed are basically represented as "boobs" and "foreigner" within Jeff's animated nightmare, thereby helpfully reminding us  just how far children's cartoons have come over the years. (Even if the majority are still basically extra long toy adverts).  

Of course this is also an episode that deals with what a deeply troubled leading man Jeff Winger really is. His struggles with getting older are never more than obvious than in his GI Joe fever dreams, and this issue becomes a central problem for the character in the final series of the show, as everyone around him looked like they'd all actually leave Greendale eventually. 

Not too many shows can mix in Inception like cartoon sequences and still find time for a little bit of actual drama... Kudos. 

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Nintendo fanboy, Doctor Who nerd, and comic book enthusiast... May not actually have a life outside of fictional characters anymore.