You May Soon Be Able to Play Cheech and Chong in ‘Call of Duty’
It’s not unprecedented for famous comedy teams to show up in ridiculous video games, from Monty Python’s CD-ROMs, to the ill-conceived Blues Brothers-themed game, to the Super Nintendo oddity in which Wayne and Garth fight mutant donut monsters using the power of rock. Now there are rumors that stoner icons Cheech and Chong may enter the video game-verse, thereby dethroning Mario and Luigi as the medium’s most drug-addled duo.
According to gaming sites such as GameSpot, all signs (and by signs, we mean data miners examining a recent update’s code) point to Cheech and Chong becoming playable characters in an upcoming Call of Duty game, along with other random celebrities like Snoop Dogg and NBA star Devin Booker. This is weird considering that Cheech and Chong’s movies rarely involve machine-gunning down enemy combatants. But who knows, maybe the game will allow them to defeat their enemies with incessant online weed gummy ads.
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This is hardly the first time that the Call of Duty series has introduced out-of-left-field pop-culture personalities who are arguably more suited to getting high in the back of a tinted van than committing acts of physical violence, lest we forget the time that Kevin Smith battled hordes of the undead in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Zombies.
It remains to be seen how exactly Cheech and Chong will be integrated into the war-themed Call of Duty franchise, but they do seem like an especially baffling choice for this particular series. After all, the only reason why Cheech and Chong exist as a team in the first place is because Cheech Marin opposed a war.
In 1968, Cheech defaced his Vietnam draft card (by getting it signed by Muhammad Ali) and then “publicly turned it over” to a student anti-war group. In “retaliation” for these types of protests, a U.S. general “called for individuals who vandalized their cards to be reclassified as fit for military service — whether or not they had student deferments” (this was later struck down by the courts). So Cheech suddenly found himself at the “top of the draft list” and decided to avoid the war by moving to Canada, where he eventually met Tommy Chong while selling carpets, and scored a job at his topless improv comedy club.
As odd as it might seem, at least introducing Cheech and Chong into a war-themed video game may be the closest we ever get to seeing Cheech and Chong Join the Army, which was Ivan Reitman’s original pitch for the movie that eventually became Stripes, before the duo asked for “full creative control” over the project. And if the Call of Duty thing goes well, maybe we can look forward to Cheech and Chong battling each other in Mortal Kombat or hawking cannabis products in Animal Crossing.
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