Community have done episodes featuring old school video game, stop-motion and even anime segments before, but this week they’re going to tackle traditional TV animation — cartoons, if you will — for the first time. The episode’s influence is obvious by its title, “G.I. Jeff,” but as Yvette Nicole Brown (“Shirley”) explained, “Just know, it's truly a G.I. Joe episode.”

Jeff (Joel McHale) as "Wingman."

Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) as "Three Kids"

Annie (Alison Brie) and Britta (Gillian Jacobs) as "Tight Ship" and "Buzzkill."

Yes, much of this episode has the gang in animated form, interacting with G.I. Joe. No, not a team that resembles G.I. Joe - this is the actual team, as seen on the 1980s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero series. The episode was done in conjunction with Hasbro, and Community creator Dan Harmon told me, “The weird thing was how cooperative they were. Not that we maligned their product in any way, but their product is a syndicated, children's cartoon with a different rating than ours, so it's like part of the point of the episode is that there's a different sensibility within this world. So I thought they'd have more problems than they did with the idea of Jeff Winger's G.I. Joe character accidentally killing people. But they were cool with that!”Harmon added, regarding Hasbro, “More power to them, because they were very, very gracious with their product. That's really cool too, because you're accustomed in TV that if someone pulls out a Snickers bar, it always says 'Snookers.' So the weird thing is that when you see actual branding like that, it hits your brain like it's kind of revolutionary. Which is dumb, because why should that be? But you see the G.I. Joe logo and we have G.I. Joe characters talking to our characters…”Fans of the 1980s series are in for some treats, as Harmon revealed, “We brought back the same guys that did the voices. I went into the VO booth and the guy that played Flint, I didn’t know he was coming in that day and I was getting a Nutrabar and I just heard Flint! ‘Get over there! Get to your battle stations!', and I was like, 'Oh my God! Flint is here!' So I don't know if it's going to be a good episode, but I know it was fun to make.”Said Danny Pudi (“Abed Nadir”), of ‘G.I. Jeff,’ “There’s a couple of things about it that I love. It’s one of those episodes where we’re celebrating our inner fan on the show and an appreciation of what we grew up with on television while also using it to do something you couldn’t necessarily do if it wasn’t animated.”As for Abed’s G.I. Joe incarnation, “Fourth Wall”, Pudi remarked, “He looks a lot better than I looked! When I saw the pictures that they sent to me for approval, I was very, ‘Wow, he’s a man!’ because I feel like I’m a boy. They gave him some nice, hard lines in his face. He looks grizzled. I think it’s typical 80s animation for G.I. Joe. All the men look like men. Their jawlines are hardcore. He’s got some furrowed brow… He looks good!”Most of the Community characters’ Joe incarnations have some pretty clear correlations to an existing G.I. Joe character (Jeff as Duke, Annie as Shipwreck, etc.). When I asked co-showrunner Chris McKenna if there were a lot of discussions about how that would line up, he replied, “Long discussions! Honestly, we talked and talked and broke and re-broke the story a lot and tried to figure out how we use everyone from our universe, at lease the regulars and our special guest stars. But really it grew out of what we wanted this journey that they go on to be about. Once we really hit upon that, pieces started falling together.”McKenna noted the episode came about in a simple way, explaining, with a laugh, “I think Harmon said, 'Let's do a G.I. Joe episode!' It was something from our childhood that we were both affected by. We were able to bring Rob Schrab in to direct it and he's absolutely a maniac trying to get it together. He's a perfect person for it; he directed three episodes for us this year.” McKenna noted that when it came to the storyline of the episode, “Like any episode that takes on a stylistic trope, we do it for a very specific reason.”Jim Rash (“Dean Pelton”) — who noted he was very happy with the Dean’s G.I. Joe character being akin to Cobra Commander — remarked, “It’s primarily about Jeff and growth and sort of an eternal battle and it's represented by his 80s reference to a cartoon and we're all a part of it. Again, it's what Dan and the writers do. What looks epic and just for fun is really about character development and pushing forward.”Shirley’s Joe character is “Three Kids,” and Brown exclaimed, “She wants everybody to know that's exactly how many she has!” Regarding the process of making the episode as far as the cast was concerned, she explained, “It was very quick to record because we shot the entire season and then went back maybe a month ago, might be three weeks ago, to do all the voices. But it's always fun when you go in the studio to hear who did your [temp] voice. I'm like, 'Do I have to match that because Shirley doesn’t sound like that!’”Britta’s G.I. Joe character is, of course, named “Buzzkill.” Gillian Jacobs was looking forward to “G.I. Jeff,” telling me, “I think it’s gonna be great. You remember the early days of the internet and ebaumsworld, where they would take those G.I. Joe PSAs from the end of the episodes and re-dub them and make them really weird? Those were previously my only real experience with the G.I. Joe cartoon, but I was a fan of those! So I'm excited to see what they've done. And it was actually with the involvement of Hasbro and some of the people who did the cartoons originally, so that's pretty darn cool.”Because of the animation, “G.I. Jeff” is being worked on down to the wire. When I spoke to the Community crew at PaleyFest last week, McKenna said, “This one is probably going to be the closest to a live episode that we've ever done. You might see hands still drawing figures!” Added Harmon, “Right now, there are a bunch of animators in cubicles in Burbank drawing Joel McHale as a G.I. Joe guy.”Harmon noted there was a lot about the episode that had him excited, saying, “There's certain frames of it... I wouldn't have predicted that this would be the thing that would make me go, 'Holy crap, this is awesome!' It's the fade up after the title sequence. The title sequence is amazing, but the fade up after it... The title comes up as these jets fly over G.I. Joe headquarters and it's like the same font and the music is playing and it's identical to it. It just makes your spinal cord go back to 1985. It's really cool.”He then added, with a grin, “It may be the high point of the episode. The rest of it is a bunch of people going, 'Hey, this is like G.I. Joe!’”

Community: "G.I. Jeff" premieres Thursday, April 3rd on NBC.Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman