‘Community’ Movie: Paintball and Dungeons & Dragons ‘Ruled Out,’ Reveals Dan Harmon

Dan Harmon’s “Community” was beloved for its non-stop pop culture references, film parodies and genre homages, like its “Die Hard”-inspired paintball episode. However, the upcoming film, written by Harmon and Andrew Guest, had to rule out some of the show’s most popular concepts, like the action-packed paintball battles.

On Friday’s episode of “Six Seasons and a Podcast,” Harmon pulled back the curtain on what to expect in the “Community” movie that will release on Peacock.

“It’s a lot easier for me to rule stuff out than tell you what we’re pursuing,” he told the hosts. “For instance, we go, ‘Do we really think it’d be a good idea to be a paintball episode?’ It’s one of the first things to rule out because it’s the first thing off the top of your head, and that’s an issue with the ‘Community’ movie concept. 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?”

Multiple episodes across the six seasons of “Community” were entirely devoted to school-wide paintball battles across the Greendale Community College campus. Splitting from the usual formula of the show, they parodied everything from “Die Hard” to “Star Wars” to “A Fistful of Dollars,” which resulted in some of fans’ most cherished episodes.

Harmon added that the rise of school shootings would also make it difficult to bring back the paintball fights, plus he ruled out the popular Dungeons & Dragons episodes that were highlights during “Community’s” lifetime.

“You’re running around with guns in a school, which was never a good idea on TV even back then,” he said. “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.”

Also on the podcast, Harmon revealed that the “Community” movie won’t return to a shut-down Greendale in the time that’s passed since Season 6 ended in 2015. Nor will it take place during a one-night reunion between the characters.

“You’re not gonna do anything terribly clever with using the school’s demise or resurrection as a device because you don’t want too much of your movie to be spent unrecognizable,” he said. “It wouldn’t be outlandish to suggest that enough time has gone by in ‘Community’ that the world, and not these characters, has changed so significantly that there’s a lot to deal with. They haven’t been together in a long time, but it’s not because they swore each other off…there’s a reason to get together and there’s a reason they have to stay together.”

Listen to Harmon’s full interview on “Six Season and a Podcast” here.

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