Toys From the Past - G.I. Joe
If you were a boy in the early ’70s, you had a G.I. Joe - it was standard issue. Your parents received a kit from the hospital after your birth that included these items: one Tonka truck, NERF basketball w/hoop, Crayola 64 crayon box w/sharpener, Play-Doh Fun Factory, Hot Wheels w/track, Lincoln Logs, Frisbee, and the aforementioned G.I. Joe. With these tools, you could cut a path through childhood. It was all you really needed.
The old-school Joes were fully posable, meaning they had so many joints that they seldom looked natural. You would routinely find one at the bottom of the toy box in some nightmarish pose. He was big - 12 inches of fighting machine, which is roughly one-third of a kid’s size. Joe was also tough. He had a scar and hadn’t shaved in days, resulting in very cool, tactile facial hair. Since we were a good decade and a half from being able to produce a beard, this was a source of fascination. He did not smile - no time, he had a job to do, and it apparently involved a lot of killing. There was an assortment of weaponry that would fit into his “Kung-Fu Grip”, the same grip he would employ to steer his military vehicles through war-torn countries and living rooms.
I was never comfortable dressing him, however. It made the experience seem too much like playing with dolls, but he wasn’t a doll, do you hear me?! Dolls were things that girls played with that would cry, wet themselves, or close their eyes. Joe was a bad-ass. He would make his enemies cry, wet themselves, and close their eyes - forever. Okay, he was a doll. So is a tin soldier or a plastic dinosaur, big deal, I’m okay with it.
We also had a “Big Jim” action figure. Ironically, he was smaller than G.I. Joe. Mattel probably gave him that name to help ease any insecurities Jim might have experienced. He is described in Wikipedia as being “an average Caucasian male with no other distinguishing characteristic, except having a permanent good attitude and joy for life.” I suppose there was a certain joie de vivre about him, however, that doesn’t mean he was a pushover, oh no! He could actually make a muscle! If you bent his arm, his bicep would bulge. Plus, he had a “karate chop” feature. A plastic piece of “wood” was included that he could snap in two with one swift motion. The pieces would fit back together so he could chop again and again. It seems both Joe and Jim had spent some time in the orient and used martial arts any chance they got. But, yes, Joe was still tougher. Jim was more florist than fighting soldier, yet I still liked him more, must be the pacifist in me.
My action figure phase didn’t last long. The new G.I. Joe’s got smaller as I got bigger until they eventually disappeared from view. The 80s Joes that came along later were a strictly commercial enterprise with advertising tie-ins to their animated TV shows. We didn’t sit inside and watch a cartoon version, we embraced it as a lifestyle that we took into the outside world, culminating in neighborhood gunfights, sandwich bags filled with dirt that you would throw and watch explode into a filthy cloud, and loud, dramatic, sprawling death scenes when your number was up.
All but the most psychotic of children grow out of this phase. The others are still left playing with guns into adulthood and beyond. These are the sad casualties of the pretend wars of childhood. My generation didn’t go to any real wars, so some were left to invent their own. Steer clear of these poor souls just as you would avoid a grown man who still obsessively plays with his Play-Doh Fun Factory. They are still living in a juvenile world of fantasy.
