67 Comments

I loved my GI Joes. I still have a bunch of them and had to replace all their rubber bands so my kids could play with them. I do like their posability much better than the Star Wars figures.

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That's great! Did you have them fight and stuff like I did?

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Totally. I remember having Snake Eyes posed with a sword skewering Tunnel Rat and lifting him off the ground.

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I tried to figure out how kicks and punches (maybe a little grappling too) worked. It was like a little scientific study of the human body with the best model I had available. The menu is not the map, though: people don't have rubber bands inside them, apparently!

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Sadly, in our current age, Joe is just how you order a cup of much-needed coffee.

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Oh Joe, why did you go?

Yo!

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Where did you come from?

Where did you go?

Where did you come from,

Cotton-Eye Joe?

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Did you ever get to see any smuggled GI Joe cartoons? or non-smuggled Action Force?

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Can't recall Action Force and GI Joe specially but I saw lots of classic Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies back then. Running Man, Commando, Rambo, etc.

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I do not recommend watching old episodes of GI Joe for fun today, but back then, they set a new standard for animation in the US. Transformers the movie kind of upped that a few notches, IMO, but GI Joe was still significant for its time.

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I never got into the whole action figure craze, least of all G.I. Joe. I think part of it was that I never was much into military themes, so it kind of went over my head. Though I heard about it of course ;) Would have been hard not to at the time.

I think I remember having a Steve Austin action figure, though I can't recall now if it was actually mine or my brother's.

Oh! And there was this really cool Hulk figure. Kinda funny cause I'm no fan of the Hulk, but I loved that figure. It was very stretchy. You could pull on its arms and legs, or push in its chest. Hmm. Wonder whatever happened to it LOL.

On a side note, I did watch the more recent live-action G.I. Joe film, mainly because Dennis Quaid was in it (he's my favorite actor). I thought it was pretty cool, though I haven't watched the sequel.

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Let's talk about these rubber superhero toys. I'm fairly confident either I or a friend of mine had either a Spider-man or a Batman toy just like that, all squishy. This had to be around 1979 or 1980.

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The timing sounds right.

Googling around, it looks like there were quite a few stretchable Hulks made after all, including some from 1978-79:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/356152969536

https://picclick.com/Mego-KO-Vics-WGSH-Bend-n-Flex-WGSH-296724125081.html

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305310701704

https://picclick.com/Vintage-1980s-Marvel-Incredible-Hulk-Bendy-Figure-156489394523.html

These all look butt-ugly though LOL. And none of them really match my memories. But then with something this old I'm not sure how much I should trust my memory. Childhood memories do tend to get distorted over time.

Still, this one better matches what I recall:

https://picclick.com/Incredible-Hulk-Bendable-Figure-Just-Toys-Bendy-Marvel-375512515434.html

Although if it's the same one as in the fourth link above, then it'd be much smaller than I thought, so I dunno. Not to mention 1989 feels way too late (I'd have been 19 and had pretty much outgrown this type of toy by then).

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Ha! I was thinking the same thing when I saw that date. 1979 I could believe.

Here's something:

https://www.megomuseum.com/heroes/elastic.shtml

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I think we have a winner! That Hulk picture at the top is the most likely match though I didn't remember him being so ugly LOL.

Even the name Mego sounds familiar, so this is likely the one I had.

It's funny how I'd totally forgotten about this toy. I hadn't thought about it in decades. Your article brought back the memory ;)

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I don't know how, but there is a (potentially fake) memory implanted in my mind of playing with one of those stretchy batmans around that time, around 1979. I talked to a friend I went to school with and then ultimately moved in with as a roommate, and he swore that he had the same toy. It turns out that we went to the same preschool. A legend formed around me stealing the toy from him or vice versa.

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Heh. Memory is such a strange thing, isn't it? You never really know how much of it you can trust. I've had a lot of little details like that that turned out to be plain out wrong. Makes me wonder, for the few we find out about, how many others are there that we have no clue about?

You know, there's probably a good story (or two) to write about this theme, ha!

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Hahaha! My friend had that rubber hulk!

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Phew! You know, for a moment there, after posting that, I suddenly wondered if it really had been the Hulk or just some strange green toy... because, you know, the Hulk wasn’t known for his stretching prowess LMAO.

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My bad. It was Stretch Armstrong. :-)

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Well that makes more sense LOL. Though I wonder why I remember him as being green. Weird.

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Yikes, looks more creepy than I remember.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretch_Armstrong

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My favorite part was the dossier on the back of the packaging, which makes sense as I’m a fiction writer….I’ve been meaning to do a GI Joe essay for a little while now. I became a SEAL because I thought it was the closest thing to being a Joe.

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Nice. Now, that's a story! Yo, Joe! er, Adam!

I loved those little backstories.

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We had cheap bubble gum with collectible pictures of cars and motorcycles.

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Nice. Gen X?

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It was smuggled from Turkey. Most of the gum was expired so we just bought it for the pictures.

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Oh, I was asking if you are generation X! Trying to get a sense of time frame.

Where did you grow up? I remember us chatting briefly about this, but memory is... well, memory.

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Bulgaria

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Were you there during Soviet rule? There are lots of folks here on Substack in that boat!

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Yes, the not real communism lol

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I’m 10 years ahead of you Andrew; no GI Joe for me. My parents were also really against guns, war all that stuff - oh and TV. For some odd reason the only show they let me watch was Space 1999. Odd. Oh and National Geographic specials

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I did see Team America: World Police. Fuck yeah

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That movie is gold. I resisted seeing it for a long time, but finally someone had it on DVD during a trip to Brazil.

Okay, maybe not a "long time", but still, I Had little interest in seeing the film until it was literally my only choice for entertainment. I was shocked at how funny it was.

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Fascinating! But you must have seen those older, bigger Joes, right? They swapped some of the branding out so that they were called "Action Force", which was popular in the UK - and also the name of GI Joes in Europe during their 80s iteration.

The "Action Force" moves in the US were deliberately designed so they navigated away from the military connotations to as great a degree as possible (I guess more like the A-Team?), and I am confident this was catered to folks just like your folks.

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Nope. Zero, zilch, nada. Never entered the GI Joe universe. I think for some pop culture if you miss the on-ramp you find other stuff. Way later in my career Mattel was one of my customers and I remember looking at displays of all their toys (no Barbies for my sister either) and realizing we missed out on some big swaths of pop culture

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I also blacked out about a decade of pop culture in my twenties, I think. I was too punk for TV and all that noise!

What sort of work did you do with Mattel? Might be some interesting anecdotes in there!

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nah nothing interesting but its a good idea for a story. I spent a lot of time on the road visiting customers. Many like this one was a meet-n-greet to see if we could get an audience with the biggest exec and convince them to optimize existing business processes on MS Teams. Man I just bored myself. The interesting thing about Mattel was this was pre-Barbie movie and the place was low morale, bit run down. That movie really turned their fortunes around. Will Ferrell was not the CEO back then

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I do think there's something to this. You spent some time on the road, meeting different types of folks.

I just thought about the piece I wrote the other day about the Pledge and how that sort of ties in with the GI Joe thing. I think the toys we played with are very telling - GI Joes in the 80s when national and military pride were probably at their highest points since the early 60s, before JFK was killed and we got super immersed in Vietnam.

I bet those kids who stood for the Pledge all played with jingoistic toys growing up. It all kinda works together.

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E.g., plastic army men and equipment.

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definitely; propaganda baby. get 'em while they're young.

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Matchbox, Hot Wheels, playing outside with neighbor kids, mostly (American) football and basketball.

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Oh yeah, those little cars were super hot when I was little.

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I don’t know about those questions. I’m too bothered that, while people do talk about David Hasselhoff at the Berlin Wall and how popular he was in Germany, people don’t talk about his amazing jacket. https://youtu.be/cJ2Sgd9sc0M?si=b4oxKbQnvF5q2nO2

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Ok, I get why he is so popular there now.

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I missed that era by a decade. I grew up in the 70s which has its own weirdness for kids' toys. I worked at a discount retail store (1981-1984) that had a toy department. I certainly saw the trends of the 80s. Graduated high school in 1983.

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Nice. Did you ever see any of the bigger, older Joes?

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Just today I commented on a note about how I still have my dozens of GI Joe toys in containers in my garage, including the USS Flagg. Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow were my favorite characters (was enthralled by their comic backstory), although one of my favorite figures was Flint. When the rubber bands wore out I'd take the figures apart and create my own.

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Nice. GI Joes inspired a little creativity when they broke, didn't they?

Flagg was the aircraft carrier? The kid in every neighborhood who had that was like the king of that hood!

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Wrap them in the flag and call them patriots.

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Steve Austin? He was on TV when I was a kid! I remember him, and then the Bionic Woman.

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So very vague, but the memory is in there!

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