Yo Joe!

Did you grow up during the 1980s? If not, I hope the following gives you a bit of a glimpse into what it was like to grow up then.

This was the era of camo and ninjas, Gremlins, Ferris Bueller, Pizza Hut buffets, and Transformers. The 80s represent all this and more to me, and in many ways it was the totality of my childhood. By the time the decade was over, I was driving and ready to buy my first car.

While I was born in the middle of the 1970s, the vast majority of my childhood was during the 80s. That meant paying very close attention to the cultural phenomena that my friends cared about. That makes me an excellent first-hand reporter from a bygone era!

There wasn’t a single cultural phenomenon bigger than GI Joe during the 1980s, at least in the world I lived in. Now, I know that GI Joes first came out during the 1960s, and I even saw one of those when I was younger—I think my uncle had one growing up, but my introduction to the characters was probably first through the cartoons.

Interestingly, the cartoons didn’t come out first. Instead, it was the action figures that led the way. For folks not from America, “action figure” is just a euphemism for a doll typically marketed to boys.

Those toys in the 60s were enormous as compared to the toys I grew up with. These Joes were twelve inches tall (30 cm), and came in four varieties, each based on one branch of the US military. I think this speaks to the feeling of adventurism present during the early and mid 60s in the US, well before complete disillusionment with the war in Vietnam.

By the 80s, it was time for a reboot. The Cold War was now in full swing, and besides, Hasbro really needed a hit toy this year. As they looked out into the world, they noticed that Star Wars action toys were just absolutely everywhere.

These were smaller dolls than those older Joes from the 60s, and they were selling really, really well. The rival company, Kenner, had moved into the top slot for toy companies with this bold turn.

The details of this story are told well in the Netflix series The Toys that Made Us, so I’ll mainly summarize this part. The smaller Joes (3.75 inches, or just under 10 cm) were a huge hit almost immediately—they were just cooler than the Star Wars toys, since you could bend their knees and arms, and kids like me certainly picked up on this quickly.

Even though the toys sold reasonably well at first, Hasbro had strong conviction that the toys could sell better if there was some kind of narrative thread that went with them. If a kid saw a cool toy, that was one thing, but if they heard a story about a person they cared about, that was something entirely different. They would virtually force their parents to buy that toy.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened next. Marvel Comics issued GI Joe number one later in June of 1982, and they originally intended the comic to be a limited series. However, there was a growing (and fervent) fan base of early adopter kids who had the toys now, and who wanted to know why they should care more about them. The comic books took off and became collector’s items.

Right around the time when GI Joe comics were becoming collector’s items, I started getting into comic books myself. A few ratty Transformers and GI Joe comics would grow into a collection that numbered in the thousands by the end of the decade.

Nobody at Hasbro wanted this incredible party to stop, so they worked with Sunbow Productions to produce a five part mini-series, which utterly and completely captivated my afternoons immediately following school. The five part mini-series was just like the “four-part” comic book series: it kept going by popular demand. This was September of 1983.

Now, I don’t know exactly when GI Joe jumped the shark, but it sure wasn’t right away. No, this phenomenon lasted for several years before showing any signs of burning out, but burn out it ultimately did.

By the time the GI Joe movie was released and I got to see it, I must have been about eleven or twelve. This was probably the tail end of any kid’s ability to keep appreciating GI Joe, but they upped the stakes in the movie by killing Duke (one of the main characters) and by introducing a pretty badass villain named Serpentor who was like Cobra Commander’s real boss.

Even still, the movie was released direct-to-video. This has to do with Transformers the Movie beating them to the punch, so Hasbro got to see how disappointing that box office result was. Honestly, this is a travesty, and you should go watch Transformers (1986) this weekend. It’s really amazing.

While GI Joe toy sales actually peaked in the late 80s, I think the wave was long gone by the end of the decade. The cultural impact was felt the strongest between 1983 and 1986 or so, and I might include ‘87 just to keep the movie in there.

GI Joe’s hot run in the 80s runs parallel with a couple of noteworthy things. I’ve already pointed out my childhood, so I won’t belabor that other than to point out that I entered at one end not knowing how to write in cursive and came out the other end driving a car. GI Joe was there for almost all of this.

Second, and just as interesting to me, this phenomenon absolutely mirrors the 80s Cold War mindset. Reagan ushered in a much more confrontational era with the Soviet Union, deliberately trying to attack the beast by provoking it. Reagan’s gambit ultimately worked, although we can argue about whether it was already inevitable some other time.

You could hear and see this mindset writ large in the GI Joe plot lines and dialogue, both of which echoed a ton of Cold War rhetoric. Cobra was like Russia, and the Joes were very obviously American soldiers. If this was propaganda, it worked like a charm on us kids.

By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall fell. If you grew up during this time, you know exactly how powerful that symbol was.

As the Cold War fizzled out, and as I became a quasi-adult, GI Joe had its entire 1980s run. And here I was, growing up through it all.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you had a couple of favorite GI Joes, and those favorites were both ninjas. Storm Shadow, the Cobra rep, wore white; while Snake Eyes (team Joe) wore black. It’s probably no surprise, then, that I’ve been consistently involved with martial arts over the last four decades, even making something of a career out of it.

I even did play-fighting with the toys, learning martial arts in a weird way by observing how human body parts interacted. These were models of the real world, and I was running little scientific experiments all the time.

I want to ask you for a couple of answers today. First, did you have a favorite GI Joe toy? Next, did you do martial arts with them like I did, or were there other types of games you enjoyed playing? And finally, did you ever blow them up? I wanted to do this with some of the toys I owned, but could rarely ever bring myself to do it.