When you’re 8 years old and it’s 1973, you’re looking over the Sears Christmas catalog and lusting over the latest GI Joe toys. GI Joe has an interesting history. The line was introduced in the 60’s, but moving into the 70’s his angle was changed from military fighter to adventurer. A couple of D cell batteries could power a search light and you were off and running. Turn out the lights in your bedroom and use the search light to scan the room for “bad guys.”
Some kids would use the GI Joe figures to act out whatever was on the box, but we always came up with different adventures for them which pretty much always consisted of fights and shootouts. We didn’t call them “action figures” either – we called them GI Joes. And we played with them for hours upon hours, doing all of our own witty dialog based on things we’d read in comic books (Marvel, not DC.) Ah, the wonderful memories.
At this point I’m probably supposed to come up with some crap about how much better the toys were when I was a kid because you had to use your imagination, and anyone over 40 who remembers GI Joe would nod their head sagely and think about how uncreative today’s kids are, because they play all of these non-creative violent video games. I would say that, but it’s a crock of shit. With stuff like Minecraft out there, I’d say there’s plenty of ways for kids to be creative. And I would have traded my GI Joes for the Internet without a moment’s thought.
But it was still fun. The days of playing outside with cap guns and watching Saturday morning cartoons are long behind us, but they are great, great memories. I think playing with GI Joes did help me become a more creative person.
By the way, I had everything on this page. And I loved it all… except the lame helicopter. That pretty much sucked.
