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Thread
:
What secrets lurk in the filecards?
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06-30-2013, 04:32 PM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Also, for you filecard obsessives out there, I was trying to figure out when Larry Hama transitioned from writing the ARAH filecards and when the filecards started being written in-house by Hasbro.
As far as I can tell, basing it mostly on the timeline Bellomo suggested in the 2nd edition of his identification and price guide, this began happening with the 1990 figures. What happened was, Hasbro's advertising/packaging department began writing its own filecards, and Hama's role was changed to an advisory capacity: The pre-publication filecards were passed on to Hama for editing and/or approval (although obviously, whether or not Hasbro would abide by those edits would be up to their discretion).
The post-1989 change in filecard-writing responsibilities also explains to some degree why from 1990 onwards, a large proportion of new characters that were introduced were named after Hasbro and/or Griffin-Bacal executives and employees (The file names and birthplaces of many of the new characters introduced in Eco-Warriors and Ninja Force were based on that of Hasbro and Sunbow/Griffin-Bacal execs/employees, for example*). It was probably the advertising/packaging guys having fun with the filecards and inserting themselves and/or their bosses into the "continuity." This also happened during Hama's tenure as the primary filecard writer, of course, but it really became a wide-ranging trend and lacked any subtlety or consistent internal logic after 1989. (When Hama named 1983's Torpedo after Marvel Comics artist Steve Leialoha for instance, he only used Leialoha's surname, and gave the character a biographical background that supported the fact that Torpedo had a native Hawaiian surname; and when he wanted to pay homage to Hasbro advertising exec Jay Bacal's wife, he changed the code-name of the female Joe slated for release in 1985 from "Lady Shea" to "Lady Jaye.")
Note that Hasbro had written in-house filecards before 1990, such as the filecard for Claymore (1987), which Hama described in a message sent to Oliverbox (which he posted something like 1500 pages ago) as
"... I am pretty sure I did not write the file card on Claymore. It reads like a parody of my stuff. I would never have written a line like 'his reputation as a soldier is known far and wide.' It looks like somebody just paraphrased a bunch of key phrases from previous file cards. This may have been right after the first time I got 'fired.' They thought they could save money by having the file cards written in house. If a Joe sounds too superlative or perfect, odds are good I didn't write the card."
Hama's explanation clears up a lot of the oddness with the post-1989 filecards, and why so many of them don't read "right" (a lot of them really do read more like ad-copy than character sketches) or even contradict the established ARAH filecard canon: Guys like Tracker and Bullet-Proof seem to be "too good to be true" and there was also Major Altitude's filecard, which suggested that the Joe team was some sort of publicly known, almost celebrity-like military entity that had been in existence for a long time prior to the early 1980s**.
*
here's a list of the Eco-Warriors and Ninja Force characters with names and/or birthplaces based on that of Hasbro/Griffin-Bacal employees for those curious:
Cesspool
- file name based on that of Vincent D'Alleva (Hasbro vice-president for marketing, 1989–1999)
Clean Sweep
- file name based on that of Daniel Price (Hasbro Project Director and senior designer, 1989–1991)
Ozone
- file name based on that of David Kunitz (Hasbro Project Manager, 1985–1995)
Bushido
- file name based on that of Lloyd Goldfine (Sunbow Productions/Griffin-Bacal producer/writer, 1992–1996)
Dojo
- I haven't been able to find any firm evidence online of a "Michael Russo" working for Hasbro or Griffin-Bacal during the ARAH era, but a "Lisa Russo" worked as Hasbro's HR manager from 1996-2007. A relation?
Nunchuk
- I haven't been able to find any firm evidence online of a "Ralph Badducci" working for Hasbro or Griffin-Bacal during the ARAH era, but the Badducci surname turns up twice in the post-1989 filecards—Static-Line's file name is listed as "Wallace Badducci"—so there's probably an employee link somewhere.
While I haven't been able to definitvely link the other Ninja Force characters to their real-world Hasbro/Griffin-Bacal employee counterparts, I think it's fairly telling that the birthplaces of all the Ninja Force characters are either in Rhode Island or New York (Hasbro is headquartered in Rhode Island, Griffin-Bacal is based in New York).
** -
It's worth noting that the file names for both Tracker (file name: Christopher Groen) and Major Altitude (file name: Robert Owens) were also based on Hasbro employees: The former was named after Kurt Groen (Hasbro senior designer, 1989–1998) and the latter was named after Robert Owens (Hasbro senior designer, 1986–2000). BTW, if you want to see Kurt Groen's early designs for Blocker, a sketch can be seen
here
.
__________________
Last edited by zuludelta; 06-30-2013 at
05:34 PM
.. Reason: added links and other stuff
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