[youdoitimbusy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HitandRun

It's crazy the ARAH line lasted 14 years - a great feat. I can still recall going into K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Children's Palace, TRU etc and seeing whole sides of an aisle dedicated to o-ring joes from the late 80s to 1994. All my friends had Joes too...great time to be a kid.

You forgot KB toys...lol

They were everywhere. Even the dollar store.

[nancy2K]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MFJayman

I generally agree about the neon, especially when it was applied so broadly or arbitrarily. Some figures, like 1990 Heavy Duty, had splashes of neon-ish green camo, very bright, which (in moderation) worked well (so did POC Shadow Tracker, for that matter). And of course, the best use of neon ever, was the Alley Viper.

I've long thought that the primary distinction between "good" GI Joe design and "bad" GI Joe design is specificity and intentionality. Take 1987 as an example. You have the pure, simple utility of Outback's design on one end and on the other the confounding, over-complicated design of Psyche Out (bright green inexplicably quilted shirt, silver chest plate of uncertain purpose, antennae and radar dishes all-over--absolute chaos). In between you have have Chuckles, whose Hawaiian shirt is silly, distinctive, and perfect. Or Fast Draw, who's absolutely ridiculous, but totally makes sense once you accept the absurd core conceit. People don't even flinch at Law's bright orange-red and neon blue torso, because the overall design just makes sense. But then you have Sneak Peek, whose design somehow manages to be both bizarre and totally nondescript, off-putting and boring as shit.

All that to say, it's never much been about the colors or the concepts--it's whether or not the designer had an actual concept or was just throwing shit at the wall.

I'd suggest that as the original ARAH line progressed, you had more and more Psyche Outs and Sneak Peeks. Barricade has a solid sculpt, an interesting speciality, a distinctive mug, and relatively muted colors (v1, at least), but what the hell is even happening here? Flak Viper isn't ugly because of his bright green and aqua color scheme, it's because he came out of the factory looking like your 5-year old brother slapped a bunch of random parts together. By the time you get to 93, you've got two versions of the same Outback sculpt competing for the most random color applications and a Muskrat that appears to have been generated by a very primitive (and maybe defective) AI.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MFJayman

I'm glad you didn't mention the spring-loaded rocket launchers though, I think they get a bad rap, being associated with 90s Joes and being wonkily-designed and colored. For vehicles, or larger figures (*ahem* 6" scale, um, Classified) I think they're a fun and useable action feature.

Related to my previous diatribe, I think the gimmick weapons of the later years are generally despised not because they are gimmicky, but because they were so arbitrarily assigned as the line went on. Heavy Duty's chest mounted anti-aircraft platform is over-sized and stupid, but it's specific to the character. See also Red Star's oddly proportioned RPG and Sci-Fi v2's laser canon. But by 1993 every figure just had some random rocket launching devise. Hell, all their gear was arbitrarily assigned by 1993. There was no thought behind it. Just Give them a tree of random weapons in a random color and call it good. Such a contrast to earlier years, when each figure's load out was unique and character/sculpt specific.

[shishi]

Action Force was big over here in the UK for a time, but the mainstream cultural impact and widespread nostalgia isn't really there. We didn't have the cartoon on TV, so it's not like Transformers, He-man, Thundercats and later TMNT, where kids who didn't have the toys still knew the characters.

The original Palitoy figures (the Red Shadows, Z-Force, SAS, etc.) and then the ARAH repackage were very popular at the time, but are probably now seen as a footnote of the wider Action Man brand story.

[GeoffDes]

People like Aaron Archer have talked about the neon colour issues with Batman, and a lot of the time it was because that's what people thought made toys stand out on the shelf.

Now, it's different with Batman than Joe because of course with Batman you're trying to sell variants of the same three or four core characters (if that) and non-geek parents aren't going to think it's a different figure unless the colours are different. But those neon Batman variants SOLD. I've never particularly blamed colours for Joe's retail downturn.

As for the original topic, it's always fun to blow Gen Zers minds by showing them things like that subscription chart Jim Shooter posted on his blog showing Joe blowing away every single other Marvel title (although I recognise that Spidey and X-Men probably sold more copies at the end of the day once the developing direct market was taken into account).

[GoodGuy9]

Here's the things I specifically remember:

Got my first Joe (Voltar) in the grocery store in 1988
Remember having the Impel cards in 90 or 91
Didn't have comics-didn't know they existed
I did own several of the coloring books
Remember seeing the Golobulus set in the grocery store checkout in FL
Wasn't permitted to watch the cartoons for some reason
I remember those long walls of Joe in the 80's in TRU
I remember the min figs/vehicles in the JCPenny catalogs

[Cobra Agent 66]

"Just Give them a tree of random weapons in a random color and call it good. Such a contrast to earlier years, when each figure's load out was unique and character/sculpt specific." For me, the "weapon tree" with the bigger card was the official death of the line. Like, they didn't care at all and didn't bother to hide it.

What's weird is that Slice, one of my favs, has two versions: red with regular weapons and card, and an orange repaint with the bigger card and weapon tree. When I started re-collecting, I made sure to get the first!

[captain mal]

This whole thread is a captivating read. Great trip down memory lane. I have tons of fond memories from GIJoe - but I came into it backwards. My story:

I'm on the older end of the ARAH age bracket. I was already 13 in 1985. Starting to get 'too old' for toys. I grew up on Star Wars. When Star Wars was ending, GIJoe was taking over. My younger brother was getting into GIJoe - so we would play together... but I was still into Star Wars mostly. Even up until Power of the Force, I was collecting Star Wars - even though I had begun to read the GIJoe comic.

Through most of my teen years - I was deeply into the Marvel comic. I didn't really buy any figures though. (I do remember buying Storm Shadow v2) After I graduated High School in 1990, I met a friend who had a similar love for the GIJoe comic - and we stared bonding over the GIJoe figures. So many great figures we missed from the mid-to-late 80's. We started searching garage sales. We went to discount retailers looking for old product. We made fliers and put them up at our local comic shop. Soon we had a huge tub full of figures that we had never known of.

The 90's era of GIJoe was extremely special to me. So many great second versions of classic characters. I would search for them between classes at College. I worked on a truck dock and we shipped for Hasbro... so whenever I saw a GIJoe pallet I would 'accidentally' have the tape fall off a box so I could peak inside. I saw so many 90's figures this way - a couple weeks before they hit the pegs.

I can tell you when I bought most of my 90's figures. From road trips, to local shops, to hunting trips to Children's Palace in a blizzard.

Then, in 1994 everything ended. I got married. GIJoe comic ended. The ARAH line ended. Life changed.

It was truly a magical time growing up in the 80's. I really believe we had the best childhood experience of any generation. Little League, Riding Bikes for hours, Playing 'War', Touch Football, Shooting Guns. Then when we were indoors we had GIJoe, Knight Rider, A-Team, Nintendo, Comic Books, The Absolute hands-down Best Music ever.

I guess to an extent I never really appreciated just how great of a time it was. No other time like it...

[BizCopperhead]

Quote:

Originally Posted by captain mal

This whole thread is a captivating read. Great trip down memory lane. I have tons of fond memories from GIJoe - but I came into it backwards. My story:

I'm on the older end of the ARAH age bracket. I was already 13 in 1985. Starting to get 'too old' for toys. I grew up on Star Wars. When Star Wars was ending, GIJoe was taking over. My younger brother was getting into GIJoe - so we would play together... but I was still into Star Wars mostly. Even up until Power of the Force, I was collecting Star Wars - even though I had begun to read the GIJoe comic.

Through most of my teen years - I was deeply into the Marvel comic. I didn't really buy any figures though. (I do remember buying Storm Shadow v2) After I graduated High School in 1990, I met a friend who had a similar love for the GIJoe comic - and we stared bonding over the GIJoe figures. So many great figures we missed from the mid-to-late 80's. We started searching garage sales. We went to discount retailers looking for old product. We made fliers and put them up at our local comic shop. Soon we had a huge tub full of figures that we had never known of.

The 90's era of GIJoe was extremely special to me. So many great second versions of classic characters. I would search for them between classes at College. I worked on a truck dock and we shipped for Hasbro... so whenever I saw a GIJoe pallet I would 'accidentally' have the tape fall off a box so I could peak inside. I saw so many 90's figures this way - a couple weeks before they hit the pegs.

I can tell you when I bought most of my 90's figures. From road trips, to local shops, to hunting trips to Children's Palace in a blizzard.

Then, in 1994 everything ended. I got married. GIJoe comic ended. The ARAH line ended. Life changed.

It was truly a magical time growing up in the 80's. I really believe we had the best childhood experience of any generation. Little League, Riding Bikes for hours, Playing 'War', Touch Football, Shooting Guns. Then when we were indoors we had GIJoe, Knight Rider, A-Team, Nintendo, Comic Books, The Absolute hands-down Best Music ever.

I guess to an extent I never really appreciated just how great of a time it was. No other time like it...

Man, you had a very different perspective from me. I am a little older than your brother, or maybe the same age.

I was in Joe from about '84-94, and by the end, the salt I brought to this forum had already developed.

When I was 14 in 1994, 1984 -86 was the "good old days" of GI Joe, and I was ready to be done with the crap-fest Hasbro was putting out.

By 1992, my mom was taking me monthly to the antique fair on the weekends at the local fairgrounds so I could scour it for action figures, specifically Joe. I was able to get those for $1-3 back then, and 3 was on the high side. It was mostly used Star Wars in that market.

I remember sometime in 1993 when my mom went to Ace Hardware (my usual spot for acquiring Joes) and came home with a Flak Viper for me, knowing that anything "Viper" from the Joe line was welcome.

I was of course appreciative to my mom, but I remember going "what the fuck is this missile launcher Robocop bullshit" in my mind, and I remember she kind of waffled giving it to me, as even she knew that this stuff was declining in quality.

My brother was about 7 by that time, and we had legos and other products with missile launchers and projectiles for several years by that point. Kirk B wasn't impressing us at all with his neon colors and missile launchers. I guess I was just old enough to see through the marketing fog, though I didn't really see GI Joe as "dying" or anything. I just knew without being able to express it that the Joe product had strayed too far from its roots.

I kept picking up Cobras, hoping for that "high" that came from getting a new one, but the weapon sprue era was just disappointing beyond belief.

I still have my last several releases from that era MOC. It just reminds me of how bad a state things were in by that point. There's not really an upside.

[Clockwise]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flint_rocks

It was just the perfect storm. Reagan deregulated children's television programs so they could basically become 30 minute toy commercials, Hasbro under the leadership of people like Kirk Bozigian decided to bring G.I. Joe a dead property back to life in a new scale, the toys were something new and innovative and the pro-American atmosphere at the time and BOOM a runaway freight train of success. Made for a great childhood growing up in the 80s.

You nailed it.

It's also worth pointing out that the last time GI Joe had an "everywhere" push was during the start of the NS era, as support for the service grew in conjunction with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as 1982, but it showed that there is some correlation between the love of country and support for the toy line (and I don't say this in a pejorative way).

[nancy2K]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clockwise

You nailed it.

It's also worth pointing out that the last time GI Joe had an "everywhere" push was during the start of the NS era, as support for the service grew in conjunction with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as 1982, but it showed that there is some correlation between the love of country and support for the toy line (and I don't say this in a pejorative way).

GI joe has an odd relationship with contemporaneous active combat. The original 12" run loses steam and redirects as the Vietnam war drags on and public support for the conflict wanes. GI Joe flourishes again in the early-80s, a period of relative peace (despite the ever-looming threat of mutually assured destruction) when the most prominent conflicts are remote and US intervention is generally small-scale, swift, and decisive. The brand starts to lose steam in the late-80s around the time that news of Pentagon/CIA shadow wars bubbles to the surface. A couple years later, the US exerts its full military might to liberate Kuwait--an effort that has pretty broad public support, and GI Joe's popularity continues to decline.

I'm not really sure how well GI joe did in the early 2000s. I know that Hasbro made a big push to reignite the brand, producing new sculpts and churning out endless re-colors and mash-ups of existing molds, but that era is also marked by an ever-shifting, scattershot approach. Nothing ever seemed to really take hold or capture the cultural imagination. Maybe Hasbro thought it could capitalize on post-9/11 patriotism and renewed public support of the military--they certainly made gave it the old college try--but I'm not sure the sales during that era suggest the effort was a success. The stuff that actually sold during that era were TRU exclusive re-colors that appealed to nostalgia and adult collectors, and thus... the 25th Anniversary reset in 2007--a moment when support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was in the basement.

I don't know what any of this means, really. Just that GI Joe's relationship to US patriotism and public support for the military is complicated and doesn't always tell a coherent story.