Neal Stephenson, in his seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, observed that, “Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
Is this attitude propagated by action figures such as G.I. Joes? Coined in 1964, the term action figure was first used by Hasbro as a euphemism to make dolls more acceptable to boys. From the very beginning G.I. Joes mirrored the most popular girls’ dolls of the era—Barbies.Constructed of stiff, hollow plastic and about a foot tall, the only difference between the two was the greater articulation of the G.I. Joe. Did this reflect the supposedly greater capabilities of males? Or just illustrate the economics of big hair versus ball joints in toy manufacturing?
Like their female counterparts, only one G.I. Joe was needed. Different personas and functions were achieved with a wardrobe change. And outfits weren’t the only similarity; G.I. Joes also came with plenty of accessories. But those didn’t include little shopping bags, condominiums, or any other trappings of consumerism. Not a chance. G.I. Joes came with the accouterments of death and destruction: combat knives, pistols, machine guns, grenades, bazookas, and flamethrowers.
The G.I. Joes of my youth bore little resemblance to those first action figures. Influenced by Japanese toys from the 1970’s, my G.I. Joes were shrunken down to less than four inches, and built from solid plastic with the clothing molded right in. No longer could you change their outfits, instead each was highly specialized. You were expected to collect a variety of G.I. Joes for different tasks: ninjas, scuba divers, pilots, and sailors to name just a few. Were these miniature action figures still dolls? Their reduced stature and greater variety are more akin to those classic little green toy soldiers, army men.
Advertising for G.I. Joes, ostensibly referred to as cartoons, was careful to separate conflict from injury. Try as they may, no bad guy was ever permitted to kill or seriously injure a G. I. Joe. There were no bullets in the realm of Hasbro, only innocuous laser beams. I never saw a character shoot at another; an intermediate device was always used to attack the enemy. Most commonly a G.I. Joe would use his gun to blast at a cliff, and the opponent would be buried in the ensuing landslide. This obfuscation of cause and effect between violence and death is what separates G.I. Joes from traditional toy soldiers. Cheap, green army men are imminently expendable; kids quickly learn that war is dangerous. Rarely did the heroic G.I. Joes fall prey to the magnifying glass or firecracker. This confusion instills kids with a false sense of immortality.
More recycled content; this was an essay for College Composition. Think it got a B—not bad considering the F-bomb I dropped in the first paragraph…