Fandom Menace: GIJoe

Yes, the title is a riff on Star Wars. Whatever.

The funny thing about Internet-based fandoms of "old*" series is that they're often full of people who insist that things should go back to "the way they originally were." Nowhere is this a more ironic statement than with GIJoe.

GIJoe is probably the most mutable and transmutable toyline ever devised. Here's its basic premise: Army guys.

Seriously, that's GIJoe's premise throughout. But it hasn't exactly remained the same.

Most people think of the '80s GIJoe line when they hear it-most Internet fandom types, anyway. GIJoe really started, however, in 1964. To my knowledge, it was the first toyline put out by manufacturer Hasbro. Hasbro has most recently drawn attention to itself with the success of the summer blockbuster Transformers**, based on the long-running toyline of the same name, but more on that later. A few years later, GIJoe figures were marketed in Britain under the name Action Man. (Keep that in mind-it will be important later. Also note that this was spun off into a cartoon in the '90s, which was further imitated a few years later in a CGI cartoon which had the same main characters with different backstories. Yes I know those links lead to the same page with an inch between them, I don't give a care.) These toys stood at 12" tall.

Following that, there was the GIJoe Adventure Team. (Yes, I know that isn't the widely accepted spelling of that. I'm just being stubborn. G.I.Joe takes longer to type, and G. I. Joe takes longer still.) This was possibly the funniest incarnation of GIJoe, with characters who had appellations such as "Kung-Fu Grip."

Okay, I totally lied. Super Joe was funnier than that. That, incidentally, is probably a more direct origin for the character Joe Colton than the Adventure team. Sometime I'll scan in an ad or two from the old Spider-Man comics I've got that are for that toy. These toys, by the way, stood at only 8-81/2" tall because of rising petroleum costs.

Then came the 1982 GIJoe. The end.

I lied again.

See, many people seem to insist that A Real American Hero is the be-all and end-all of GIJoe. That particular cartoon, and especially its corresponding comic, have the largest and most enduring of all GIJoe fanbases. At the Joepedia wiki, ostensibly about all GIJoe versions, many of the other sections are nothing more than afterthoughts. Having a number of the comics from Marvel's GIJoe, I'm well aware of the quality of the stories, and I wish I had issue 21, which many Joe fans proclaim inspired them to want to tell stories in comics. This is the series whose fans are the primary targets of Hasbro's nostalgia campaign. These figures were 33/4" tall.

To some degree, this series continued into the mid-'90s, with continuously weaker cartoon tie-ins (although I really liked that stupid Dragonfire storyline when I saw it all those years ago), a gradually fading Marvel Comic, and an increasingly weird toyline. Myself, I like the brilliance that was the Septic Tank and the insanity that were the Lunartix aliens and Mega Monsters, but alas, that approach ticked off the traditional fans, and in 1994, the line died forever.

I just can't stop lying once I start, can I?

In 1995, Sgt. Savage and the Screaming Eagles attempted to fill the void of the loss of the Real American Hero. It cleverly combined the origin story of Captain America and the character of Sgt. Rock (with a hint of Nick Fury's WWII adventures thrown in), but despite this fine pedigree the toyline itself was apparently a big piece of epic fail, as it died after just two waves, leading to the only fictional release being a single measly episode packaged with a toy. This is even more ironic since Savage co-starred with other GIJoe characters in the cartoon.

In 1996, Hasbro, determined to keep trying regardless of their flagrant failures, Hasbro released GIJoe Extreme. I remember this one very distinctly-when the "Power Block" featuring Beast Wars was still on early weekday mornings, GIJoe Extreme was the Friday slot. It was a moderately entertaining show, seeing as how it was made in the '90s, but it had a weaker cast than even Super Joe (maybe not; I'm prone to exaggeration), and like Super Joe and Sgt. Savage before it, Extreme burned and died, though less rapidly than Savage. I totally think that they should bring back Iron Klaw, but maybe that's just me.

In 1997, Hasbro thought "Hm. The last real success we had with GIJoe was in the '80s. Let's cheaply re-release a bunch of ten-year-old toys, call them collectible, and see if anyone bites."

Thus began the first wave of Joestalgia. Hasbro then started making toys for kids again in the '00s, first with Spy Troops and then Valor Vs. Venom. Like the '80s version, these were in the 33/4" size. Of course, while they had strong responses from '80s collectors, they had a lot of grousing over poor quality and such.

Apparently, sales were down, because the next step Hasbro took was to completely reinvent GIJoe again (almost but not really) in the form of Sigma Six. These 8" figures received criticism because they were too big to fit in the '80s Joe vehicles. Possibly a source of greater criticism came for the fiction, which was anime-like and thus automatically bad (in the minds of old-er, longtime fans). I find this ironic mostly because, while they didn't make a big deal about continuity with previous lines, they did acknowledge and mention it. For instance, General Hawk (warning-no actual biographical information)was in the process of recovering from becoming Venomous Maximus in the first few episodes, although they kinda forgot he was there or something after that, even though his teenage son had a few more cameos.

Anyway, as previously mentioned, they've gone back to 33/4" for nostalgia purposes, and that's the current phase of GIJoe. But that's not the whole story.

No, I'm not lying. There's a lot more.

When GIJoe ('82) was exported to other countries, it had a lot of figures that were totally made up junk. When I say "totally made up junk," I mean they were supposed to be cyborgs and stuff, which totally didn't show up in GIJoe ('82). Not counting, of course, S.N.A.K.E.s or BATs or Robo-Joe. There was also Action Force, the British version, which was merged with a homegrown toyline of much less articulated figures and a stronger sci-fi theme. (I once had a url that lead to information on this, but I'm not certain what happened to it. I'll probably present it at some point in the future. And no, I have no idea why they didn't just go with Action Man again.)

But that wasn't really the most significant of the interesting permutations of GIJoe. No, that started rather earlier, with Combat Joe, a re-release of the 12" figures for the Japanese market way back. Combat Joe's molds were re-used by Japanese company Takara, for a toyline called Henshin Cyborg, which featured clear figures with visible cybernetic parts inside. Henshin Cyborg still gets a few commemorative releases now and then, but back in the day it was mostly supplanted by a toyline called Microman (a toyline of approximately 33/4" figures, apparently entirely by coincidence as it was a few years earlier than '82 GIJoe). Microman saw some success in the '70s, enough so that it saw release in the USA as Micronauts (which got a comic, coincidentally also from Marvel). They also revamped Microman as an unexceptional series called Timanic or something (an 8" line... hm...).

There were a couple more closely related spin-offs, such as Diaclone (not sure how it's linked precisely, but they say it is-and beware, Japanese site) and Blockman.

Then, there was Transformers.

You might be screeching to a halt about now. "What are you talking about? Hasbro made Transformers!" (If you said something else, such as "Takara made Transformers," shame on you.) You see, Transformers has its roots in two toylines-Diaclone and Microman. Most of its first wave of toys came from Diaclone, which had been previously repackaged cheaply under five or six names by Hasbro in an attempt to sell more toys. Hasbro wanted to do it one more time, but it came up with a brilliant new tactic: Let's give them complicated bio notes and a comic book and maybe a cartoon. Transformers took Diaclone's "realistic vehicle" toys and Microman's transforming "realistic household item" toys, along with a few "microvehicles" from Microman, and declared that they were all actually alien robots that had been locked in an endless war for eons. (See, GIJoe is always about soldiers.)

I don't know just how carefully they planned it beyond the comic series (which was probably intended to be a miniseries) and the cartoon (which was obviously originally intended as a miniseries) and the "tech specs" that they stuck to the toys' packaging (apparently written by the same folks who started off the comic), but Transformers has endured. It's endured, in fact, with far less change and far more faculty than its distant cousin/blood brother/grandfather/whatever GIJoe. (Ironically, Transformers and GIJoe have a long, proud tradition of crossing over with each other. I'll probably blog about that sometime.) The biggest change ever to Transformers was when they briefly started transforming into organic-looking animals in Beast Wars, and while it revitalized Transformers, it was only a brief sideline in Transformers history.

GIJoe, on the other hand, still seems to be floundering, with limited successes here and there. Why does it continue to struggle? Probably because, unlike Transformers, it can't escape from the image of being "war toys." Transformers have guns and fight wars, but because they're mostly unrealistic robots and brightly colored, they can thumb their metal noses at the image; it doesn't stick, while even ridiculous-looking GIJoe vehicles are still clearly built for war. "War toys" are heavily frowned upon as "causing violence." They met with success at least partly back in the '80s thanks to the process of healing that the country was then undergoing with the Vietnam veterans (in the comics most of the team was in fact presented as being Vietnam vets); since then, its reinventions have been efforts to get away from the "war toy" image. And unfortunately, these reinventions fail, because even Sigma Six tends to have "GIJoe" proudly proclaimed on it. It might get some respect from the upcoming live action movie, but this movie has had even more criticism (as far as I can tell) from its fandom than Transformers, which viciously blasted by many fans for being "too much like [insert any random nonsensical thing you like here]" and "not enough like Transformers" by its fans.

*Here, I'm defining "old" as any subject matter which is old enough that I don't remember it from the first time it came around. I'm in my mid-20s and have a cruddy memory, so that means I don't remember much of anything before 1990. If that makes you feel old, I apologize. I don't have much sympathy, though-I've been getting AARP membership offers since before I graduated from high school (a long story I'll talk about some other time, and yes I'm pretty sure I know how it happened).
**Don't listen to Wikipedia-it claims that the 2007 live action Transformers was a remake of the '80s Transformers: The Movie. Idiots. (There's one of my own fandom biases, I suppose. But how anyone could take the '07 film to be a remake of TF:TM is totally beyond me.)