G.I. Joe Was There: Were Yesterday’s Boys Programmed for Today’s War of Terror?

Knowing the script of Spectacular Reality many in the United States are living through now, the little boys of the 80’s may have learned what to expect and even what parts to play from watching the cartoon programming on TV. Specifically, I’m referring to the 80’s cartoon version of G.I. Joe and its complimentary toy line: the Real American Hero. This incarnation marked a very intriguing re-branding (not the first nor last) of the toy line for a new, malleable generation of young American boys. Perhaps, that generation of boys was “rebranded” as well. I say that because there seems quite a few similarities between the plot of the “Real American Hero” and the mediated reality fed to us in these Spectacular Times.

But first, let’s take take a look at the history of G.I. Joe before the 1980’s rebirth.

G.I. Joe: Reporting For Duty in the Shadow of World Events

It probably isn’t a going to be much of a shock to anyone if I posit that through most of its history, G.I. Joe has been about selling boys on war. But I wonder how many have pondered the curious time in which the world’s first action figure was birthed. On November 2nd, 1963, a U.S.-backed coup led to the assassination of Vietnam’s President Ngo Dihn Diem, an unforeseen consequence of a U.S.-backed coup initiated a day earlier. (Shades of our current times: the U.S. and U.S. money had supported Diem’s rise to power. Saddam anyone?) Twenty days after Diem’s death, the world witnessed the assassination of JFK. Despite his role in approving the Vietnamese coup, records show he had secretly intended the full withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.

It was during this volatile year that Korean War vet Don Levine, working from Stan Weston’s idea, presented his prototype for G.I. Joe to the suits at Hasbro (then called Hassenfeld Brothers).

The following year, 1964, saw G.I. Joe, the world’s first “action figure,” begin his first tour of duty in U.S. toy stores. Joe covered all the bases, with a figure for each branch of the military: Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. The product launch must have seemed serendipitous to Hasbro because in August of that year the infamously misnamed Gulf of Tonkin “attack” occurred. Like the equally fake “Polish attack” on a German radio station (Operation Himmler) before WWII, the Gulf of Tonkin proved useful as pretext for war. G.I. Joe, by the way, proved an instant hit with little boys across the country at the same time that the four branches of the military began sacrificing only slightly older boys in Southeast Asia.

I’m not implying any conscious plot in this, mind you. In an interview, Don Levine said that he and his design team of mostly WWII and Korean War vets “weren’t out to romanticize war or international conflict,” when they designed the G.I. Joe “action figure.” It was simply a part of his “generation’s milieu. ” The military theme simply provided a convenient array of ideas for accessories to sell the kids on.

Maybe.

Whatever the case, I’ll bet the coincidence of selling a military doll just in time for Vietnam worked pretty well for Hasbro’s bottom line.

At least, for awhile.

By 1968, G.I. Joe, like the conflict in Southeast Asia, was failing to win hearts and minds as Americans were nightly traumatized by images of the senseless brutality of war broadcast on television news. Sales plummeted to the extent that G.I. Joe was morphed into a bearded, bead-wearing “former soldier” called Adventure Joe, thus saving the brand. I suppose random adventures “capturing tigers and gorillas” and “stolen mummies” seemed far more palatable at that point than carpet-bombing and carnage in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

In the mid-to-late seventies, our boy Joe now had an Adventure Team, which included a Million-Dollar Man rip-off dubbed Atomic Man. By then, Joe and the Adventure posse was getting into it with space aliens in addition to the random wildlife. But the oil embargo in 1978 cut all that non-war-like adventuring short. “[D]ue to an increase in the price of petroleum,” Hasbro now decided it was too costly to manufacture their “moveable fighting man,” beard or no beard.

But G.I. Joe wasn’t gone for long. And that brings us to the “branding” discussed in the beginning of this piece.

G.I. Joe, Covert Ops, Secret Wars & Fighting the Terror Monolith

Whereas the original G.I. Joe was just the name of one man, who never had any specific human enemy with which to contend, when G.I. Joe re-emerged in 1982 that all changed.

G.I. Joe was now the name of not one soldier, but of an entire military group. From the “Complete Guide to G.I. Joe:”

This incarnation of G. I. Joe was conceived as a small “mobile strike force” or “special missions force” assembled by U.S. Army General Flagg in the late 1970s, mostly from Vietnam veterans and young up-and-comers, with the mission of protecting America from threats to freedom which needed to be kept from the public, or which the regular military forces were ill-equipped to handle. Their duties quickly narrowed to defending America and its interests from the forces of an evil used car salesman-turned- terrorist known as the Cobra Commander. This villain had masterminded terrorist activities in the Middle East and, by the time of Issue # 1, had come to command legions of troops in a militarized society called Cobra. The Commander’s ultimate goal eventually became world domination.

The comical used car salesman origin of the Cobra Commander didn’t get mentioned in the American Hero cartoon, with which the rest of this essay is concerned. However, the other particulars remain true. G.I. Joe was now the code name for a special military elite. Particularly suggestive, this elite military unit concerns itself with activities to be “kept from the public.” In addition to this, G.I. Joe now carries out missions against an entire terrorist society, named Cobra, connected to Middle-East terrorism. If this doesn’t already start to sound like our latter-day bogeymen in Al Qaeda, then mayhaps you’re not paying attention. And as the cartoon that began at the same time as the launch of this new covert-ops-themed G.I. Joe bears out, G.I. Joe now engaged in an ongoing, secret war against a seemingly ubiquitous terrorist organization…

[Stay tuned...We're just getting started...I hope to revise and expand this essay soon.  Unfortunately time is short for the rest of the day, but I wanted to get this much out.]