We Had That

G.I. Joe's enemy: Cobra Frogman "Eels" (Hasbro, 1985) 1985 was an awesome year for GI Joe!  Hasbro gave us some of the best bad guys of the entire Real American Hero run with The Crimson Guard, Snow Serpents, and the first three Dreadnoks!  Even with all of those awesome new characters from Hasbro, the Cobra Eel was definitely one of the figures that caught my eye right from the first time I saw the new figures pictured on the back of my Footloose card!  Just from that tiny picture, I knew I wanted to add this guy to my Cobra team. Cobra Eel: Ready for Action! At that point, we didn't have many underwater figures.  Torpedo was a great figure from wave 2, but my Deep Six figure who came out in wave 3 spent most of his time living in a shoe box and rarely saw any action at all.  Torpedo needed someone to fight against and the Cobra Eels fit that role perfectly! GI Joe: Cobra Eels file card According to their file cards, the Eels are Cobra's demolition experts....

  Star Wars Nikto action figure (Kenner, 1984) Just like most of the boys I knew in the early 80s, I was a huge Star Wars fan!  Kenner's action figures from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were easily my favorite toys during the late 70s and early 80s.  There for a while, I'm pretty sure I had every Star Wars figure that Kenner released!  I spent hours creating adventures for these amazing action figures!  In 1982, the GI Joe "Real American Hero" line started showing up in toy stores and my interest became divided between GI Joe and Star Wars with GI Joe probably getting more of my attention because they were new and therefore more exciting at the time. My childhood Nikto action figure Still, when the first figures for Return of the Jedi started showing up in 1983, before I had even seen the movie, that got my attention and Star Wars was on my mind again.  Seeing the new figures and the photographs on the packages made me speculate about the upcoming ...

  GI Joe Outback action figure (Hasbro, 1987) When GI Joe was re-born as a 3 3/4" action figure under the "Real American Hero" banner in 1982, I was immediately on board!  Each year, a new wave of figures and vehicles was released. For the first several years, I was a huge fan who wanted everything that Hasbro offered!  But as the years went on, Hasbro began to stray from the original concept.  The GI Joe team had originally been made up of the military elite, but with each subsequent wave, more and more figures were showing up who didn't feel very "military" to me.  I didn't mind the crazy Cobra outfits as much since they were a terrorist organization, but I thought guys involved with the US Military should look a certain way. Outback on patrol with all his gear! To me, it felt like 1987 was the crossover year for the GI Joe team.  About half of the guys looked great.  Falcon, in particular, was one of the most military-looking Joes of the entire run....

  G.I. Joe's enemy: Cobra Communications Specialist "Tele-Viper" (Hasbro, 1985) When Hasbro first introduced G.I. Joe as a 3 3/4" "Real American Hero" in 1982, I fit their target audience 100%. I wanted all of the toys, I read the comic books, I watched cartoons and got excited when there was a commercial for GI Joe.  By 1985, I had a nice collection of Joes and Cobras who shot, punched, kicked, stabbed, and blew each other up pretty much daily.  When I saw my first wave-four figure in the toy store (It was Footloose, by the way), I looked at the back of his card and saw so many cool characters that I couldn't wait to find them!  Some of the most exciting were: The Dreadnoks, Snow Serpents, Crimson Guard, a new Snake Eyes figure with a sword and a wolf!?  The Tele-vipers, honestly, had some pretty serious competition for my very-few dollars.  The stars never aligned and I never brought home a Cobra Communications figure. Cobra Tele-Viper in the field Al...

  G.I. Joe S.W.A.T. Specialist: Shockwave (Hasbro, 1988) I loved the 3 3/4" GI Joe figures from the moment that I first saw them!  I thought the comic books were amazing!  As a kid, I enjoyed acting out adventures with these awesome action figures for many years.  My favorite figures on the Joe team were typically the ones that looked more realistic...at least what I thought was realistic at the time.  By the time wave 7 came out in 1988, I had already begun to expect there to be too many silly looking members of the Joe team and in general, that was the case with this wave.  However, there were still a few cool figures like Repeater and Hit & Run who looked like they could actually be in the military. Repeater and Hit & Run compared to Shockwave GI Joe's resident S.W.A.T. Specialist, Shockwave, was a little different than the others to me.  I thought of the GI Joe Team as an elite military group - brought together to deal with the mo...

Helicopter Assault Trooper: Airborne (Hasbro, 1983) G.I. Joe began his life as America's Movable Fighting Man in 1964 in the form of a one-sixth scale, fully articulated action figure.  After more than a decade on the shelves of toy stores across the country, Joe retired in the mid-70s.  With the popularity of Star Wars figures, G.I. Joe returned in 1982 as a 3 3/4" Real American Hero and that's where my adventures with G.I. Joe began... Airborne: Deep Behind Enemy Lines Right from the start, I thought these little guys were awesome and when the 2nd wave of figures hit the scene in 1983, I was excited to expand my team of Joes.  One of my absolute favorites from the second wave was a Helicopter Assault Trooper - Code Name: Airborne!  According to the file card on the back of his package, Franklin E. Talltree was a Navajo from a Arizona.  His family had made their fortune in the oil industry and as a kid, his parents let him take Sky-Diving lessons.  Origina...

Heroic Man-At-Arms (Mega Construx, 2018) Man-At-Arms was one of the very first figures to be released in the Masters of the Universe line back in 1982.  Throughout the MOTU franchise, Man-At-Arms has been a prominent character.  He appeared in about half of the original mini comics that came packaged with the action figures and has appeared in many of the books, comics, and cartoons that have come out of the series.  He's even one of the few characters from the original toy line to appear in the live action Masters of the Universe movie. Man-At-Arms: Ready for Battle! Toys aside, when most people think of the personality of Man-At-Arms, they are probably primarily influenced by the Filmation cartoon from 1983 to 1985.  Man-At-Arms was much less defined in the original few mini comics and the original action figure had a significantly different face (at least to my eyes) than the version in the cartoon.  Filmation developed the character from simply a master of w...