But teams of good and bad guys weren't enough. Children needed context. A "history" had to be written for these preplanned figures, what the toy industry would come to call a "backstory." Then a way had to be found for each figure to bring his own backstory, his play instructions, into the home. First, "Joe" was shrunk to 3 3/4-inch size, so that his warrior team could fit into the Star Wars universe. Next, he was reconceived as a set of earthbound fantasy figures (rather than "real" soldiers) and armed with Star Wars-style weaponry.
A Marvel comic book series lent the toys an ongoing story form, while Hasbro pioneered using the space on the back of each figure's package for a collector card/profile of the enclosed toy. Larry Hama, creator of the comics and of the earliest profiles, called them "intelligence dossiers." Each Joe or COBRA was now to come with his own spacy code name (from Air Tight to Zartan) and his own "biography." Each "individualized" team member would carry his story into the home on his back.
Take "enemy leader, COBRA Commander." Poisonous snakes are bad news, but his no-goodness was almost laughably overdetermined. Faceless in the style of Darth Vader, his head was covered by a hood with eye slits, reminiscent of the KKK, his body encased in a torturer's blue jumpsuit, leather gloves, and boots. Here is his "dossier":
"Primary Military Specialty: Intelligence.
Secondary Military Specialty: Ordnance (experimental weaponry).
Birthplace: Classified.
Absolute power! Total control of the world... its people, wealth, and resources -- that's the objective of COBRA Commander. This fanatical leader rules with an iron fist. He demands total loyalty and allegiance. His main battle plan, for world control, relies on revolution and chaos. He personally led uprisings in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and other trouble spots. Responsible for kidnapping scientists, businessmen, and military leaders then forcing them to reveal their top level secrets. COBRA commander is hatred and evil personified. Corrupt. A man without scruples. Probably the most dangerous man alive!"
Other than the telltale reference to Southeast Asia, he was an enemy uncoupled from the war story. Only the profile that came with him separated him from Snake-Eyes, a good guy with Ninja training who also came encased in a blue jumpsuit with slits for eyeholes.
Launched in 1982, the new G.I. Joe was to prove the most successful boy's toy of the period. By the mid-1980s, Joe had an every afternoon animated TV show that put special effects battles with COBRA constantly within the child's field of vision. After Joe, war play on "Earth" would be in the reconstructionist mode. Carefully identified teams of good and bad figures, backed by collectors' cards, TV cartoons, movies, video games, books, and comics, as well as a host of licensed products stamped with their images, would offer an overelaborate frame of instruction in new-style war play. All a child had to do was read the toy box, turn on the TV, go to the video store, put on the audio tape that accompanied the "book," or pick up the character's "magazine" to be surrounded by a backstory of war play. Yet the void where the national war story had been remained.
The New Business of War Play
By 1993, Hasbro had produced over 300 G.I. Joe figures with "close to 260 different personalities" and sold hundreds of millions of them. No longer a masked man and his lone sidekick, but color, price, and weapons coordinated masked teams, these "characters" on screen and on the child's floor were byproducts of an extraordinary explosion of entrepreneurial life force, for the business impulse behind war play was childhood's real story in the 1980s. The intrusive, unsettling world of commercial possibility that had first looked through the screen at the child three decades earlier represented the real victory culture of the postwar child's world.
The new war story it produced had only a mocking relationship to a national story, for all "war" now inhabited the same unearthly, ahistorical commercial space. Even Rambo, transformed into an action-figure team for children, found himself locked in televised cartoon combat with General Terror and his S.A.V.A.G.E. terrorist group. While various Ninjas and Native Americans brought their spiritual skills to the good side, everywhere the "enemy" remained a vague and fragile construct, a metallic voice stripped of ethnic or racial character; and everywhere the boundary lines between us and the enemy, the good team and the bad team, threatened to collapse into a desperate sameness.
In its characters, names, and plots, the new war story relied on constant self-mockery. The enemy, once the most serious of subjects, was now a running joke. The evil COBRA organization, as described by Hasbro's Bozigian, was made up of "accountants, tax attorneys, and all other kinds of low lifes that are out to conquer the world." The mocking voice of deconstruction was alive and selling product in children's culture -- as with that mega-hit of the late 1980s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In the new war play universe, you did need a scorecard to tell the players apart. In the comic book world, for example, the story had become so self-enclosed that it was nearly impossible to pick up an X-Man comic and have any sense of where you were if you hadn't read the previous 20 issues. Here is part of the dossier of a 1991 Marvel Comics supervillain from one of 160-odd similar bubble gum cards. His code name is Apocalypse.
"Battles Fought: 6344
Wins: 3993 Losses: 2135 Ties: 216
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