The Intruders have never made much sense to me, but I can’t get over how cool and weird the concept and execution is–So very wonderfully 70s. I wonder if anyone knows the story on these guys’ production? The scale difference has to have some sort of explanation. It’s a mystery!
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GI Joe has hands that grip!
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Mummies and GI Joe go way back–all the way to the 70s. As a kid just barely aware of the large scale Joes that predated my childhood Real American Heros, I was somehow aware of the original search for the mummy set. Maybe it was the Peter Pan book and record. As an adult collector, I think that set perfectly
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By KansasBrawler As much as I love Kre-O, sometimes the choices they make with their sets are a little strange. Case in point, the Thunderwave Jet Boat set. While it’s probably the second-weakest set, I wanted it because Cutter is one of my favorite Joes. It’s obvious the Thunderwave Jet Boat set was a refugee from the unsuccessful Battleship line
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I enjoy toy catalogs. Whether Christmas fare, local circular ads or highly specific retailer and Toy Fair presentations, it all hits me in the right place. The Hasbro internal catalogs have always featured some of the best layout of product as well as (inadvertently) spotlighting interesting pre-production samples of well-known sets. For the Adventure Team’s second year, the catalog highlights
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I have a lot of fun playing a bit of clean-up with card art images. The Adventure Team sets didn’t often offer a lot of real estate to show off product paintings, but the carded outfits gave up a little more package width to showcase the set. The paintings were often evocative, and certainly helped to fire one’s imagination. This
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For the past several years, I’ve been choosing the club’s 12 inch yearly incentive figure. My interest was piqued first by the henchman figure that made its debut as a convention exclusive. Then the Man of Evil was released, and after the expected 50th anniversary figure, was later followed by weirdos like Dr. Isotope and Mike Power. This year, The
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When GI Joe transitioned to the Adventure Team, Hasbro maintained the basic figures’ breakdown into what previously represented the four main armed services. The army, navy, air force and Marines were reconfigured into a less overtly militaristic organization. In what surely must have been a cost-cutting move, the four main figures retained their original uniforms. The Land Adventurer then would
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If you think the GI Joe brand only gave rise to ridiculous accessory concepts as recent as the 1990s, you’d be thinking wrong. Check out the Chest Winch, from the Adventure Team era. I covered it once before in its application as part of the Action Man line, but I think this piece of package artwork truly captures the beautiful
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One of the things I really enjoy about the Adventure Team package art are the mixing of depictions of the product in both fictional and real-world settings. The Windboat illustrates Joe in his craft at the left, yet the right panel shows a kid hand assembling the toy. Better yet, a closer look at Joe on the windboat reveals that
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