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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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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As we’ve covered before, the battlefield accessories were great extras to add to your living room or backyard warfare. Hasbro spent as much effort in making and marketing these sets as they did their larger vehicle offerings. The Ammo Dump box art clearly shows all the bits in the kit, and even cross-sells Recondo in the process. Diabolical marketing strikes
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I covered the Rapid Deployment Force back in 2013, and I had a grand time revisiting the re-purposed Pocket Patrol Pack. It even inspired me to wear the thing out on the town. Read the sordid story here. It’s one of my faves. Now on to the real purpose. If you’re into action figure carrying cases of all stripes, I
Read moreI don’t know about you, but if I were in the midst of a heated battle with Cobra, I’d be jonesing for these sweet shades to protect my delicate ocular orbs! Bright optic orange? Sweet! Too bad they don’t come in prescription. And hey, they’re only one dollar–waitaminute, what’s that asterisk all about? A dollar-fifty shipping and handling?! Man, looks
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What you see before you can best be described as excitement on the go. Can you imagine being able to carry three of your favorite GI Joe figures with you wherever you go? How about unleashing three (okay, two) highly desirable figures from a fairly nondescript looking black plastic case? You can even look super cool while doing so, because
Read moreIf there was ever evidence of how big the GI Joe line was in the 80’s, one need only look at the amount and variation of product and its increase as those first few years went by. From the beginning, Hasbro was wise to include a variety of price points in its offerings. There were big ticket items like the
Read moreThe Revenge of Cobra was filled with new and entertaining GI Joe characters. Among my favorite Joe additions like Flint, Lady Jaye and Shipwreck were a number of Cobras. Chief among the new baddies was an intriguing antagonist that confounded the Joes upon their first meeting. As a kid having watched the mini-series over and over, this same character was
Read moreThe battlefield accessory concept was another brilliant piece of marketing for the Real American Hero line. For a small price point you could provide your troops with an added element of play. While the cannon, machine gun and missile unit sets were cool additions to my arsenal, I particularly enjoyed the small base type emplacements. The Cobra bunker is somewhat
Read moreThe Revenge of Cobra. I had a Beta (that’s right, Beta) tape that I’d recorded from its first TV airing that I watched over and over. I watched that mini-series so many times that I can still recite most of the dialog even today. There were a few vehicles and accessories from the mini-series that I had always wished for
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