Toy Fair Flashback: Tonka GI Joe Vehicles
It’s Toy Fair time again, and no Joe news to report from Hasbro. That’s why we’re reaching into the catalog vault to dig up an advert of what was coming soon—in the past.
My favorite of these 1993 offerings are the Steel Brigade branded vehicles. It wouldn’t be Tonka without a bulldozer and dump truck. And it’s the most literal use ever of the Steel Brigade nomenclature.
I have no memory of these at all. I didn’t even know Tonka ever made anything G.I. Joe related. The closest I can come up with was the Steel Monsters line, which was in the same scale, but that was more along the lines of Mad Max as almost all the figures looked like they could audition to be new Dreadnoks.
I never knew these existed either. The Striker is a ringer for the Avenger Stinger missile system I used in the Army for a while!
Kudos to Tonka for finally leaving the cab open so you can slip action figures in! The downside is, these vehicles are BIG. The MP Pickup doesn’t look too bad, but I’ve got one of the Strikers, and as much as I want to like it, it’s about 50% too large for the figures. O-ring figures look like children riding in there. Mine looks more like a Humvee and less like a truck though, and I’m pretty sure it has side steps with footpegs. And the missile rack sounds like one of the Sonic Fighters backpacks with generic gun/missile/bomb sounds.
Huh, these are bizarre. The toy line was pretty much dead by 1993, and it was waaaay past the mundane, down-to-earth military stylings of these things. This seems like a license team-up that should have happened about 10 years sooner.
This is most likely around the time Hasbro had finalized its purchase of Tonka brands.
Yeah, that makes sense. I wondered if it was something along those lines. I guess it was less a question of “Why?” and more, “Eh, why not?”
Way cool! Wish bit went further, earlier.
I saw these at toys r us in the nineties
Thought about buying them but didn’t have a job back then…. Not enough money….