GI Joe and Vietnam
Joe was born in 1964, while, in Vietnam, thousands of American "advisers" were already offering up their know-how from helicopter seats or through gun barrels. In less than a year we would send in our first large contingent of ground troops, adolescents who would enter the battle zone dreaming of John Wayne and thinking of enemy-controlled territory as "Indian country"; it was, as a recent James Barron piece on Joe in the New York Times reminds us, "the year that Ford Mustang, Diet Pepsi and Kellogg's Pop-Tarts also joined consumers' vocabularies"; the year when a generation of children began to play out familiar scenarios of American battle triumph via the most popular toy warrior ever created.As the cold war ended a new enemy was required.
His name, G.I. (for "Government Issue") Joe was redolent of World War II, America's last total victory -- Korea was already "the forgotten war" -- and utterly generic. There was no specific figure named Joe, nor did any of the "Joes" have names. Joe initially came with no story, no instructions, and no enemy because it had not yet occurred to toymakers that a child could not be trusted to choose the right enemy to pit against Joe.
In TV ads, Joe was depicted as the most traditional of war toys. Little boys in World-War-II-style helmets were shown entering battle with a G.I. Joe tank or fiercely displaying their Joe equipment while a chorus of deep, male voices sang (to the tune of "The Caissons Go Rolling Along") "G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe/ Fighting man from head to toe/ on the land, on the sea, in the air." He could take any landing site in style dressed in his "Ike" jacket with red scarf. And he was a giant, too, nearly a foot tall. From the telltale pink scar on his cheek to the testosterone rush of ad boys shouting "G.I. Joe, take the hill!" he seemed the picture of a manly American fighting toy.
Yet Joe, like much else in his moment, was not quite what he seemed. Launched the year Lyndon Baines Johnson ran for president as a peace candidate (while his administration was seeking a pretext to escalate the war in Vietnam), Joe, though a behemoth of a toy soldier, was also a doll.
Joe was, in fact, the spawn of Barbie, who took the fashion salons, malt shops, boudoirs, and bedrooms not so long before he took the beaches. He was the brainstorm of Stanley Weston, a toy developer convinced that boys secretly played with Barbie and deserved their own doll. Joe was designed as a thoroughly accurate military figure, with a special "grip," an opposable thumb and forefinger, all the better to grasp those realistic bazookas, and he was built with 21 movable parts so that boys could finally put war in motion.
In those days, everyone in the toy business knew that toy soldiers were 3-inch-high, immobile, plastic or lead figures, and the initial response to Joe ranged from doubt to laughter. But Joe confounded them all, a warrior Adam created from Eve's plastic rib, a tough guy with his own outfits and accessories, whom you could dress, undress, and take to bed -- or at least tent down with, if you were lucky to have that "bivouac-pup tent set" of his.
But none of this could be said. It was taboo at Hasbro, Joe's company, to call him a "doll." Instead, the company dubbed him a "poseable action figure for boys," and the name "action figure" stuck to every war-fighting toy that followed. So Barbie and Joe, hard breasts and soft bullets, the exaggerated bombshell and the touchy-feely, scar-faced warrior, came to represent America's increasingly shaky gender stories at decade's end, where a secret history of events was slowly sinking to the level of childhood.
As the Vietnam years wore on, Joe slowly began to transmogrify. His toy-DNA began to change. He became ever less a soldier. Protest was in the air. As early as 1966, mothers in Mary Poppins outfits picketed the New York toy convention, with umbrellas displaying the slogan, "Toy Fair or Warfare?" and Sears soon dropped all military toys from its catalogue. A nervous Hasbro began altering Joe's look. He gained a beard and "flocked hair," lost his military edge, and, in 1970, joined the G.I. Joe Adventure Team.
Now, just as Joe began to leave history behind, in various packaged play sets he was linked up with his first real enemies, but they weren't human. There was the tiger of the "White Tiger Hunt," the mummy of "Secret of the Mummy's Tomb," as well as other assorted carnivorous villains. For the first time, in those years of growing adult confusion, some indication of plot, of what exactly a child should do with these toys, began to be incorporated into titles like "The Search for the Stolen Idol." Not only was Joe now an adventurer, but his "adventure" was being crudely outlined on the packaging that accompanied him.
This hipper new Joe had also begun to look suspiciously like the antiwar opposition. By 1974, he had even gained a bit of an Asian touch with his new "kung-fu grip." In 1976, under the pressure of the increased cost of plastic (think first oil crisis here), he shrank almost four inches, and soon after he vanished from the scene. He was, according to Hasbro "furloughed," and as far as anyone then knew, consigned to toy oblivion along with all those cowboys, Indians, bluecoats and other historical figures.
In this, his fate was typical of what happened to the rest of child culture in those years. It was as if Vietnamese sappers had reached into the American homeland and blasted a story of battle triumph almost 300 years in the making free of its ritualistic content; as if the "Indians" of that moment had sent the cavalry into flight and unsettled the West. In fact, no American entertainment form could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a non-white people in a frontier war. Instead, the forms simply dematerialized as well.
By the time Saigon fell in 1975, children, like adults, existed in a remarkably story-less, history-less realm -- which turned out to be nothing but a boon for consumer culture, whose corporations were ready indeed to set off for outer space, inner realms, Medieval fantasy times, any place, in fact, that could produce product history was incapable of assailing.
Instead of the Russians or their surrogates, they chose to create a vaguer enemy -- and in this, too, they were remarkably predictive. That enemy was a bogeyman called "terrorism" and it took the form of COBRA. (Today you could substitute "al-Qaeda.") COBRA was an organization of super-bad guys who lived not in Moscow, but in -- gasp -- Springfield, U.S.A. (Hasbro researchers had discovered that a Springfield existed in every state -- except Rhode Island, where the company was located.)
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In story and style, the Joe's and their enemies left history behind for some alternate or future Earth and they disported themselves with bulked-up weaponry and a look that befitted not so much "real American heroes" as a set of superheroes or supervillains in any futuristic space epic. Take "enemy leader, COBRA Commander." Faceless in Darth-Vader style, his head was covered by a hood with eye slits, reminiscent perhaps of the Ku Klux Klan; his body was encased in a torturer's blue jumpsuit, leather gloves, and boots. He was an enemy uncoupled from history, whose "dossier" included this information: Total control of the world… its people, wealth, and resources – that's the objective… COBRA commander is hatred and evil personified. Corrupt. A man without scruples. Probably the most dangerous man alive!
G.I. Joe as President
In our politics, it would perhaps not be too strange to say that G.I. Joe in his original incarnation has, at least for the moment, won. We have a "real American hero" for President, though what exactly he ever did that was heroic no one can quite say. In his appearances before the troops, togged out in specially prepared military outfits, whether struting across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished"), dropping in on Baghdad International Airport for Thanksgiving, or more recently visiting the Marines at Camp Pendleton, he's had the eerily familiar look of a well-known fashion doll, a "hero" with a distinctly hidden history. He represents, and plays upon, a nostalgic yearning for that landmark-filled world that the first Joe almost missed, a world in which things did indeed seem more solid, less market-driven, and somehow clearer (at least to the young); and in that spirit and that language he's sent off young Americans on a fool's task in Iraq, boys and girls who grew up on a history-less diet of "stories" filled with teams of "good guys" and "bad guys." Our troops in Iraq represent the first video-game generation, kids who spent their teen years ramping up their weaponry in outer space as on Earth. Perhaps then it's not surprising that, trapped in Iraq, they now speak of the enemy familiarly as "the bad guys."
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