Retroist GI Joe Toys Podcast

Aug 20, 2021

Welcome to Episode 1 of the 14th season of the Retroist Podcast. In this episode, I discuss that most patriotic of toylines, GI Joe.

I have been thinking wanting to release a GI Joe Podcast for a while now. It always just felt too big a subject to cover in the way that I do podcasts. The answer to how I should cover it was pretty straightforward. I would do it as a multi-part podcast. So this podcast is part one of three episodes of GI Joe podcasts.

I start off talking about how my friends and I played with GI Joe figures. The actual way we played, which was like live-action roleplaying but with dolls. It was delightful and very rarely ended in fighting.

Then I moved on to the toys themselves. This story starts way before the 80s with the company that made them, Hasbro. So I talk about how that company started, how it got its hands on GI Joe, and how the toyline would move from the Sixies into the Eighties.

My coverage of the toys stops in the first year. I do mention a few things that came later but I really wanted this show to focus on that first year of figures and how we got there.

GI Joe was extremely popular in my group of friends and would be for years. It was a colorful and creative toy line that was brimming with possibilities. Despite all the movies and attempts to reboot the franchise, I continued to be surprised that they didn’t figure out a way to sell Joes to kids again.

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Production Notes

This is the first episode of the 14th season of the podcast. It was the first episode I recorded this season and the first time I am attempting to cover a topic in multiple episodes.
I cut out about 30 seconds about The Lieutenant.
You really need to do a search on the Hypo Squirt toy. Its so silly looking.
I had more about Romper Room. It was a show I liked. I mentioned its history and when Hasbro came to be associated with them. It was too much of a tangent.
I had talked about the origin of the phrase GI Joe, but I garbled it. It probably would not have added much.
I had a rant about breaking figures and a friend who loved to do it. At the same time I also talked about how easy it was to learn to fix them.
That led to talks of custome figures. I cut that out because it felt like it didn’t work in the window of time I had chosen.
I had a bunch more commercials, but cut them out. I am also trying to remove the commercial bumbers. I kind of like the way it turned out on this episode.
I removed some info about Palitoy and the UK version of the figures. Action Force feels like it could be its own thing.
You will learn a bit more about Larry Hama in the next episode.
Fury Force would have been very cool.
I talked about how Snake Eyes was done on the cheap being unpainted. I didn’t like how it turned out. Cut it.
I have a couple of bonus tracks I will probably release for this episodes. I had recorded two other stories for the intro of the show before settling on this one and I had talked a bit more about stuff while I looked at them in catalogs.
All the music you hear in this episode is by the mighty Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.