If there’s anything this weekly Throwback Thursday segment is showing, it’s that people collect more than toys, but the stories behind their toys. For some reason I don’t really think about just how many stories there are behind a lot of the toys I have … until I’m pressed to think about them. And then suddenly I remember all sorts of little blurbs. There’s the day my family and I went hiking in the Blue Ridge mountains and then afterwards we stopped at the mall — totally exhausted — and I found Super Powers Dr. Fate at Kay-Bee. There’s the time I spent what felt like an eternity in kid years trying to decide between the Millennium Falcon and the Hoth Playset at Best department store. There’s the time I saw a Masters of the Universe Ninjor figure in the trash can at my elementary school … and left it because I didn’t know who it was, not having seen the latest round of figures. There’s the one and only time in my entire childhood I ran across Zartan and his Swamp Skier in a Brendle’s Department store one town over. There’s the Christmas I got the AT-AT, X-Wing, and Snowspeeder … plus a brand new bike. That was the Christmas all my toys seemed bigger than I was.
Wow, was I a spoiled kid …
But this is not about those times. This is about my very first GI Joe figures.
There’s something about a brand new toyline; there’s this feeling of limitless potential that opens up when you look at the cardback of this brand new character and see this tiny world open up.
Despite everything I said above, my parents were not wealthy by any means when I was growing up. I was an only child, which helped, but I was very conscious of the fact that we couldn’t just buy anything and everything, so I hesitated to ask for too much. Usually one figure when we were in a store. Hell, they were only around two bucks, and I still felt quasi-guilty asking. They never made me feel guilty, but I did just the same. I had lists, of course — big long lists of toys I wanted — and mom dutifully carried these little pieces of cardboard in her pocketbook that had colorful pictures of different toys with the ones I had neatly X’ed out and little numbers ranking the ones I wanted the most. Anal, yes.
Back then my dad’s job switched a lot, so we moved through a few houses before finally settling. My first year of school was in a city school that was literally across the road from where we lived, which was convenient enough. I was sick a lot that year. I missed almost 60 days of school — nearly half the year — due to mold in the air ducts in the house we lived in — apparently something the realtor never bothered to tell us about. I’m sure there’s no lasting damage, though. *twitch*
One day after school and I made the extremely short walk across the road to home, I saw that my parents had just pulled in, still sitting in the vehicle. They waggled a finger at me to get in because we were going to go somewhere. I can’t remember where. We had a crappy old Datsun pickup, so I squeezed into the middle.
“Look in the glove compartment,” Mom said, so I did.
Out popped two action figures. At first glance, due to the cardboard with the plastic bubble, I assumed they were Star Wars figures, but then I saw the logo: GI Joe.
I was an instant fan.
Flash was a laser trooper. Lasers. Is there anything cooler than lasers when you’re a kid? I mean, other than robots, or robots shooting lasers. The word itself is cool. And then there was this badass-looking dude with a metal head. Was it a head, or a mask? Was he part robot? Was he a part man/part robot with a laser pistol? Could there be anything better?
I wasn’t sure just what was going on here, but I knew it was forged out of pure awesome.
I don’t know how many times I buffed Destro’s head to keep it shiny. You can see that his crotch has suffered the dreaded broken crotch, and that his gun is frayed from being placed in and out of his hand roughly a katrillion times. Destro was easily my favorite of the two because he had the swivel arms that this earlier Flash was lacking. This would have been right at the beginning of the introduction of the swivel-arm upgrades. Flash and Scarlett — she was my third figure — are the only two Joes I ever had that had Straight-Arm Syndrome.
I still have their file cards. In fact, I have every file card in the order in which I got the figures, from Flash and Destro to V4 Snake Eyes. Who you callin’ crazy!?
Both of these figures are pretty wobbly in the knees, and their paint has suffered over time. But decades later, I’m still as big a GI Joe fan as these two figures made me. They started it all. And now I need them in 6-inch.