Real life crept into the G.I. Joe line only a handful of times. In hindsight, pulling a real-world entity into the fictionalized G.I. Joe universe was as strange a phenomenon as can be, but it can be easily explained by the fact that the 80s were made of cocaine and Hasbro had its nose to the snortstone.
Of all the toylines, G.I. Joe was the only place where it made a certain amount of sense. No other 80s action figure lines had that particular line-straddling cache where it could work. Most either were off-world, futuristic, or involved gigantic transforming robots.
Sgt. Slaughter was a real-world wrestler with a real-world wrestling shtick involving military shenanigans, but none of that mattered, because he had the name “Sgt. Slaughter” and that was about as G.I. Joe a name as it gets, and therefore his insertion into the line was more-or-less seamless. In real life Slaughter was a 6’5 life support system for a chin that looked like it ate Bruce Campbell’s chin and mutated into a freakish chin-monster. The Joes needed a hardass drill instructor, so in comes Sgt. Slaughter, who was mythologized into the badassiest bad ass that ever badded an ass.
I am not ashamed to say that I gave in to the hype almost immediately. I did not watch wrestling in the 80s. I might have been the only kid I knew that was not into wrestling. Oh, sure, I knew the main dudes of the time. There was Andre the Giant, and Hulk Hogan and…some big guy that…probably did things and stuff…possibly in a ring. But a wrestling fan I was not. In fact, it woud not be unfair to say that I hated wrestling and thought it was stupid. Therefore, I had no actual idea that Sgt. Slaughter was a wrestler. I knew he existed in real life because he showed up in commercials to advertise his own figure, but I thought it was some giant Frankenchin dude they created in a lab to market this figure to the masses. To this day I have never seen Slaughter walk his chin into a ring and drop it on anybody.
But that doesn’t matter, because he was a member of G.I. Joe and that was all I needed. His name was Sgt. Slaughter and he looked like he bench-pressed MOBATs for breakfast. My lifelong fandom of the strong guys on various teams meant that Slaughter’s action figure gave me a muscular boner in the most asexual way possible. I needed this figure, so that it could punch and punch until there was nothing left to punch. The fact that his figure came with a small personal tank that he could wear like some ladies wear fur coats was only icing on the sweet sweet cake. I was on a frantic mission to get this figure, and I finally got it one sunny day in a Kmart, back when Kmart was a thing that happened.
Sgt. Slaughter had very little comic book time, because I’m assuming that Larry Hama just didn’t give much of a rat’s patootie about Sgt. Slaughter. He made a couple of contractually obligated appearances, but even those were scant. You get the feeling that Hama was probably saying “Ok, I used him, am I done yet?”
The cartoon was where Slaughter was really able to shine. He exploded onto the scene in his Triple T tank and ate an entire platoon of BATs before telling the Joes that they were all flabby little bitches and needed to be whipped into shape, because America’s elite fighting force were just punk-pounded by a bunch of hyperthyroided Roombas with laser guns until Slaughter arrived. That’s how you establish the badass: have him punch the moon out of orbit and then call everyone else a bunch of crybaby sissypants.
Slaughter would show up frequently in the cartoon. He growl-shouted everything. Literally, even when he was talking in a normal voice, he was growl-shouting. This was a man who could ask you how your day was and make you feel ashamed. This was a guy who could tell a girl her eyes were like twin diamonds suspended inside a dream and her face would peel off. But to be honest, Sgt. Slaughter would never sweet-talk a woman like that. Sgt. Slaughter walks into the club, growl-shouts the words “SLAUGHTER’S DICK IS HERE” and waits for the women to leave their boyfriends. Because all the other guys are wimps, and he’s Sgt. M*****f***ing Slaughter.
