“G.I. Joe: The Best Is Back!” in 2007
I think that when we look back over the last decade of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe we can all agree that 2007 was the brand’s most exciting year. 2007 was before two films destroyed the brand at mass retail. 2007 was the launch of the brand’s 25th Anniversary series (find at Amazon.com*) and a time when the future looked bright for G.I. Joe.
2007 was also a time when you could still buy toy magazines, meaning that Hasbro had an outlet for this wonderful G.I. Joe advertisement: ToyFare. Fantastic ad. I’ll be staring at this for a few hours and trying to forget that I live in a world where magazines are dying and I can’t walk into a Walmart or Target and buy G.I. Joe action figures. 2016 is a sad, sad world.
Related articles
- “Trained to Find The Enemy, No Matter What.” (battlegrip.com)
- “Some Secrets Won’t Stay Buried.” (battlegrip.com)
- G.I. Joe’s 25th Anniversary in Tomart’s Action Figure Digest (battlegrip.com)
I’d argue that 2007 was the worst year. Vintage Joes were unceremoniously killed off and fandom turned on itself over the new sculpts (most of which are hated now). Really, it was the end of collecting for a lot of people.
It’s interesting that the films seem to have done a lot of damage to the toyline. Both of them made a ton of money, though from what I can tell the Rise of Cobra toyline was waaaaay over-ordered and pegwarmed for a long time. Then when the second film was delayed, a bunch of toys had already hit the shelves in line with the original release date, which seemed to cause a lot of panic-buying.
It’s a shame, because while the two films certainly weren’t amazing pieces of art, they were no sillier than plenty of other big film franchises *cough* Transformers *cough* and should have been a great way to introduce a whole new collection of fans to the toys. Just didn’t seem to work for some reason.
As a sidenote, the Retaliation toy line never made it to Australia — at least, not anywhere I saw. Rise of Cobra’s relative failure on the shelves seems to have doomed the line over here, which is a shame. It was a big brand here in the 1990s.
I’d readily argue 2007 was the start of GI Joe’s fall from grace, and it was decisions that Hasbro made that did more damage to the brand than the movies themselves (though, both films suffered from massive mishandling of the product lines).
To me, 2007 was really the point where somebody at Hasbro, effectively, “gave up” on kids. From the abandonment of the well selling 8″ Sigma-style figures, to the emphasis on what COLLECTORS preferred over what kids might actually like.
The line stayed on a trend of focusing on details, realism, and complexity, which collectors responded well to, at the expense of simple playability and fun. Heck, I feel safe in saying that the majority of the 25th line were worse TOYS than anything since possibly Extreme (or at least the first wave 2002 JvC figures).
Instead of supporting the GI Joe Renegades cartoon with a timely toyline (seemingly well into production), Hasbro retooled leftover post-movie figures because “that’s what collectors wanted”, or, “Collectors don’t want stylized Clone Wars figures (until they do)”. I still think the only reason we got ANYTHING from the show was so that Hasbro had something to justify the 2011/30th line to retailers.
Instead of following Transformers and even STar Wars (even though Star Wars stubbornly held on until 2012), GI Joe really didn’t seem to take a much needed “step back” to re-evaluate the brand and product line, and if necessary, make some hard decisions (such as the dramatically more simple Transformers in 2011, or re-introduction of 5 articulation point Star Wars figures as the line staple in 2013). They seemed to TRY and do that with the first wave of Retaliation, only to see that effort abandoned pretty quickly. Doublely so after the delay which saw a movie figure (Red Ninja Mountaineer) scrapped so that someone could squeeze out a 30 year old comic character that only collectors remember and had NOTHING to do with the movie (Kwinn)
As nifty as it was to see that sort of nostalgia play AT THE TIME, in the intervening years, I just look at 2007 as the year GI Joe abandoned the kids. And as much as collectors hate to acknowledge it…kids DO ultimately drive these toy brands. And without kids, we’re stuck with a limited retail partner line heavily populated with reruns.
And more importantly, no new fans to keep the GI Joe spark alive as more and more fans age out or even DIE off.