 The concept and basic design of G.I. Joe was by Stan Weston and it was approved by Hasbro executive Don Levine. Weston's original idea could have gone in a different direction, it could have been a licensed product for the TV show The Lieutenant. But it's a good thing that it wasn't. The toy would have gone away when the show was cancelled. Instead, Levine took the name of the figure from the story of G.I. Joe, the 1945 movie starring Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith. Burgess Meredith did voice acting for the 1987 G.I. Joe animated movie. Now that could have been a nice way to bring G.I. Joe full circle back to its origin, but unfortunately the movie was just not very good. This really is the origin of the action figure. Without G.I. Joe, maybe there still would have been a Star Wars toy line and a Ninja Turtles and all the other toy lines that we know today, but they may have looked very different. Somebody first had to prove that boys would play with dolls. And let's be honest, whatever you want to call them, whether they're 12 inches or 3 and 3 quarter inches, they're still dolls. The earliest G.I. Joe stressed authenticity. In the late 60s though, the Vietnam conflict became less popular and military based toys lost favor. So the focus changed to adventure. In the 1970s, we got the adventure team and G.I. Joe was decidedly less military. But the adventure team featured some innovations such as the lifelike hair, the flocked hair and beard. And that was imported from the UK's version of G.I. Joe called Action Man. In 1974, they added Kung Fu grip, which was rubbery hands that could grip rather than these plastic hands that were frozen in one position. Those were also imported from the UK. In 1976, they got the eagle eye, which was a mechanism that could move the eyes left and right, which was honestly just really creepy. In the 70s, G.I. Joe spun away from reality. They introduced a superhero bullet man who frankly looked ridiculous. He had a bullet shaped helmet and a unitard. And G.I. Joe had a rip off of the $6 million man called Mike Power Atomic Man. Hasbro even made a knock off of its own toy line. It made some non-G.I. Joe action figures called defenders. They were G.I. Joe sized figures with less articulation and really they were just cheap crap. Later Hasbro introduced Super Joe. It was a last ditch effort to keep G.I. Joe relevant. It ran from 1977 to 1978 and they were 8 inch figures instead of 12 inch figures. They were basically meego sized figures. Instead of innovating, Super Joe was trying to ride the coattails of more popular toys. It didn't work and it killed the line. And G.I. Joe was dead until 1982. While G.I. Joe was dying, something else was happening. Fisher Price introduced Adventure People in the 3 and 3 quarter inch scale. The energy crisis had made petroleum products more expensive, so smaller action figures were more affordable. In 1977, Star Wars was a huge hit movie and Tanner got the license to produce Star Wars action figures and they did them in the Adventure People scale. And of course they were a huge hit and so 3 and 3 quarter inches became a standard for action figures through the rest of the 70s and the 1980s. In the post Vietnam era, the US was ready to look at military toys again and G.I. Joe was relaunched in 1982. The figures in 1982 were kind of generic looking figures, but they had individual backstories and the universe for G.I. Joe was created by Marvel Comics and comic book writer Larry Hama. The file cards written for the figures by Larry Hama really excited the imagination of kids in the 80s. Back in those days, they were not allowed to use animation in toy commercials, so Hasbro used animation to advertise the comic books and that in turn helped to sell the toys. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan's chairman of the FCC, Mark Fowler, deregulated rules for children's programming. That allowed toy inspired cartoons to hit TV, including G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe. From there, the marketing was really ramped up and G.I. Joe was a huge success and that was the G.I. Joe that I grew up with.