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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
GI JOE BROUGHT PHENOMENAL GROWTH AND GAIN TO THE HASBRO toy company. In 1964, the year Hasbro introduced GI Joe, the United States was still holding on to a naive self-concept that helped make the climate prime for this innovative boys' toy that offered a self-sufficient metaphor of American individualism. The Bay of Pigs incident had sent the public the message that US military intelligence was not infallible, and the thirteen days that Americans spent living in fear during the Cuban missile crisis forced a crack of acknowledgment that the US military might not keep all Americans safe. John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 shocked and startled the nation's sense of itself, its security, and its future, yet US popular culture that represented the period and still has currency today was dominated by blockbuster movie musicals, cartoon capers, and lots of good, clean American fun.
The top-grossing movies of 1964 were Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady. Two of the year's bestselling nonfiction books were authored by cartoonist Charles M. Schultz. During its first season, the new television sitcom Gilligan's Island was ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings. It was in this entertainment climate that Hasbro president Merrill Hassenfeld had to choose between two new product ideas to launch at the annual toy fair: Rube Klamer's miniature grocery store or Don Levine's miniature soldier (Levine and Michlig 39). In the same social climate, another president, Lyndon Johnson, responding to pressure that he was soft on communism, rushed the escalation of US military involvement in Vietnam. (1) When these two presidents--one a toy maker and the other initially committed to waging a war on poverty, not on a poor nation--put their resources into militarism, the lives of US youth were forever changed.
In much the same manner that baby dolls work to shape girls' conceptualization of themselves and the future, GI Joe led boys to fashion themselves after the same mold that Joe was cast in: militarized, masculinized citizenship, not of woman born but government issued. And not six feet tall, but twelve inches. A friendly one-sixth replica of the soldiers he represented, GI Joe, like the celluloid heroes of so many Hollywood combat films, put a trustworthy, amiable, childlike face on the image of the US military.
GI Joe's miniature body serves as an uncanny symbolic replica of the social forces at play during the era of his greatest popularity. In his analysis of the connection between the body and globalization, David Harvey outlines two fundamental propositions: that the body is an unfinished project and, connected to this, that the body is not a closed, self-contained entity but a relational "thing," gathering its meanings from historical, social, and geographical contexts (402). Reading Joe's body and the history of its development and production as an unfinished project and a relational object offers a metaphor for what the embodiment of the oppressive relationship between the US consumer-citizen and Southeast Asia might look like, and how awareness of and experience from such a body might change the image of the US military and the nation's self image.
The History of Hasbro's GI Joe
GI Joe arrived in the social milieu of the Vietnam era before social and historical changes burst the childlike image of America's fighting boys. Until 1968, US involvement in Vietnam existed within the American war tradition in which war was a symbol of masculine courage and mastery. The contemporary political context surrounding Vietnam was left out of media representations, and a dramatically simplified and more palatable version of the conflict that positioned US involvement within the timeless American tradition of war making was broadcast to Americans. (2)
The evening news provided the structural shape that war narratives took in American culture at the time: finite objectives are defined; well-trained, personable forces are deployed to secure their objective; correspondents report the results of successful operations. The relationship between the big picture in which politicians sought to convince the American public that they must use force to prevent the spread of communism and the small pictures created by each finite mission was left ambiguous. The ambiguity was filled more often by nationalist rhetoric than by political or historical analysis. Children heard the news and the conversations that adults had in response to current events and combined the information they gathered from other popular media images of war. These multiple sources shaped the unwritten rule book that children followed in their war play. On the evening news, on the playgrounds, and in the backyards of the United States, war took the shape of an episodic adventure that could be tallied in terms of body counts to determine the ultimate winner.
This was the world into which Hasbro released GI Joe in 1964. The original doll was available in each of the four military branches: Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. Along with the four appropriately uniformed figures, Hasbro released seventy-five accessories sold in twenty-five separate action packs. In the first year, sales reached nearly $17 million, suggesting that very few family households were without a GI Joe figure (Levine and Michlig 12). The product line continued to grow in 1965, and Hasbro introduced an African American action soldier. In 1966, the toy line expanded further, and at this time included 120 different accessories.
However, after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War was cut off from the American war tradition, forcing representations of war and warriors to shift. GI Joe sales, like the sales for all military toys, plummeted. The image of the soldier was no longer embraced by an infallible military corps. A new cultural image of the isolated warrior gradually began to humanize the war's costs to the US military and to the individuals in it by depicting the individuals' losses and struggles with internal conflicts caused by the war. The myth of democratic expansion and the struggle of good over evil began to fracture in the face of the vulnerabilities and casualties that the US military faced fighting an unconventional war dominated by guerilla tactics. Once the traditional conventional standards failed to represent the concerns and issues of increasing numbers of soldiers and civilians, the war story began to focus on the individual, as if the crisis of the historical moment was defined by crisis on the individual level rather than the national or ideological levels. The structure of the war story began to shift its focus from the clear objectives of a diverse and well-trained team to the internal moral struggles of the individual. The war story of the early 1970s was a story of the crisis of individual faith, patriotism, courage, strength, and honor. (3)
During this time of representational shift from the military unit as competitive team to the internally focused individual warrior, Hasbro retooled Joe's image and launched GI Joe Adventurer in 1969. It was difficult to maintain the military's good-guy underdog facade when it was the industrialized military giant at war against a much poorer nation. To survive in the military toy market, Hasbro had to update its product. GI Joe Adventurer had fewer weapons and his connection to the military was softened, but his adventures maintained a paramilitary flavor. Although most accessory sets featured natural elements for GI Joe to do battle with--an octopus in Eight Ropes of Danger, an alligator in Mouth of Doom, and the polar climates in Fight for Survival--military intelligence and espionage were still important elements in action sets like Mysterious Explosion, Secret Mission to Spy Island, and Hidden Missile Discovery.
Plagued by low sales and a storyline that was too loose to attract children to GI Joe Adventurer, Hasbro tightened the doll's focus with the introduction of the Adventure...
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