News and Notes
Commentary From the Editors
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Why G.I. Joe Doesn't Exactly Exist
We've added a profile of G.I. Joe, just in time for the movie being released this weekend.Histories of the doll make it pretty clear that Joe's creation in 1964 was a direct response to Barbie's popularity with girls. Hasbro freely admits they coined the term "action figure" because they were afraid boys wouldn't play with "dolls."
I was halfway through the profile before I realized that there is not, and never really has been, any one individual character or doll named G.I. Joe. From the start Hasbro had different versions of the doll -- soldier, sailor, pilot, marine, etc. -- and at first they gave them all nicknames. Soon enough they gave up on the nicknames and just released them all under the name of G.I. Joe. None was THE G.I. Joe... though in the early days there was a main cleancut doll who seems (to me) to have been the "real" Joe.
The dolls died out in the 1970s but came back in the 1980s, with a TV cartoon that cranked up a whole separate backstory in which "G.I. Joe" is the name of an umbrella organization of fist-fighting adventurers and soldiers. Their main enemies are the terrorist group COBRA, bad guys with capital letters in the tradition of James Bond's SPECTRE and SMERSH. That G.I. Joe strain that gave us the movie coming out this weekend, with Channing Tatum in the alpha-Joe role of Duke and Dennis Quaid as good-guy General Hawk.
And nobody named "G.I. Joe."
Labels: Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, G.I. Joe, James Bond
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 8:57 PM0 comments 
Dennis Quaid Has Appeared In A Lot of Things
Heh! I love the "He has appeared as..." sequence in our profile of Dennis Quaid.You want befuddled, nihilistic, overprotective, sinewy, shady, plucky? He's your man.
Here he is as plain ol' Dennis, bearing the difficult burden of joining Sienna Miller in Rome to promote their new G.I. Joe flick.
Sinewy he may be, but his pants are too long.
(Photo credit: WENN)
Labels: Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 1:19 PM0 comments
