News and Notes
Commentary From the Editors
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Rocky's Beef: The Greatest Action Figure Prop Ever?
A few days ago we examined GI Joe action figures.Now we discover that that the movie Rocky *also* has action figures, created in 2006 by JAKKS Pacific, Inc. You get Rocky, Apollo Creed, Burgess Meredith's plucky trainer guy... and this classic piece:
Yes, it's the side of beef Rocky walloped during training.The full boxing-the-side-of-beef scene from the 1976 movie doesn't seem to be online. But the slab does make a cameo appearance at about 1:15 of this training montage:
More Rocky action figures here.
Labels: Burgess Meredith, G.I. Joe, Rocky Balboa, Side of Beef, Sylvester Stallone
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 2:22 PM0 comments 
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
