Customer Reviews

GI Joe: The Complete Story of America's Favorite Man of Action

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This book is so wonderfully written and designed, it's hard to imagine anybody not enjoying it's large closeup photos and detail rich text. The history of one of America's favorite toys is told with relish, humor and a great deal of "insider info". Mr Michlig's love of original design art also is evident in the use of many photos of prototypes, box art and samples. The attractive, large sized volume looks very impressive and tempting on the coffee table too.

Don't confuse this book with the "GI Joe collector's guides" that exist in various forms. This is a different animal - - gripping, well-written nonfiction, telling the story of a small family-owned business and its leap of faith on a brand new type of toy for boys, the now-ubiquitous "action figure."

The story of the GI Joe product illuminates the story of the toy industry itself. I found this look inside the process of bringing a product to market and maintaining its value over the course of decades fascinating.

I don't normally give a Five Star rating, but my god, this book is wonderful. The story is fun and indepth. The design is AMAZING and the images of the GI JOE figures are wonderfully shot.

If you have even a slight, passing interest in GI JOE, buy this book, you won't be dissappointed!

All other books about GI Joe take note: You have just been left in the dust. Michlig's authoritative and highly readable GI Joe: The Complete Story of America's Favorite Man of Action is the best single source of information about the origin of GI Joe that exists. Colorful anecdotes illuminate this exhaustively informative, definitive work about America's Movable Fighting Man. It belongs on the bookshelves of everyone interested in the history of playthings.

Richard C. Levy
Washington, D.C.

A great read for the hardcore collector or the novice.

Full of great insider info and eye watering photographs.

The best researched book on GI Joe ever written. My only complaint is that the sections on the 70's and 80's need to be expanded. But that is a minor complaint, this is a beautiful book and a must for GI Joe collectors.

For anyone who grew up with gijoe as a back yard play mate this is the book for you. You will be amazed at the behind the doors work that went on to bring gijoe to life. This is a fascinating story of joe and how he came to life his rocket to stardom and then fade to twilight. A must read for any joe lover and collector. 5 stars

*SNIFF*

I love my GI Joes. They were like the family I never had. The last time we were together was during the Sandbox campains. Most of our squadron was swallowed by the fine grains of sand and some fell victim to the artilery fired from the distence by enemy plastic toy soldiers (the ones on the littleplastic stands) My best friend and I were the only survivors. The rescue chopper was on the other side of stovetop flats. We could here the rotors. we made our way carefully across, but not carefully enough. I turned intime to see my pal melt into a puddle of molten plastic, char black, and burst into flame. after I said a prayer for his soul all that remained was the putrid smell of burt plastic and the rubber that held his legs to his body, and a metel screw that held together his torso. I picked up the screw and headed for the choper and today I have the screw on my bathroom counter so every time i'm sitting on the throne i will remember him.

One of the guys at Hasbro got to reading an encyclopedia, and his son became fascinated at all the different medals listed therein. That's where the seed was planted. Toy soldiers have been around probably as long as real soldiers have, and now at Hasbro, plans went forward to develop a toy soldier for the 20th Century.

One of the toy moguls involved in the Barbie line lent them some business advice that stuck: "First you sell them the razor, then they have to keep buying the blades." Or something like that. With Barbie, little girls got the doll one time, but turned Mattel into a toy empire buying accessories for it (different clothes, purses, doll houses, etc.). This was a perfect strategy for Hasbro, too, since Joe could be any flavor of GI a boy wanted him to be: deep-sea diver; scuba diver; pilot; astronaut; grunt with rifle; submachinegun; flamethrower... And speaking of Barbie, Hasbro was adamant that their new toy was for boys, and should never be called a doll. This is when, where and how the term "action figure" sprang into the American vocabulary.

I chuckled when I read how Hasbro settled on his name. There were only three TV stations to choose from in any given city back in the early 1960s, and it turns out that during the period when they were agonizing over a name for their serviceman, one night, with no planned coordination among them, the members of the Hasbro think-tank all wound up watching the same movie: The Story of GI Joe. The next morning, they unanimously decided to adopt Ernie Pyle's (the movie was based on his war correspondence) catchy euphemism for their entire "action figure" line. In a cockeyed way, this part of the tale gave me a sort of personal connection, having read about that film years before and pondered the title.

There are many interesting tidbits revealed in this book, like how Joe's backward thumbnail came to be and why they kept it; how they designed his face; and how they staged that picture of the fighter plane I mentioned above. The reason behind Joe's transformation from a GI into a smoke-jumping paramedic in the 1970s is explained in the book, though hardly a mystery to anyone who knows anything of those times. It can be summed up in one geographical name: Viet Nam. (And had Joe not burned his draft card, grown a beard and put on an orange jump suit, my mother probably never would have allowed me to own such a toy. So Hasbro's demilitarization was a wise move, I suppose. Sigh. Pragmatism...)

The book takes Joe up into the fantasy paramilitary organization of the 1980s, complete with cartoons and comic books, and it's all an interesting read if you have an interest in toys, business marketing, or pop-culture.

Henry Brown is the author of TEOTWAWKI aviation adventure The Delayed Blitz(Krieg), as well as the military thriller Hell and Gone. He is the columns editor at New Pulp Fiction, and does some blogging of his own at the Two-Fisted Blogger.

Excellent review of the life and times of America's Moveable Fighting Man. Especially interesting are the details of the conception and behind-the-scenes work in creating the prototype figure and marketing concept, an aspect of the story that may interest even non-Joe devotees. Collectors may wish to note that this is a much-expanded (and therefore more essential) version of the slender book included with the G. I. Joe Masterpiece Edition boxed figure.