Teenagers in Space (The Secret History of G.I. Joe, Part 2)

How warfare reentered
childhood

[The following excerpt from Tom Engelhardt’s book The End of Victory Culture is posted with permission from the University of
Massachusetts Press. Part 1, “The Secret History of G.I. Joe (Part 1),” can be found
by clicking here.This essay originally appeared at Tom
Dispatch.]

1. “Hey, How Come They Got All
the Fun?”

Now that Darth
Vader’s breathy techno-voice is a staple of our culture, it’s hard to remember
how empty was the particular sector of space Star
Wars blasted into. The very day the Paris Peace Accords were signed
in 1973, Richard Nixon also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an
admission of the obvious: war, American-style, had lost its hold on young
minds. As an activity, it was now to be officially turned over to the poor and
nonwhite.

Those in a
position to produce movies, TV shows, comics, novels, or memoirs about Vietnam were
convinced that Americans felt badly enough without such reminders. It was
simpler to consider the war film and war toy casualties of Vietnam than to
create cultural products with the wrong heroes, victims, and villains. In Star Wars, Lucas successfully
challenged this view, decontaminating war of its recent history through a
series of inspired cinematic decisions that rescued crucial material from the
wreckage of Vietnam.

To start with,
he embraced the storylessness of the period, creating his own self-enclosed
universe in deepest space and in an amorphous movie past, “a long time ago in a
galaxy far, far away.” Beginning with “Episode IV” of a projected nonology, he
offered only the flimsiest of historical frameworks — an era of civil war, an
evil empire, rebels, an ultimate weapon, a struggle for freedom.

Mobilizing a
new world of special effects and computer graphics, he then made the high-tech
weaponry of the recent war exotic, bloodless, and sleekly unrecognizable. At
the same time, he uncoupled the audience from a legacy of massacre and
atrocity. The blond, young Luke Skywalker is barely introduced before his
adoptive family — high-tech peasants on an obscure planet — suffers its own My Lai. Imperial storm troopers led by Darth Vader
descend upon their homestead and turn it into a smoking ruin (thus returning
fire to its rightful owners). Luke — and the audience — can now set off on an
anti-imperial venture as the victimized, not as victimizers. Others in space
will torture, maim, and destroy. Others will put “us” in high-tech tiger cages;
and our revenge, whatever it may be, will be justified.

In this way, Star Wars
denied the enemy a role “they” had monopolized for a decade — that of brave
rebel. It was the first cultural product to ask of recent history, “Hey! How
come they got all the fun?”
And to respond, “Let’s give them the burden of empire! Let’s bog them down and
be the plucky underdogs ourselves!”

Like Green
Berets or Peace Corps members, Lucas’s white teenage rebels would glide
effortlessly among the natives. They would learn from value-superior Third
World mystics like the Ho-Chi-Minh-ish Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and be protected by ecological
fuzzballs like the Ewoks in Return of the
Jedi. In deepest space, anything was possible, including returning
history to its previous owners. Once again, we could have it all: freedom and victory, captivity and rescue, underdog status and the spectacle of slaughter. As with
the Indian fighter of old, advanced weaponry and
the spiritual powers of the guerrilla might be ours.

Left to the
enemy would be a Nazi-like capacity for destroying life, a desire to perform search-and-destroy
missions on the universe, and the breathy machine voice of Darth Vader (as if
evil were a dirty phone call from the Darkside). The Tao of the Chinese, the
“life force” of Yaqui mystic Don Juan, even the political will of the
Vietnamese would rally to “our” side as the Force and be applied to a crucial
technical problem; for having the Force “with you” meant learning to merge with
your high-tech weaponry in such a way as to assure the enemy’s destruction.
Looked at today, the last part of Star
Wars concentrates on a problem that might have been invented after,
not 14 years before, the 1991 Persian Gulf War: how to fly a computerized,
one-man jet fighter down a narrow corridor under heavy antiaircraft fire and
drop a missile into an impossibly small air shaft, the sole vulnerable spot in
the Emperor’s Death Star.

Here, Lucas
even appropriated the kamikaze-like fusion of human and machine. In Vietnam, there
had been two such man-machine meldings. The first, the bombing campaign, had
the machinelike impersonality of the production line. Lifting off from distant
spots of relative comfort like Guam, B-52
crews delivered their bombs to coordinates stripped of place or people and left
the war zone for another day. The crew member symbolically regained humanity
only when the enemy’s technology stripped him of his machinery — and, alone,
he fluttered to earth and captivity.

At the same
time, from Secretary of Defense McNamara’s “electronic battlefield” to the
first “smart bombs,” Vietnam
proved an experimental testing ground for machine-guided war. Unlike the B-52
or napalm, the smart bomb, the computer, the electronic sensor, and the video
camera were not discredited by the war; and it was these machines of wonder
that Lucas rescued through the innocence of special effects.

In James Bond
films, high-tech had been a display category like fine wines, and
techno-weaponry just another consumer item for 007. For Lucas, however,
technology in the right hands actually solved problems, offering — whether as
laser sword or X-wing fighter — not status but potential spiritualization.
This elevation of technology made possible the return of slaughter to the
screen as a triumphal and cleansing pleasure (especially since dying “imperial
storm troopers,” encased in full body carapaces, looked like so many bugs).

The World as a Star Wars Theme Park

Not only would
George Lucas put “war” back into a movie title, he would almost single-handedly
reconstitute war play as a feel-good activity for children. With G.I. Joe’s demise,
the world of child-sized war play stood empty. The toy soldier had long ago
moved into history, an object for adult collectors. However, some months before
Star Wars opened, Fox reached
an agreement with Kenner Products, a toy company, to create action figures and
fantasy vehicles geared to the movie. Kenner
president Bernard Loomis decided that these would be inexpensive, new-style
figures, only 3 ¾-inch high. Each design was to be approved by Lucas himself.

Since Kenner could not produce
the figures quickly enough for the 1977 Christmas season, Loomis offered an
“Early Bird Certificate Package” — essentially an empty box — that promised
the child the first four figures when produced. The result was toy history. In
1978, Kenner
sold over 26 million figures; by 1985, 250 million. All 111 figures and other Star Wars paraphernalia, ranging from
lunch boxes and watches to video games, would ring up $2.5 billion in sales.

By the early
1980s, children’s TV had become a Star
Wars-like battle zone. Outnumbered rebels daily transformed
themselves from teenagers into mighty robots “loved by good, feared by evil” (Voltron) or “heroic teams of armed
machines” (M.A.S.K.) in order
to fight Lotar and his evil, blue-faced father from Planet Doom (Voltron), General Spidrax, master of
the Dark Domain’s mighty armies (Sectaurs),
or the evil red-eyed Darkseid of the Planet Apokolips (Superfriends).

Future war would be a machine-versus-machine affair, a
bloodless matter of special effects, in the revamped war story designed for
childhood consumption. In popular cartoons like Transformers, where good “Autobots” fought evil
“Decepticons,” Japanese-animated machines transformed themselves from mundane
vehicles into futuristic weapons systems. At the same time, proliferating teams
of action figures, Star Wars-size
and linked to such shows, were transported into millions of homes where
new-style war scenarios could be played out.

In those years,
Star Wars-like themes also
began to penetrate the world of adult entertainment. Starting in 1983 with the
surprise movie hit Uncommon Valor,
right-wing revenge fantasies like Missing-in-Action
(1984) returned American guerrillas to “Vietnam” to rescue captive pilots
from jungle prisons and bog Communists down here on Earth. In a subset of these
— Red Dawn (1984) and the TV
miniseries Amerika (1987) are
prime examples — the action took place in a future, conquered United States
where home-grown guerrillas fought to liberate the country from Soviet imperial
occupation. Meanwhile, melds of technology and humanity ranging from Robocop to
Arnold Schwarzenegger began to proliferate on adult screens. In 1985-1986, two
major hits featured man-as-machine fusions. As Rambo, Sylvester Stallone was a
“pure fighting machine,” with muscles and weaponry to prove it; while in Top Gun, Tom Cruise played a “maverick”
on a motorcycle who was transformed from hot dog to top dog by fusing with his
navy jet as he soared to victory over the evil empire’s aggressor machines,
Libyan MIGs.

War Games in the Adult World

It took some
time for political leaders to catch up with George Lucas’s battle scenarios. In
the years when he was producing Star Wars, America’s post-Vietnam presidents
were having a woeful time organizing any narrative at all. In the real world,
there seemed to be no Lucas-like outer space into which to escape the
deconstruction job Vietnam
had done to the war story. The military was in shambles; the public, according
to pollsters, had become resistant to American troops being sent into battle
anywhere; and past enemies were now negotiating partners in a new “détente.”

Gerald Ford,
inheriting a collapsed presidency from Richard Nixon, attempted only once to
display American military resolve. In May 1975, a month after Saigon fell,
Cambodian Khmer Rouge rebels captured an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez.
Ford ordered the bombing of the Cambodian port city of Kampong Son and sent in the Marines. They
promptly stormed an island on which the Mayaguez crew
was not being held, hours after ship and crew had been released, and fought a
pointless, bitter battle, suffering 41 dead. The event seemed to mock American
prowess, confirming that rescue, like victory, had slipped from its grasp.

Jimmy Carter,
elected president in 1976, had an even more woeful time of it. Facing what he
termed a Vietnam-induced “national malaise,” he proposed briefly that Americans
engage in “the moral equivalent of war” by mobilizing and sacrificing on the
home front to achieve energy independence from the OPEC oil cartel. The public,
deep in a peacetime recession, responded without enthusiasm.

In 1979, in a
defining moment of his presidency, Carter watched helplessly as young Islamic
followers of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini took 52 Americans captive in the U.S. embassy in
Teheran and held them for 444 days. In April 1980, “Desert One,” a military
raid the president ordered to rescue the captives, failed dismally in the
Iranian desert, and the president was forced to live out his term against a
televised backdrop of unending captivity and humiliation that seemed to
highlight American impotence.

Only with the
presidency of Ronald Reagan did a Lucas-like reconstitution of the war story
truly begin at the governmental level. The new president defined the Soviet
Union in Star Wars-like terms
as an “evil empire,” while the Army began advertising for recruits on TV by
displaying spacy weaponry and extolling the pleasures of being “out there” in
search of “the bad guys.” In Nicaragua,
Angola, Afghanistan,
and elsewhere, the Reagan administration managed to portray the forces it
supported as outnumbered “freedom fighters” struggling to roll back an overwhelming
tide of imperial evil. This time, we would do the hitting and running, and yet
we — or our surrogates — would retain the high-tech weaponry: mines for their
harbors and Stinger missiles for their helicopters.

Meanwhile,
planners discovered in an intervention in Grenada that, with the right media
controls in place and speed, you could produce the equivalent of an outer space
war fantasy here on Earth. No wonder that a group of junior officers at the
Army Command and General Staff College at Fort
Leavenworth responsible for aspects of
the ground campaign used against Iraq in 1991 would be nicknamed the
Jedi Knights.

2. The Second Coming of
G.I. Joe

The reversals
of history first introduced in Star Wars
were picked up by a fast-developing toy business in the 1980s. Every “action
figure” set would now be a Star Wars
knock-off, and each toy company faced Lucas’s problem. In post-Vietnam
war-space, how would a child left alone in a room with generic figures know
what to play? Star Wars had
offered a movie universe for its toys to share, but a toy on its own needed
another kind of help.

About the time
Ronald Reagan came into office, Hasbro began to consider resuscitating G.I.
Joe, for the world of war play was still distinctly underpopulated on Earth, if
not in space. As the toy company’s executives were aware, Joe retained
remarkable name recognition, not only among young boys (who had inherited
hand-me-downs from older siblings) but among their parents. The question was,
what would Joe be? At first, Hasbro had only considered marketing “a force of
good guys,” but according to H. Kirk Bozigian, Hasbro’s vice-president of boys
toys, “the [toy] trade said, who do they fight?” Hasbro’s research with
children confirmed that this was a crucial question.

In fact,
blasting an action figure team into a world in which, as Bozigian put it,
“there was a fine line between the good guys and the bad guys,” called for
considerable grown-up thought. Although Joe was to gain the tag line, “a real
American hero,” the G.I. Joe R&D and marketing group (“all closet
quasi-military historians”) early on reached “a conscious decision that the
Soviets would never be the enemy, because we felt there would never be a
conflict between us.” Instead they chose a vaguer enemy — “terrorism” — and
created COBRA, an organization of super-bad guys who lived not in Moscow but in
Springfield, U.S.A. (Hasbro researchers had discovered that a Springfield
existed in every state — except Rhode Island, where the company was located.)

Re-launching Joe

But teams of
good and bad guys weren’t enough. Children needed context. A “history” had to
be written for these preplanned figures, what the toy industry would come to
call a “backstory.” Then a way had to be found for each figure to bring his own
backstory, his play instructions, into the home. First, “Joe” was shrunk to 3
3/4-inch size, so that his warrior team could fit into the Star Wars universe. Next, he was
reconceived as a set of earthbound fantasy figures (rather than “real”
soldiers) and armed with Star Wars-style
weaponry.

A Marvel comic
book series lent the toys an ongoing story form, while Hasbro pioneered using
the space on the back of each figure’s package for a collector card/profile of
the enclosed toy. Larry Hama, creator of the comics and of the earliest
profiles, called them “intelligence dossiers.” Each Joe or COBRA was now to
come with his own spacy code name (from Air Tight to Zartan) and his own
“biography.” Each “individualized” team member would carry his story into the
home on his back.

Take “enemy
leader, COBRA Commander.” Poisonous snakes are bad news, but his no-goodness
was almost laughably overdetermined. Faceless in the style of Darth Vader, his
head was covered by a hood with eye slits, reminiscent of the KKK, his body
encased in a torturer’s blue jumpsuit, leather gloves, and boots. Here is his
“dossier”:

“Primary
Military Specialty: Intelligence.

Secondary
Military Specialty: Ordnance (experimental weaponry).

Birthplace:
Classified.

Absolute power!
Total control of the world… its people, wealth, and resources — that’s the
objective of COBRA Commander. This fanatical leader rules with an iron fist. He
demands total loyalty and allegiance. His main battle plan, for world control,
relies on revolution and chaos. He personally led uprisings in the Middle East,
Southeast Asia and other trouble spots.
Responsible for kidnapping scientists, businessmen, and military leaders then
forcing them to reveal their top level secrets. COBRA commander is hatred and
evil personified. Corrupt. A man without scruples. Probably the most dangerous
man alive!”

Other than the
telltale reference to Southeast Asia, he was
an enemy uncoupled from the war story. Only the profile that came with him
separated him from Snake-Eyes, a good guy with Ninja training who also came
encased in a blue jumpsuit with slits for eyeholes.

Launched in
1982, the new G.I. Joe was to prove the most successful boy’s toy of the
period. By the mid-1980s, Joe had an every afternoon animated TV show that put
special effects battles with COBRA constantly within the child’s field of
vision. After Joe, war play on “Earth” would be in the reconstructionist mode.
Carefully identified teams of good and bad figures, backed by collectors’
cards, TV cartoons, movies, video games, books, and comics, as well as a host
of licensed products stamped with their images, would offer an overelaborate
frame of instruction in new-style war play. All a child had to do was read the
toy box, turn on the TV, go to the video store, put on the audio tape that
accompanied the “book,” or pick up the character’s “magazine” to be surrounded
by a backstory of war play. Yet the void where the national war story had been
remained.

The New Business of War Play

By 1993, Hasbro
had produced over 300 G.I. Joe figures with “close to 260 different
personalities” and sold hundreds of millions of them. No longer a masked man
and his lone sidekick, but color, price, and weapons coordinated masked teams,
these “characters” on screen and on the child’s floor were byproducts of an
extraordinary explosion of entrepreneurial life force, for the business impulse
behind war play was childhood’s real story in the 1980s. The intrusive,
unsettling world of commercial possibility that had first looked through the
screen at the child three decades earlier represented the real victory culture
of the postwar child’s world.

The new war
story it produced had only a mocking relationship to a national story, for all
“war” now inhabited the same unearthly, ahistorical commercial space. Even
Rambo, transformed into an action-figure team for children, found himself
locked in televised cartoon combat with General Terror and his S.A.V.A.G.E.
terrorist group. While various Ninjas and Native Americans brought their
spiritual skills to the good side, everywhere the “enemy” remained a vague and
fragile construct, a metallic voice stripped of ethnic or racial character; and
everywhere the boundary lines between us and the enemy, the good team and the
bad team, threatened to collapse into a desperate sameness.

In its
characters, names, and plots, the new war story relied on constant
self-mockery. The enemy, once the most serious of subjects, was now a running
joke. The evil COBRA organization, as described by Hasbro’s Bozigian, was made
up of “accountants, tax attorneys, and all other kinds of low lifes that are
out to conquer the world.” The mocking voice of deconstruction was alive and
selling product in children’s culture — as with that mega-hit of the late
1980s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In the new war
play universe, you did need a scorecard to tell the players apart. In the comic
book world, for example, the story had become so self-enclosed that it was
nearly impossible to pick up an X-Man
comic and have any sense of where you were if you hadn’t read the previous 20
issues. Here is part of the dossier of a 1991 Marvel Comics supervillain from
one of 160-odd similar bubble gum cards. His code name is Apocalypse.

“Battles
Fought: 6344

Wins: 3993 Losses:
2135 Ties: 216

Win Percentage:
63%

Arch-enemies:
X-Factor

First
Appearance: X-Factor #5, June
1986

Apocalypse
believes that only the strong survive, and that the weak must be destroyed. In
his quest to weed out those he deems unfit to live, he manipulates various
factions of mutants to battle each other to the death…

Did You Know:
Apocalypse’s former headquarters, a massive sentient starship, now serves as
the headquarters for his arch-enemies, the super hero group known as
X-Factor.”

Though a sort
of story was recaptured and with the help of television made to surround the
child constantly, behind the special effects was an eerie inaction — of which,
at an adult level, the war in the Persian Gulf
would be symbolic.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project
and author of The United States of Fear,
runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. This is part two of a series. The first part,
“The Secret History of G.I. Joe,” can be found by clicking here. Both posts are excerpted from Engelhardt’s
history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture(just published in a Kindle edition), with the permission of its publisher, the University of
Massachusetts Press.

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Image by Happy Batatinha,
licensed under Creative Commons.