As a kid that grew up in the 80's and being told all my cartoons were just half hour toy commercials... my response is, I don't care... They were absolutely AWESOME.
That's my thought. I think when we were kids we didn't really separate these worlds. For some reason it's seen as some great evil today to have sold kids toys, yet our parents always bought them for us (or we saved up and bought them ourselves), and this led to countless hours of social fun and imagination. I think today's models of endless streaming screen time are much more dangerous to kids.
This video was a bit rough to me. I respect the work but to say it was apart of brainwashing is a bit of a reach. There were many other cartoons that had toys too such as Voltron or Smurfs that was due to the show being so popular. He neglected to mention how big Star Wars toys were and that was a movie.
I grew up during the transition from subtle toy advertising to Pokémon. That was the point where it became a lot more obvious. Hell, even the tag line was, "Gotta catch 'em all!"
Alot of us kids in the 80s were very aware of the marketing, but that alone was not the reason we wanted the toys. The cartoons were engaging that it inspired alot of imaginations to continue the adventures of GI Joe or My Little Pony once the cartoons ended and we went outside to play. Even it you were poor, a friend might have an extra GI Joe for you to borrow. Maybe that's the genius in the marketing in the 80s, the toys were for us to play with.
That's my thought. I think when we were kids we didn't really separate these worlds. For some reason it's seen as some great evil today to have sold kids toys, yet our parents always bought them for us (or we saved up and bought them ourselves), and this led to countless hours of social fun and imagination. I think today's models of endless streaming screen time are much more dangerous to kids.
Almost no kid had ALL the GI Joe toys, there's so many different things. But between all the kids on our block was enough to make an entire army base. We played star wars and he man too but, the GI Joe toys and action figures was the best. In our neighborhood anyway.
@@ADSheehan I also think things were better when I was young, and that society today is all wrong. This is unique only to me, not every generation ever.
Yep, I used the toys (in combination with toys I'd make myself, to have toys I couldn't afford, add original characters, or have a toy of a character that there were no toys of) to act out fanfics, which I sometimes wrote down. The toys were essentially a way to make and share fanfics before a kid could jump on the internet and find a fanfic community. I still write and read, and I still make toys (I make a good portion of my income selling toys I make). And I still love plenty of shows that are 99% toy marketing (there's still tons of Japanese shows like this), even though I don't buy (much) of the toys nowadays. I would love to see a study of the different imaginations and creativity of people that grew up with these kind of toys vs those that didn't.
The title of this video should be: "Not understanding the 80s at all and seeing the generation as 'problematic'". 80's kids weren't so stupid as to not realize that their favorite TV shows were glorified toy commercials.
I didn't see them as toy commercials. I saw them as entertainment that I could only reenact myself to my own standards using the toys I would purchase. By buying the toys, I was making my own cartoons. Same with TMNT, Transformers, Rambo, Terminator, Robocop, and Batman (all those franchises had some awesome quality toys in the 80s and early 90s). It was when I was 13 or 14 in 93-4 when the "Real American Hero" version of GI Joe was winding down that I fully grew out of it. I moved on to the gritter "Batman: The Animated Series." Finally around 13-14 I stopped watching animation and buying toys completely. Later, I would feel nostalgia for old 80s cartoons that were not in wide syndication by the late 90s--stuff like Robotech, Voltron, and Battle of the Planets. I would also keep an eye out for shows like A-Team and Knight Rider. Now I watch them to relive my childhood for 30 mins at a time.
Yes. I remember having this conversation with my mom in the 80s. We knew! We weren't clueless. But I told her that Roald Dahl wasn't going to make a cartoon show with Quentin Blake (or else I really would be watching that instead) and that Bill Cosby's sitcom was so successful, he wasn't going to make another cartoon (we didn't know he was a monster) so those cartoons were the best we were getting. Maybe not the best, but they had their moments. That two parter with Shipwreck going Twilight Zone was cool.
We liked watching the cartoons and playing with toys. What's the problem? Getting to learn about the characters on tv and playing with them after the show went off was fun. Kids like cartoons and toys, this had both.
"GIJOE had long since disappeared from Saturday mornings" that's because GIJOE didn't air on Saturdays. GIJOE like Transformers, He-man, She-Ra and many others were Monday through Friday cartoons. Many of GIJOE's early adventures were 5 part series and specifically made to air Mon-Fri. I love the videos that say more about the writer or content maker than the actual video says about its subject matter. Tell me you were born after 1993 without saying you were born after 1993.
Even the damn movie originally aired as a 5 part show. This guy must be confusing gi joe with X-men back in 92 and how they brainwashed kids to get the Covid vaccine so they can get mutant powers and shoot lasers out their eyes
I was wondering if I was the only one who watched GI Joe after school Monday through Friday. I watched Saturday morning cartoons too, but GI Joe was never on at that time.
I think it's secondary from DIC was actually run on saturday mornings, but the primary run by Sunbow up to the movie was all done monday-friday after school. It's possible some local stations tossed on saturday mornings from time to time but it's main air time was between 3-5 pm weekdays typically followed by Transformers when I saw it on WGN, channel in Chicago. People use saturday morning cartoons as a catch all for the 80s shows, but the reality is during the week plenty of cartoon ran. Some shows ran in both slots, while others were primarily a saturday morning affair like Dungeons and Dragons or Captain N.
It came on Saturdays in the 80s and 90s. I specifically remember that but they also came on M-F and it all depended on what region and local station. I used to have tapes of Saturday Morning cartoons (you could tell because the filming stops the second American Bandstand comes on.
Locally for me I remember it starting on Saturdays but from either popularity or the original planning moved to the M-F schedule. It was a race back in the day from the bus to the tv just to hear that Transformers intro.
I am a Gen X father now and I will say it here and now that I LOVED MY 80s CHILDHOOD! Of course they were 20 minute toy commercials - we knew that back then. I had parents with the amazing power of "no!" Got toys at birthdays and Christmas and that was it. I loved my cartoons and will always have fond memories of cereal, friends, awesome cartoons, Atari and Nintendo, arcades,, freedom to go out and do stupid shit before the lights came on and classic WWF!
The 80s was a magical time!!! I miss the toons, toys, and even with the Cold War still fresh in our minds, there wasn’t a never ending feeling of doom and gloom! No chem trails, real clouds, fresh air and food that would nourish you instead of slowly poisoning and killing you….
The all mighty power of "No!" I don't know how many times I heard no, it generally was for them stupid TV only things, " like otlrder now and well double the offer " I miss all that good cartoons with the ok animation, that stuff would inspire hours of drawing and imagination, and who didn't know that these cartoons were commercials, just like when they put the dang discloser in the commercials "toys don't actually talk or move on their own" 🤦♂️
G.I. Joe was epic The PSA’s were not out of place. I moved a lot as a kid and my parents weren’t around and I was an only child. The morality of those PSA’s partially raised me and the characters were my friends
Don’t be a bully. Don’t swim alone. Wear bright clothes at night so you don’t become roadkill… Even if they were forced to do it, the cartoons’ PSAs are a positive legacy. I guess it’s just fashionable for TH-camrs to criticize everything nowadays, regardless of merit.
For being 20 minute commercials for toys, they sure had incredible story lines, themes, and heroic acts of courage. These helped me get through childhood and still serve me today.
I have a very hard time watching Transformers anymore, after watching and recognizing the far superior storytelling of G.I. Joe such as There's no place like Springfield, Synthoid Conspiracy, World's without End, Memories of Mara, and Nightmare Assault. Although I still love Transformers, the writing on G.I. Joe was just amazing.
I have no regrets about my love of transformers and gi joe. They were icons, along with those saturday morning cartoons. Saturday always was the Best. Day. Ever.
G.I. Joe A Real American Hero! was never a Saturday morning cartoon, nor was it on any Network television (ABC, CBS, NBC). It was strictly syndicated on Weekday afternoons, and each season began with a 5-part series that was shown Monday thru Friday.
Came here specifically to see if anyone else caught that glaring error about how the cartoon was broadcast. It was a weekday ritual for me as a kid in the mid-80s...come home from school and watch G.I. Joe, Transformers, Voltron, and Robotech.
@@FrenchCelt I caught it to. I'm use to stuff like this from either people with no long-term memory or yahoos who make TH-cam videos for click-bait but either 1) does not have first-hand knowledge of the subject matter or 2) too young to have been alive during the era and is just putting together stuff in bits and pieces in a sensationalized manner similar to a Fox News editorial piece for again, clicks. 🙄
I thought this video was going to be about how GI Joe convinced a bunch of kids to enlist when they got older. I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s, so GI Joe wasn't on air anymore, but I found the tapes at my local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and would rent them all the time. Fast-forward several years later I joined the military.
GI Joe did teach patriotism toward the USA and the value of teamwork. Also, it brought an interest of the military to young people after years of post Vietnam resentment towards the military. It also showed that a motley crew can still work as a team and accomplish the mission. There was one episode in which GI Joe and Cobra teamed up together to defeat an evil tycoon.
I am 43yrs old. Im seriously sad that my son (5) will never know that almost Christmas feel of waking up before his parents on Saturday just to watch cartoons. And that slight fear of, “if i don’t watch it Saturday morning i may never get to see it” He will also never fully appreciate the fact that he can just bring up anything he wants to watch whenever he wants to watch it.🤷♂️
I’m nearly 42. Such is the nature of time and change. We cannot expect our kids to really understand it. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a kid with Internet access, but I’m grateful to have grown up when I did.
True. I'm just about 50. I remember the time when these cartoons came out brand new and watched the first airings on a lot of them. It was something else as nothing like them existed in the late 70s. Saturday morning was indeed magical. Especially after a Friday night playing video games at the arcade after a hard week of school. And if you did miss that episode, it could be months or years before you caught it on a rerun.
Ngl should just give him cable tv. Like I mean if you’re bothered by him just getting to have everything with the click of a button. Why spoil him with that? Not judging your parenting or anything just giving maybe a new thought
TH-cam features Saturday morning cartoons all the classics including commercials my son has been watching it for eight years and he loves it and we only watch it on Saturday mornings totally awesome. I recommend it.
There is always a huge omission in these TH-cam docs about this era. It was not Marvel and Hasbro magically getting together - there was an ad agency in the middle who's client was Hasbro. Griffin-Bacal Advertising - literally the 1980s version of Mad Men- made those first commercials and then started Sunbow Productions who sub-contracted it all out to the Japanese studio Toei Animation, and co-producing them with US animation studio DPE Films who was bought by Cadence and renamed: Marvel Productions. Sunbow did ALL the Hasbro toy cartoons - Jem, Inhumanoids, My Little Pony, Visionaries - before the entire industry imploded a few years later. The business story is much more fascinating than the witch-hunt of parent groups trying to shut the toy-toons down.
People had a major problem with toy ads, but no one seems to have a problem with the non-stop drug ads that run now, many of which have awful side effects. Makes sense.
@@jliller predatory behavior is wrong no matter who is the target. And the consequences of a bad drug interaction are far greater than mom getting nagged about buying a toy.
@@nadavegan My point is that children are expected to susceptible to manipulation and lacking the experience to make good choices. Adults should be resistant to manipulation be capable of making good decisions. Many people with otherwise reprehensible behavior consider children off limits for their crimes. I do wish we had laws prohibiting the advertising of any drugs. But the fact that they are effective is a condemnation of our dumb, gullible society as much as it is a condemnation of predatory capitalism.
DUDE! It's YOU AGAIN! ! The guy who makes videos about the 80s who wasn't born yet , but pretends they were there. GI Joa was not a Saturday morning cartoon. It aired after school. Also If you'd been a kid in the 80s , you'd know we were down with the whole scheme to get toys any way we could. We felt in cahoots with the creators because it's geared towards . . oh the heck. Dr Mindbender put you up to this to finally brainwash us here and now but Xr's know that Knowing is Half the . . .
I disagree. After school you played not watched cartoons. Saturday morning was where cartoons were at. Then play sometime before noon on sat . Cartoons may have been on weekdays but after boring day of school no one was watching cartoons
The Toys That Made Us is mind-blowing in revealing how the toy lines were made. Some crazy entertaining stories and larger than life characters in that documentary series.
The Power Rangers episode was really good. Saban's idea to take the show from Japan, film some American scenes, and import the toys was a stroke of genius.
I feel bad for the generations after me who didn’t get to enjoy the brainwashing of GI Joe. I’m going to sit my kids down and make them watch every episode. Once they are fully brainwashed they beg me to buy them GI Joe toys, but little do they know that the toys I buy will actually be for me! Bwhahahaha!! (Cobra Commander would be proud of my evil plot).
Who cares, the cartoons allowed us kids to escape the pressures of school and life for a couple hours on the weekend and weekdays after school. The last thing we needed was more educational programming.
I have mixed feelings about this video, but you raised several valid points and are 100% correct about toy companies in the 80's exploiting young minds for large profits (Hasbro is still at it today). However, I very much enjoyed the fantasy & using my own imagination to create new ideas & stories w/ my action figures and they'll always have a special place in my heart because it was pure fun & adventurous. Corporate greed is one thing, but us kids had some amazing creative treasure back in the day & I'm thankful to the creative minds that gave us lovable & memorable characters, along w/ fantastic tales of heroism & friendship that still hold up today.
@@chowderwhillis9448 Heh. And the one time Disney made a movie that even comes close to outlining what it's actually like to be a princess -- "The Princess Diaries" -- the shock and horror I saw on the faces of the women sitting next to me when duty, service, sacrifice, self-control, tradition, and the other real aspects of the life were mentioned were both hilarious and sad.
It feels like some facts were massaged to fit the story. I'm sure it aired somewhere on Saturday mornings, but as many have commented, in most areas it was a weekday cartoon. The first two GIJoe mini-series did not have any PSA tags at the end. He-Man was the first cartoon to do that probably due to the lashback to the GIJoe miniseries. The full series of GI Joe started in 1985 and also put in PSAs to provide some "edutainment". I also struggle with the use of the word "brainwashing" due to the negative connotation. You'd have to be able to prove that the kids weren't predisposed to liking the toys in the first place. I think "conditioned" would be a more fitting word choice. A cartoon tie-in did not guarantee success, so the toys had to be fun on some level as well.
Yeah I never understood the "saturday morning" terminology. Is that really a thing in the US? Why would schoolchildren even be awake at that time? All the children's cartoons I saw in the '90s and early '00s were either at midday during supper (or dinner? I always forget), or in the afternoon long after school hours.
@@DaveGrean It goes all the way back to the early days of American television and really took off in the 60s. Saturday mornings were set aside as a long five-hour block of children's programming and advertising. Initially live action shows and then eventually cartoons.
@@DaveGrean Well, in the 80s and early 90s I would get up on Saturday mornings specifically to watch shows that came on at that time. Or, at least, to turn on the VCR to record it and go back to sleep, once I had that option lol. It was a time that kids were likely to be home, not at school, not at after school activities, not outside playing yet, and maybe the parents weren't awake yet to take over the TV. It probably also goes back to when households only had one tv, and in the evening, the parents were more likely to be choosing what was watched.
As a 48 year old with a 9 and 11 year old It has been interesting how little my kids and their friends care about pretend-play with action figures compared to what I recall being all-consuming to my life in elementary school. But I have been able to sell off my old toys to other adults to put it in to my grown-up hobby of board games with miniatures. several of my GI Joe figures sold for $100+ each.
@@hugogieles4816 My 9 year old son likes Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and minecraft while my 11 year old daughter is big into drawing and crochet. They are also probably over scheduled with music lessons and soccer. Given the opportunity though they would probably sit around watching youtube or netflix all day. This probably relates to this video in that they have never had to watch their shows with kid-targeted commercials like we did. My son is a big Star Wars fan and I have started introducing him to some of the Star Wars tabletop games like X-Wing and Imperial Assault which I hope will be a great bond activity for us.
Pretend play is an integral part of coke development. Yes of course they were marketed to make profit in just saying that it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Social skills are trained during these pretend play sessions where you have to abide by certain rules, accept authority, delegate work etc. The fact that children don't do that all that much is an observation I really can confirm regarding my nephews. It really shows in their problems to socialize.
Action figures, the trucks, tanks, helicopters, aircraft carrier, all of it was awesome. Between all the kids on our block was just about everything for GI Joe. Good times.
Saturday morning cartoons may have been ads for toys, but they were fun, and a great way to take a break from 5 days of school. Hell, they've been showing shows like G.I. Joe and Transformers on Tubi, and I've been on cloud nine. Looking back, the writing, voice acting, and animation on certain shows were quality, and they still hold up today. Edit: and as someone mentioned in the comments, G.I. Joe and Transformers were actually weekday cartoons, not Saturday morning cartoons.
I was clueless about this when I was a kid, but dam it man, the 80s had the best cartoon. My family was too poor to buy the toys, but waking up Saturday Morning watch cartoon with a big bowl of cereal was bliss
Same on all accounts!! I am 43yrs old. Im seriously sad that my son (5) will never know that almost Christmas feel of waking up before his parents on Saturday just to watch cartoons. And that slight fear of, “if i don’t watch it Saturday morning i may never get to see it” He will also never fully appreciate the fact that he can just bring up anything he wants to watch whenever he wants to watch it.🤷♂️
Give me a break. G I Joe and Transformers were such detailed toys, that, as a kid, I was obsessed. Loved em. Same with gundam and others. That in turn sparked my imagination in a lot of ways and helped teach me how to draw.
We was just having fun as kids 😂😂😂😂 Our generation wasn’t the first to have toys 😂😂😂😂. Nobody blinks an eye at how the adults have always got rope in living beyond their means with their shows and commercials 😂😂😂😂😂. GI Joe was just plain fun. Stimulate kids imagination through playing with the figures. And even as a grown up, you have an instant connection with others who watched it.
I guess I was in that number of people who were brainwashed because I played with a lot of GI Joe toys. And the GI Joe movie from 1987 I still love that intro.
So much so that you proudly signed up for a socialist jobs program where you donned a camo costume, carried out the orders of corrupt politicians and became a parasite on the taxpayers for the rest of your life.
That's also something this video gets wrong. G.I.Joe was a SYNDICATED week day afternoon TV series. Only a handful of Toy centric shows aired on saturday morning in the 80s and 90s. Saturday morning Cartoons were under control of the big 3 TV Networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and eventually Fox) with ALL sorts of regulations. Ghostbusters and TMNT were the only ones I recall being aired on Sat morning.
@@ShadesMP5 Also Muppet Babies, Snorks, The Smurfs, Land of the Lost, Beetlejuice, M.A.S.K., Silverhawks, LoneStar, and I don’t remember if DinoSaucers and Centurions were Saturday Morning shows or not. Edit: Oh also just remembered C.O.P.S and Dark Water.
Knowing is half the battle. I'm 49 and this was all me. I remember G.i joe , he man Transformers , volition (the lions and the cars ) Thundercats. To put it short the 80s was awesome.
1. Superfriends came way before G.I. Joe. Super friends came out in the 70s. And G.I. Joe was an afterschool cartoon. It was never on Saturdays. It came on during afterschool around 4 o’clock in the evening and it was on channel 11.
'84 myself.. and they definitely got us... I remember how upset I was in those last few years of '96-'98 where they basically ended Saturday morning and after school cartoons... and made us watch Jack Hannah play with Animals.. Damnit, I wanted Xmen, Spiderman, Power Rangers, and so many more...
You are correct. The show was syndicated, so when it went daily, it aired at whatever morning or afternoon timeslot your local syndication channel aired it. Prior to it going daily, there were miniseries that aired in syndications, usually on weekends, but that was once in a blue moon until the toyline reached peak popularity. A lot of these essayists get this wrong. Guess you had to be there. ^_^
I grew up in the Chicago area and GI Joe was NOT a Saturday morning cartoon. It came on during the weekdays; 3 to 3:30pm. Transformers came on right after. I would rush home from school to catch both programs.
Trust me. We were fully aware of the link between the entertainment and the advertising. We just didn’t care. Most of us also had parents who didn’t have problems telling us “No”.
As a 3 year old I sat down to watch cartoons and got visibly irritated when the commercials came on. Kids aren't stupid, they know what ads are. I'd probably describe it wrong and you'd think I knew no difference, but oh boy did I ever.
Nah, it wasn't the shows. It was ALWAYS the commercials. I am almost 50 and my son went his whole life with no "regular" TV so no commercials at all. He loved all the old shows as I had them for him to watch but he NEVER lusted after toys like we did in the 80s.
The G.I. Joe toys from the 80s are still one of the best plastic boy toys ever made. And yes, the advertising helped to safe all of my pocket money to buy as much figures and vehicles. But the cartoons also stimulated hours of joyful play (indoors and outdoors), creating mindblowing adventures and battles and the construction of cobra and g.i.joe bases. It motivated me to draw my heroes, and write stories about them. I was 'brainwashed' to get inspired and 'brainwashed' to play and to create. I can imagine much worse forms of brainwashing, as we see in our world today. Besides G.I.Joe helped to teach a generation of boys the use of a compass in good and bad (evil) behaviour, and helped to understand that freedom is something we need to protect. Hasbro, thank you, for the joyful hours of creation and play! Yo Joe!
I'm an 80s kid too and I loved the commercials as much as the cartoons. To me those old 80s commercials are still more entertaining than some of the crap on Disney.
I will never forget waking up one morning to my boyfriend at the time singing the G.I. Joe theme song in the shower, complete with the announcer dialogue. I fell so hard! Nostalgia is mighty!
It brainwashed kids to be respectful to others. At the end of each episode had a different message. Current shows for kids have zero messages. Only violence
Did the kids all run out to the stores and buy these toys on their own? Why aren't parents held responsible for any of this? None of this happens in a vacuum. We have personal responsibility for how we respond to marketing. We aren't helpless and we certainly aren't "brainwashed."
@@thebiguglyalien2032 It is very strange. I totally get the idea of doing a video on the dance between toy companies and the FCC and how it shaped Saturday morning cartoons for a generation of kids. But the rest seems like a bit of a reach.
I used to do chores all week and get paid 3.25. That was enough to buy a single GI Joe figure. I would have an elaborate story about how either the Joe's or Cobra would rescue or recruit the new figure. The show inspired imagination and endless missions.
I grew up with GI Joe and I was born before 9/11. I think it’s a mix of GI Joe, post 9/11 patriotism and a Cold War veteran grandpa that brainwashed me into joining the military. I fought terrorists and communists but never had lasers shot at me; I’ve been lied to
@@schemar17 no. I just enjoyed watching it. But then someone my parents knew , told them how Gi Joes are violent and that I shouldn’t play with the toys or watch the show. So my toys were thrown away. Then I got into baseball cards.
And joining the Navy was an effort to provide for my family. A classified ad advertising to be a postal clerk, I answered it. Worlds greatest navy is what the guy on the other end of the phone said. I had to learn how to swim but I was determined to do what needed to be done, provide for my wife and daughter.
If only we'd known about the dangers of television marketing instead of learning a bunch of useless lessons about how to be brave, responsible, smart, and respectful. Such a shame. I'm a child of the '90s and I remember the huge shift toward educational programming. Some of the shows were cool, but most of us just got bored. We spent 40 hours a week learning at school, and all we wanted on a Saturday morning was to kick back with what we considered some good stories, and the ratings of even the well-known educational shows likely reflected that. With action cartoons mostly out of favor, studios scrambled to put something out, and we ended up with little more to watch than empty, vapid comedy. Again, some of this was great, but I distinctly remember being disappointed with the lack of "serious" (to my young mind) shows to watch. I wanted more Batman: TAS and I always ended up with more crappy Scooby Doo reruns.
The a real American hero franchise had cooled down by the late 80s and really got cooler a few years later and was on life support by say 1993 which was 2 years after 1991s dic season 2 ended. You could tell things were about the end come 1994 when there the last of the reruns from sunbow on USA network and the reruns of syndicates dic stopped airing and the comic book was featuring transformers and then star brigade. While the toys also had the star brigade aliens. You also had gi Joe street fighter figures and even then (I was ten going on eleven in 93) I was like "huh?" The last time I saw a real American hero figure in stores was in 1995 and the next thing I know a real American hero was replaced by gi Joe extreme. So gi joe period regardless of what incarnation was definitely not huge in the mid nineties By the way the sunbow stopped airing in 86. It was picked up by six in 1989.
They definitely got me with He-Man toys back in the day.. They were advertising those toys Monday-Saturday mornings.. I would watch those commercials and want those action figures so bad that practically every dollar I made from chores was going towards them..
Independently of it’s obvious pro armament message, the OG Gi Joe cartoon showed us how different people (Whites, Blacks, Asians, etc) can work together against the corrupt (I really enjoyed how Cobra Commander was not just the generic “I’m a Naz!/Communist villain”, but a guy who has connections with powerful warmongers and millionaires).
yeah lets see you tihs on the 2nd amendment when you no longer are able to own ANY weapons to defend yourself with tell me how that goes or better yet go to the uk and ask the families of those shot how they feel about not being able to defend themselves with nothing but a spoon you give up your snug and you give up your freedoms PERIOD end of discussion
Gi joe was my childhood, I hold it dearly and as a adult collector of them now the feeling the cartoon and toys gave me in the 80s was magical. Thank you for the brainwash
The cartoons such as GIJoe, Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Thundercats, Swat Cats, Supetman, Spiderman etc all carried an important lesson of Good vs Evil...it built character and imbued morals in us which I cherish till date... Today i c youngsters with very less morals & values and very few who have them. Times hav changed.
I don't think it had much effect on me. Certainly wasn't brainwashed. Just sometimes thought, "That you looks cool. I think I want it." But honestly, I think Rescue Heroes was most of what I got. Found out pretty quick I didn't actually enjoy the toys. I don't have enough imagination. Took my mother longer to learn that, though lol.
No one was brainwashed. They put a product out and advertised it in clever ways and it was a product that kids enjoyed. Those damn executives were so damn evil by making toys that were wildly popular! How dare they!
As a kid, I always felt bad when I would watch a cartoon and there were no toys for them. I would want to recreate the episodes or make my own version of the show. Toy tie-ins are popular for a reason.
I watched the cartoons with my brothers...and played with the G.I. Joe toys when they were over. My brother still has them in his basement. I have our baseball cards and my son has our Legos. I don't care that it was all a commercial. It was entertaining and had a decent good guys vs. bad guys plot.
Wrong: plenty of adults that grew up with GI Joe didn’t want to join the military mainly because of what the remanence Vietnam veterans with PTSD. Plenty of adults dissuading adolescence from joining. High School shop teacher even told me “they (US Gov) own you.” Still joined and valued my service to this Nation.
Every youtube video gets this one thing wrong about GIJoe; It wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon. It was an after school cartoon that aired around 4pm Monday through Friday. The same goes for transformers he-man and Thundercats.
Joes came in a bit late to India. I grew in the early-mid 90s and Gi joe was a huge success. Almost everyone had a joe growing up and we hardly had any "marketing" here. The toys by themselves were enough to be sold out. I still remember the first joes I got, storm shadow and beach head. It was only a bit later that we got cartoon network and gi joe show.
I do seem to remember that gi joe was a big thing back in the day and I'm not even American. Kids all wanted these figures. Just goes to show how successful the marketing was and how influential were these shows to an entire generation.
@@AkumaKristian they seem quite different though, it was all that large barbie doll size. So not the smaller size that usually seems more popular for action figures.
@@ashaw1016 Yeah, let me make a slight correction. The original toys from the 60s/70s were released as Action Man. The two brands had become more distinct by the time the show launched.
What I learned from this video is to blame ACT with why my two favorite afternoon cartoons GI Joe and Transformers stopped airing. These shows didn't "brainwash" a generation to buy toys. They had good stories that made children want to buy the toys. The GI Joe and Transformers dealt with grown up themes of fighting for something, death, loyalty, etc. The beginning of GI Joe the Movie was probably the most patriotic thing I saw directed towards children. I miss the days when we taught our children that our country and its ideals is worth fighting for. From GI Joe to Hulk Hogan to watching Red Dawn, the 80s was a good time to be a kid.
It was "concerned" people/parents like them that ruined shows like Captain Power and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Michaelangelo not using his nunchucks). If I could go back in time I'd love to say what was on my mind and what I thought of their concern.
I like GI Joe. Japanese manufacturers like Figma should take a crack at making some action figures. They have been making a killing at making various toys recently especially anime figurines. They take more care, polish, and pride than most western toy makers.
I only remember seeing GI Joe as an afternoon show, after school, Monday thru Friday. I don’t recall it ever being on Saturday mornings. Maybe I’m wrong it’s been awhile
@@inuyasha989 I can say this much, I watched GI Joe and Transformers after school every day in Junior High School, and thinking back on them, they were very wholesome and taught great life lessons.
Like many other commenters, GI Joe defined my childhood to an extent. It wasn't brainwashing, or anything else of the sort, at least not like what younger generations see today with all of the propaganda leading them down permanent paths of self-mutilation and emotional distress. The cartoon and toys were interconnected. I could never amass a collection that let me recreate any given cartoon episode, but the figures and vehicles I did have led to some memorable battles. I kept getting GI Joes into the early '90s, long after any sense of realism left the toy line, but Lift Ticket and Low Light could still hang with whatever neon colored new-gen Joe I had to defeat Cobra. There are YT channels devoted to creating stories using not only original GI figures, but other vintage toy lines to create rather decent narrative arcs. As a solid late Gen-Xer, I can attest to the time that GI Joe saw its greatest popularity. We still did regular nuclear attack drills, as I grew up less than 100 miles from DC, and my high school still had a fallout shelter in the basement. The late Cold War era marked a time of uneasiness, with our military having fairly recently suffered its first "loss" in Vietnam, and the "Ugly Stupid Stinking Russians" having their own debacle in Afghanistan. We had acorn fights and later BB gun wars (one pump max was the rule), Reagan was President, we knew we were going to triumph over Communism, and American kids like me dreamed of one day becoming Duke, General Hawk, or Lt. Falcon. I did my time post-9/11, retired from a military career wholly unlike those listed on the file cards of my old action figures, and now just watch nostalgic content. Sears could be accused of brainwashing kids into wanting toys just as easily. Their annual catalog contained dioramas of different scenarios that made us kids want everything they sold. Then we'd get to the video game section, with the simple box art and brief description piquing our curiosity. There was a solid barrier between our wants and reality, though: our parents. Unlike so many of today's kids (admittedly including my own), we could watch cartoons daily, study the Sears catalog, and stare longingly at the Kmart toy aisles, without ever having a chance of getting what we wanted. "I want these GI Joes and an NES". Come Christmas, I was lucky to get a Go-Bot and a Lite-Brite. My kids, like so many others, can just say "I want" and all but expect they'll get it at the next semi-important moment, even a sibling's birthday or National Audobon Day. What can I say? Largely due to GI Joe and my life decisions partly influenced by that cartoon and toy line, I have a higher disposable income than my parents had, and things are much more convenient these days.
I showed my son GI Joe and Transformers several years ago. We ended up watching the entire run together. At one point he turned to me and asked, "Dad, why can't they make good cartoons like that anymore?". I just answered, "I don't know, son."
She-Ra and The Princesses of Power is the best modern reboot of an 80s cartoon IMO so unless your one of those people who care about keeping your son all macho man and never exposing him to any femininity then I’d recommend the She-Ra reboot
Have you seen the cartoon “Final Faction?” It’s very much like something from the 80s and 90s and it’s on TH-cam for free. It’s also got a toy line at Dollar Tree.
GI Joe was not a Saturday morning cartoon; and the Flintstones was a *prime time* animated sitcom (and a rather tight parody of The Honeymooners), so its cigarette ads were no more or less nefarious than the cigarette ads that were legal and ubiquitous everywhere else on TV back then. The Simpsons didn't invent cartoons for an older audience so much as rediscover it after an anomalous period where they had declined into kiddie stuff. Cartoons used to play before every movie and during WW2 cartoons encouraged soldiers to use condoms and Donald Duck encouraged you to pay your "Taxes to fight the Axis" promptly. The idea that cartoons were for little kids was something that a few age cohorts grew up with, but it would have been completely foreign before that. I like Nerdstalgic but this particular video's only real revelation to most of its viewers will be that GI Joe specifically was the one to pioneer the cartoon-as-toy-commercial model that everyone is well familiar with at this point. (That, plus the PSAs. Truly a trailblazer!)
I feel like I remember GI Joe being on in the afternoon after school not on Saturday morning, but maybe I'm wrong. Either way, me and my brother had a lot of GI Joe toys.
I bought my son some of the retro wave gi joes that came out in 2020. Gi joes were my favorite toys when I was his age. He loves them. They are still his favorite toys and he's a gamer. So that says alot about how fun they are to play with. I picked up quite a few to collect, but I end up giving him one or 2 a year now for birthdays or Christmas. He really loves them
I’m a 90s kid. I played with my dad’s old GI Joes. I was so excited when I found all of the VHS tapes at a garage sale. Didn’t even know there was a cartoon until I found the tapes. When I finished watching them I was bummed to learn it was canceled.
awesome video! Just a quick correction G.I. Joe wasn’t a Saturday morning cartoon well not in my city anyway. It came on @ 4:30pm everyday Mon-Fri lol I used to haul ass home from school everyday to make I didn’t miss an episode 😁😁
You made a good point. While our nostalgia might be sad that Saturday morning cartoons no longer exists, it has reduced the advertisements targeting kids (not saying TH-cam ads are any better...)
I lived through the supposed targetting/braining washing and I'm not even mad about it. My parents were only going buy so many toys, so at some point I stop asking for things especially after my dad got laid off. I had a variety pack of toys ranging from knock offs to the actual items. I played with what I had and I was fine. I did have a love for Jets(Yes I did want a Skystriker...but who didn't in the 80s?) as my favorite characters were typically pilots like Ace McCloud of Centurion or flyers like Starscream, Skyfire and the Aerial bots. I suppose that had a hand in my enlistment in the Air force. But if that's the worst that came of it all I think I ran the gauntlet of corporate greed fairly unscathed.
G.I. Joe wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon. 1:20 - So's all TV shows. That's how they get their budget. 2:20 - Prime time =/= Saturday morning 4:20 - At the same time there were also toy ads for Joe's. 4:26 - Ron Friedman isn't anything special. 5:01 - Thundercats wasn't based on a toyline. 5:06 - Neither was Superfriends until the very last series... 5:15 - Again with Thundercats... 5:24 - There's literally no difference in the structure of toy based and non toy based shows. As evident by you persistently labeling Thundercats as one. Toy company commissions a studio to create a cartoon - they make a cartoon, they're in the business of making cartoons, a creative symbiosis beneficial for both. 5:42 - Toy propaganda.... can you make it any more sinister sounding? 5:44 - A lot of parents were BSing how these shows were Communist and devil worshiping propaganda... 6:05 - Wast majority of He-Man episodes were structured around moral lessons. Something your ilk would mock as preachy... 7:06 - And yet video game and toy based shows continued to get made... Your narrative stinks. 7:45 - "Blatant brainwashing"... sez a peddler of BS. 8:08 - EVERY SHOW IS MADE TO MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE SINCE EVER. 8:21 - We? I'm sorry, but you're nothing but a cynical BS peddler catering to the masses incapable of critical thought (something which you projected onto 80's shows...) 8:30 - Oh, yeah, it's not like there's literally an episode about television being used for brainwashing ("The Wrong Stuff")... You bloody dirtbag.
I loved those 80’s cartoons. I didn’t care that they were basically toy commercials. They were awesome. Kids from that era had imagination and creativity. I wrote a lot of short stories based on what I liked to imagine. The creativity helped me with critical thinking skills to come up with unconventional solutions to difficult problems I faced later on in life. The toys were also a reward for doing well in school and bringing home a favorable report card. My parents didn’t mind buying the toys. The toys kept us out of trouble. A childhood without toys isn’t a childhood at all.
I don't recall GI Joe being a Saturday morning cartoon. That thing was after school during the week in the 80s.
I was getting ready to comment the same thing.
MONDAY! TUESDAY! WEDNESDAY! THURSDAY! AND FRIDAY!
Yes exactly.
I also remember it was on at 7am during the week, I used to get ready for school while watching it.
Until the stupid Cubs season started.
As a kid that grew up in the 80's and being told all my cartoons were just half hour toy commercials... my response is, I don't care... They were absolutely AWESOME.
That's my thought. I think when we were kids we didn't really separate these worlds. For some reason it's seen as some great evil today to have sold kids toys, yet our parents always bought them for us (or we saved up and bought them ourselves), and this led to countless hours of social fun and imagination. I think today's models of endless streaming screen time are much more dangerous to kids.
This video was a bit rough to me. I respect the work but to say it was apart of brainwashing is a bit of a reach. There were many other cartoons that had toys too such as Voltron or Smurfs that was due to the show being so popular. He neglected to mention how big Star Wars toys were and that was a movie.
Here here!
I grew up during the transition from subtle toy advertising to Pokémon. That was the point where it became a lot more obvious. Hell, even the tag line was, "Gotta catch 'em all!"
I mean if it wouldn't be brain washing if you didn't care or you think you aren't brainwashed.
Alot of us kids in the 80s were very aware of the marketing, but that alone was not the reason we wanted the toys. The cartoons were engaging that it inspired alot of imaginations to continue the adventures of GI Joe or My Little Pony once the cartoons ended and we went outside to play. Even it you were poor, a friend might have an extra GI Joe for you to borrow. Maybe that's the genius in the marketing in the 80s, the toys were for us to play with.
That's my thought. I think when we were kids we didn't really separate these worlds. For some reason it's seen as some great evil today to have sold kids toys, yet our parents always bought them for us (or we saved up and bought them ourselves), and this led to countless hours of social fun and imagination. I think today's models of endless streaming screen time are much more dangerous to kids.
Almost no kid had ALL the GI Joe toys, there's so many different things. But between all the kids on our block was enough to make an entire army base. We played star wars and he man too but, the GI Joe toys and action figures was the best. In our neighborhood anyway.
@@ADSheehan I also think things were better when I was young, and that society today is all wrong. This is unique only to me, not every generation ever.
Kids don’t even play with toys anymore it’s kinda sad
Yep, I used the toys (in combination with toys I'd make myself, to have toys I couldn't afford, add original characters, or have a toy of a character that there were no toys of) to act out fanfics, which I sometimes wrote down. The toys were essentially a way to make and share fanfics before a kid could jump on the internet and find a fanfic community. I still write and read, and I still make toys (I make a good portion of my income selling toys I make). And I still love plenty of shows that are 99% toy marketing (there's still tons of Japanese shows like this), even though I don't buy (much) of the toys nowadays.
I would love to see a study of the different imaginations and creativity of people that grew up with these kind of toys vs those that didn't.
It's amazing that this was a problem 40 years ago but not when social media and apps throwing enough ads at you render said app virtually useless
The title of this video should be: "Not understanding the 80s at all and seeing the generation as 'problematic'".
80's kids weren't so stupid as to not realize that their favorite TV shows were glorified toy commercials.
Riiight, like you didn't harass your parents to buy you some action figures because you saw them on the latest cartoon or movie.
You be full of shit.
Excatly we knew & this is what we wanted! We loved this. Why wouldn't we want to see cartoons & then be able to buy the same stuff we just seen!
I didn't see them as toy commercials. I saw them as entertainment that I could only reenact myself to my own standards using the toys I would purchase.
By buying the toys, I was making my own cartoons.
Same with TMNT, Transformers, Rambo, Terminator, Robocop, and Batman (all those franchises had some awesome quality toys in the 80s and early 90s).
It was when I was 13 or 14 in 93-4 when the "Real American Hero" version of GI Joe was winding down that I fully grew out of it.
I moved on to the gritter "Batman: The Animated Series." Finally around 13-14 I stopped watching animation and buying toys completely.
Later, I would feel nostalgia for old 80s cartoons that were not in wide syndication by the late 90s--stuff like Robotech, Voltron, and Battle of the Planets. I would also keep an eye out for shows like A-Team and Knight Rider.
Now I watch them to relive my childhood for 30 mins at a time.
Yes. I remember having this conversation with my mom in the 80s. We knew! We weren't clueless. But I told her that Roald Dahl wasn't going to make a cartoon show with Quentin Blake (or else I really would be watching that instead) and that Bill Cosby's sitcom was so successful, he wasn't going to make another cartoon (we didn't know he was a monster) so those cartoons were the best we were getting. Maybe not the best, but they had their moments. That two parter with Shipwreck going Twilight Zone was cool.
We liked watching the cartoons and playing with toys. What's the problem? Getting to learn about the characters on tv and playing with them after the show went off was fun. Kids like cartoons and toys, this had both.
"GIJOE had long since disappeared from Saturday mornings" that's because GIJOE didn't air on Saturdays. GIJOE like Transformers, He-man, She-Ra and many others were Monday through Friday cartoons. Many of GIJOE's early adventures were 5 part series and specifically made to air Mon-Fri.
I love the videos that say more about the writer or content maker than the actual video says about its subject matter. Tell me you were born after 1993 without saying you were born after 1993.
Even the damn movie originally aired as a 5 part show. This guy must be confusing gi joe with X-men back in 92 and how they brainwashed kids to get the Covid vaccine so they can get mutant powers and shoot lasers out their eyes
I was wondering if I was the only one who watched GI Joe after school Monday through Friday. I watched Saturday morning cartoons too, but GI Joe was never on at that time.
I think it's secondary from DIC was actually run on saturday mornings, but the primary run by Sunbow up to the movie was all done monday-friday after school. It's possible some local stations tossed on saturday mornings from time to time but it's main air time was between 3-5 pm weekdays typically followed by Transformers when I saw it on WGN, channel in Chicago.
People use saturday morning cartoons as a catch all for the 80s shows, but the reality is during the week plenty of cartoon ran. Some shows ran in both slots, while others were primarily a saturday morning affair like Dungeons and Dragons or Captain N.
It came on Saturdays in the 80s and 90s. I specifically remember that but they also came on M-F and it all depended on what region and local station. I used to have tapes of Saturday Morning cartoons (you could tell because the filming stops the second American Bandstand comes on.
Locally for me I remember it starting on Saturdays but from either popularity or the original planning moved to the M-F schedule. It was a race back in the day from the bus to the tv just to hear that Transformers intro.
I am a Gen X father now and I will say it here and now that I LOVED MY 80s CHILDHOOD! Of course they were 20 minute toy commercials - we knew that back then. I had parents with the amazing power of "no!" Got toys at birthdays and Christmas and that was it. I loved my cartoons and will always have fond memories of cereal, friends, awesome cartoons, Atari and Nintendo, arcades,, freedom to go out and do stupid shit before the lights came on and classic WWF!
My folks were the same way. I'll never forget the one birthday when i received 6 new joes, i was shittin in tall cotton
Amen.
The 80s was a magical time!!! I miss the toons, toys, and even with the Cold War still fresh in our minds, there wasn’t a never ending feeling of doom and gloom! No chem trails, real clouds, fresh air and food that would nourish you instead of slowly poisoning and killing you….
The all mighty power of "No!" I don't know how many times I heard no, it generally was for them stupid TV only things, " like otlrder now and well double the offer " I miss all that good cartoons with the ok animation, that stuff would inspire hours of drawing and imagination, and who didn't know that these cartoons were commercials, just like when they put the dang discloser in the commercials "toys don't actually talk or move on their own" 🤦♂️
Similar experience as a gen Z with gen X parents. I always wanted to get new Transformers toys buy my parents had the power of "no".
G.I. Joe was epic
The PSA’s were not out of place. I moved a lot as a kid and my parents weren’t around and I was an only child. The morality of those PSA’s partially raised me and the characters were my friends
Precisely. The characters from our shows were indeed inspirational and warm-blooded.
I'm glad they worked out for you! That takes a load off my mind, lol!
Well said.
So sad 😢
Don’t be a bully. Don’t swim alone. Wear bright clothes at night so you don’t become roadkill… Even if they were forced to do it, the cartoons’ PSAs are a positive legacy. I guess it’s just fashionable for TH-camrs to criticize everything nowadays, regardless of merit.
For being 20 minute commercials for toys, they sure had incredible story lines, themes, and heroic acts of courage. These helped me get through childhood and still serve me today.
And it wasnt insulting, we uderstood the stoy lines enough to say..." i want zartan cause he is bad ass & changes color in the sun"
GI Joe cartoons in the 80’s were better written than 90% of the movies today.
@Modok.Saint424that’s not a stretch. Sorry your current kid shows are garbage
Completely agree
Very true
Yeah and they had charm,
I have a very hard time watching Transformers anymore, after watching and recognizing the far superior storytelling of G.I. Joe such as There's no place like Springfield, Synthoid Conspiracy, World's without End, Memories of Mara, and Nightmare Assault. Although I still love Transformers, the writing on G.I. Joe was just amazing.
I've been rewatching the old GI Joe cartoon. It still holds up and I'm not embarrassed to say I like watching it.
Same
Just started watching the DIC run. Those are a little harder to watch than the Sunbow lol
Yeah man it's legit I love Hasbro put it on there TH-cam channel
You have to watch them in your underoos with a big bowl of cereal to get the full effect!
Is does hold up
I have no regrets about my love of transformers and gi joe. They were icons, along with those saturday morning cartoons. Saturday always was the Best. Day. Ever.
"He'll fight for freedom wherever theres trouble, GI Joe is there!"
*15 years later, and 4 kilometers outside of Mosul... "hey... wait a minute?!?"
Same my childhood would been a lot more boring without them.
G.I. Joe A Real American Hero! was never a Saturday morning cartoon, nor was it on any Network television (ABC, CBS, NBC).
It was strictly syndicated on Weekday afternoons, and each season began with a 5-part series that was shown Monday thru Friday.
Came here specifically to see if anyone else caught that glaring error about how the cartoon was broadcast. It was a weekday ritual for me as a kid in the mid-80s...come home from school and watch G.I. Joe, Transformers, Voltron, and Robotech.
@@FrenchCelt I caught it to. I'm use to stuff like this from either people with no long-term memory or yahoos who make TH-cam videos for click-bait but either 1) does not have first-hand knowledge of the subject matter or 2) too young to have been alive during the era and is just putting together stuff in bits and pieces in a sensationalized manner similar to a Fox News editorial piece for again, clicks. 🙄
Came here to say this. This was after school viewing, for sure.
@@jonathancook1096 Well said. You absolutely said exactly what I was thinking watching this.
Yeah, this is kind of a goofy video without much solid info to prove the point alleged in the title.
I thought this video was going to be about how GI Joe convinced a bunch of kids to enlist when they got older. I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s, so GI Joe wasn't on air anymore, but I found the tapes at my local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and would rent them all the time. Fast-forward several years later I joined the military.
GI Joe did teach patriotism toward the USA and the value of teamwork. Also, it brought an interest of the military to young people after years of post Vietnam resentment towards the military. It also showed that a motley crew can still work as a team and accomplish the mission. There was one episode in which GI Joe and Cobra teamed up together to defeat an evil tycoon.
If COBRA existed in real life it would be funded at Wall Street
Evil tycoon?
That's something I do appreciate, Despite the overtly militaristic themes by now standards I guess it wouldn't be stupid to like it somehow
Games Master
@@Voucher765. Gi joe is basically what mortal kombat could've become with some focus, an expansive universe full of memorable and quirky characters!
I am 43yrs old. Im seriously sad that my son (5) will never know that almost Christmas feel of waking up before his parents on Saturday just to watch cartoons. And that slight fear of, “if i don’t watch it Saturday morning i may never get to see it” He will also never fully appreciate the fact that he can just bring up anything he wants to watch whenever he wants to watch it.🤷♂️
I’m nearly 42. Such is the nature of time and change. We cannot expect our kids to really understand it. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a kid with Internet access, but I’m grateful to have grown up when I did.
So damn true..
True. I'm just about 50. I remember the time when these cartoons came out brand new and watched the first airings on a lot of them. It was something else as nothing like them existed in the late 70s. Saturday morning was indeed magical. Especially after a Friday night playing video games at the arcade after a hard week of school.
And if you did miss that episode, it could be months or years before you caught it on a rerun.
Ngl should just give him cable tv. Like I mean if you’re bothered by him just getting to have everything with the click of a button. Why spoil him with that? Not judging your parenting or anything just giving maybe a new thought
TH-cam features Saturday morning cartoons all the classics including commercials my son has been watching it for eight years and he loves it and we only watch it on Saturday mornings totally awesome. I recommend it.
There is always a huge omission in these TH-cam docs about this era. It was not Marvel and Hasbro magically getting together - there was an ad agency in the middle who's client was Hasbro. Griffin-Bacal Advertising - literally the 1980s version of Mad Men- made those first commercials and then started Sunbow Productions who sub-contracted it all out to the Japanese studio Toei Animation, and co-producing them with US animation studio DPE Films who was bought by Cadence and renamed: Marvel Productions. Sunbow did ALL the Hasbro toy cartoons - Jem, Inhumanoids, My Little Pony, Visionaries - before the entire industry imploded a few years later. The business story is much more fascinating than the witch-hunt of parent groups trying to shut the toy-toons down.
Yeah it is. It should be a course in marketing 101.
People had a major problem with toy ads, but no one seems to have a problem with the non-stop drug ads that run now, many of which have awful side effects. Makes sense.
Exactly I turn on Nick and Disney and they are nothing but pharmaceutical drug adverts!!!! (Jk there is none, obviously)
Well said.
Drug ads are targeted at adults, not kids.
@@jliller predatory behavior is wrong no matter who is the target. And the consequences of a bad drug interaction are far greater than mom getting nagged about buying a toy.
@@nadavegan My point is that children are expected to susceptible to manipulation and lacking the experience to make good choices. Adults should be resistant to manipulation be capable of making good decisions. Many people with otherwise reprehensible behavior consider children off limits for their crimes.
I do wish we had laws prohibiting the advertising of any drugs. But the fact that they are effective is a condemnation of our dumb, gullible society as much as it is a condemnation of predatory capitalism.
The poster is clueless. GI Joe was a classic.
Both are true. It is a classic, and it was just made of 20 minutes toy commercials. Can't see any issues in pointing that out.
DUDE! It's YOU AGAIN! ! The guy who makes videos about the 80s who wasn't born yet , but pretends they were there. GI Joa was not a Saturday morning cartoon. It aired after school. Also If you'd been a kid in the 80s , you'd know we were down with the whole scheme to get toys any way we could. We felt in cahoots with the creators because it's geared towards . . oh the heck. Dr Mindbender put you up to this to finally brainwash us here and now but Xr's know that Knowing is Half the . . .
Seriously....kids today. Just jealous their childhood sucked compared to ours.
Calm down. There were multiple series but yes, it aired after school but AND Saturday mornings too from season four onward or something.
I disagree. After school you played not watched cartoons. Saturday morning was where cartoons were at. Then play sometime before noon on sat . Cartoons may have been on weekdays but after boring day of school no one was watching cartoons
Battle!
The Toys That Made Us is mind-blowing in revealing how the toy lines were made. Some crazy entertaining stories and larger than life characters in that documentary series.
The Power Rangers episode was really good. Saban's idea to take the show from Japan, film some American scenes, and import the toys was a stroke of genius.
Stunts like that make me look down upon such toy franchises in my opinion...
80's is the golden era of toys. With everything being digital now, VR, there will never be another great era of toys. I'm so happy I experienced it.
I feel bad for the generations after me who didn’t get to enjoy the brainwashing of GI Joe. I’m going to sit my kids down and make them watch every episode. Once they are fully brainwashed they beg me to buy them GI Joe toys, but little do they know that the toys I buy will actually be for me! Bwhahahaha!! (Cobra Commander would be proud of my evil plot).
COBRA!!!!!
COOOOOBRAAAAAA!!!!
Don’t forget to show your kids how to “retreat!”
Yo!Joe!!! 🇺🇸
Ahahahaha!!!
COBRA LALALALALALALA
Who cares, the cartoons allowed us kids to escape the pressures of school and life for a couple hours on the weekend and weekdays after school. The last thing we needed was more educational programming.
Honestly an adult animated GI Joe show would probably do numbers
I have mixed feelings about this video, but you raised several valid points and are 100% correct about toy companies in the 80's exploiting young minds for large profits (Hasbro is still at it today). However, I very much enjoyed the fantasy & using my own imagination to create new ideas & stories w/ my action figures and they'll always have a special place in my heart because it was pure fun & adventurous. Corporate greed is one thing, but us kids had some amazing creative treasure back in the day & I'm thankful to the creative minds that gave us lovable & memorable characters, along w/ fantastic tales of heroism & friendship that still hold up today.
But why is it wrong for a company to make toys that kids like to play with?
If you think Hasbro's bad when it comes to manipulation, Disney'll make your brains catch fire.
@@Beedo_Sookcool agreed there’s literally a Disney Princess Syndrome in the medical field lol
@@chowderwhillis9448 Heh. And the one time Disney made a movie that even comes close to outlining what it's actually like to be a princess -- "The Princess Diaries" -- the shock and horror I saw on the faces of the women sitting next to me when duty, service, sacrifice, self-control, tradition, and the other real aspects of the life were mentioned were both hilarious and sad.
Yeah, it’s not wrong that every kids show shouldn’t be a toy ad, but acting like such shows should never exist is extreme
It feels like some facts were massaged to fit the story. I'm sure it aired somewhere on Saturday mornings, but as many have commented, in most areas it was a weekday cartoon. The first two GIJoe mini-series did not have any PSA tags at the end. He-Man was the first cartoon to do that probably due to the lashback to the GIJoe miniseries. The full series of GI Joe started in 1985 and also put in PSAs to provide some "edutainment". I also struggle with the use of the word "brainwashing" due to the negative connotation. You'd have to be able to prove that the kids weren't predisposed to liking the toys in the first place. I think "conditioned" would be a more fitting word choice. A cartoon tie-in did not guarantee success, so the toys had to be fun on some level as well.
Yeah I never understood the "saturday morning" terminology. Is that really a thing in the US? Why would schoolchildren even be awake at that time? All the children's cartoons I saw in the '90s and early '00s were either at midday during supper (or dinner? I always forget), or in the afternoon long after school hours.
@@DaveGrean It goes all the way back to the early days of American television and really took off in the 60s. Saturday mornings were set aside as a long five-hour block of children's programming and advertising. Initially live action shows and then eventually cartoons.
@@DaveGrean Well, in the 80s and early 90s I would get up on Saturday mornings specifically to watch shows that came on at that time. Or, at least, to turn on the VCR to record it and go back to sleep, once I had that option lol. It was a time that kids were likely to be home, not at school, not at after school activities, not outside playing yet, and maybe the parents weren't awake yet to take over the TV. It probably also goes back to when households only had one tv, and in the evening, the parents were more likely to be choosing what was watched.
"Some facts"?
I didn't want to dismiss the entire piece out of hand. :)
As a 48 year old with a 9 and 11 year old It has been interesting how little my kids and their friends care about pretend-play with action figures compared to what I recall being all-consuming to my life in elementary school. But I have been able to sell off my old toys to other adults to put it in to my grown-up hobby of board games with miniatures. several of my GI Joe figures sold for $100+ each.
If you dont mind me asking what keeps your kids busy now mostly
@@hugogieles4816 My 9 year old son likes Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and minecraft while my 11 year old daughter is big into drawing and crochet. They are also probably over scheduled with music lessons and soccer.
Given the opportunity though they would probably sit around watching youtube or netflix all day. This probably relates to this video in that they have never had to watch their shows with kid-targeted commercials like we did.
My son is a big Star Wars fan and I have started introducing him to some of the Star Wars tabletop games like X-Wing and Imperial Assault which I hope will be a great bond activity for us.
@@andreweckert2949 given the opportunity they'd sit idle and not do a fucking thing...lmao great leadership loser
Wait until you hear how much Pokémon cards go for… card. Paper ….
Edit: Pokémon cards , one that came out when I was in high school 95-98
Pretend play is an integral part of coke development. Yes of course they were marketed to make profit in just saying that it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Social skills are trained during these pretend play sessions where you have to abide by certain rules, accept authority, delegate work etc. The fact that children don't do that all that much is an observation I really can confirm regarding my nephews. It really shows in their problems to socialize.
I grew up in the 2000s and watched all the 80s cartoons and I had the toys and I don’t regret one single minute and I still watch today
I love how because of the removal of the like/dislike ratio how much easier it is to tell the audience opinion by simply comparing views to likes
The effect of that show was astounding. I was a kid in a small town in India and I owned around 90 GI Joe action figures.
So? Why's that a bad thing?
@@mfmageiwatch it wasn't. I loved those toys.
@@theindiancop nice. I misunderstood. Sorry.
Action figures, the trucks, tanks, helicopters, aircraft carrier, all of it was awesome. Between all the kids on our block was just about everything for GI Joe. Good times.
90 is a good start
Saturday morning cartoons may have been ads for toys, but they were fun, and a great way to take a break from 5 days of school. Hell, they've been showing shows like G.I. Joe and Transformers on Tubi, and I've been on cloud nine. Looking back, the writing, voice acting, and animation on certain shows were quality, and they still hold up today.
Edit: and as someone mentioned in the comments, G.I. Joe and Transformers were actually weekday cartoons, not Saturday morning cartoons.
I was clueless about this when I was a kid, but dam it man, the 80s had the best cartoon. My family was too poor to buy the toys, but waking up Saturday Morning watch cartoon with a big bowl of cereal was bliss
Same 👍🏼💯🎯
Same on all accounts!! I am 43yrs old. Im seriously sad that my son (5) will never know that almost Christmas feel of waking up before his parents on Saturday just to watch cartoons. And that slight fear of, “if i don’t watch it Saturday morning i may never get to see it” He will also never fully appreciate the fact that he can just bring up anything he wants to watch whenever he wants to watch it.🤷♂️
Give me a break. G I Joe and Transformers were such detailed toys, that, as a kid, I was obsessed. Loved em. Same with gundam and others. That in turn sparked my imagination in a lot of ways and helped teach me how to draw.
I look at people that weren't kids in the 80's and actually feel sorry for them. It was a GREAT time to be a kid!
I don’t know about that. There was an HIV pandemic going around. And the Cold War was still going on.
We was just having fun as kids 😂😂😂😂 Our generation wasn’t the first to have toys 😂😂😂😂. Nobody blinks an eye at how the adults have always got rope in living beyond their means with their shows and commercials 😂😂😂😂😂. GI Joe was just plain fun. Stimulate kids imagination through playing with the figures. And even as a grown up, you have an instant connection with others who watched it.
I guess I was in that number of people who were brainwashed because I played with a lot of GI Joe toys. And the GI Joe movie from 1987 I still love that intro.
Mother of god let’s do it again and see what a second batch of generation look like
G.I. Joe the Movie's song was and remains the JAM. Or by today's vernacular it is a whole BOP. It slaps. Okay I'm done.
That intro is awesome. I still rewatch it every now and then.
I also played a lot of GI Joe toys
So much so that you proudly signed up for a socialist jobs program where you donned a camo costume, carried out the orders of corrupt politicians and became a parasite on the taxpayers for the rest of your life.
GI Joe was a little behind He-Man on release (Like a week), and they were both Monday-Friday shows, as I recall, not Saturday morning ones.
I'm pretty sure you're right, I remember GI Joe being on in the afternoons not Saturdays
That's also something this video gets wrong. G.I.Joe was a SYNDICATED week day afternoon TV series. Only a handful of Toy centric shows aired on saturday morning in the 80s and 90s. Saturday morning Cartoons were under control of the big 3 TV Networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and eventually Fox) with ALL sorts of regulations. Ghostbusters and TMNT were the only ones I recall being aired on Sat morning.
@@ShadesMP5 Also Muppet Babies, Snorks, The Smurfs, Land of the Lost, Beetlejuice, M.A.S.K., Silverhawks, LoneStar, and I don’t remember if DinoSaucers and Centurions were Saturday Morning shows or not.
Edit: Oh also just remembered C.O.P.S and Dark Water.
@@ShadesMP5 and later,X-Men. With an Alice in chains, Man in the Box, lead in later on!!
G.I. Joe also only ran for 5 episode in 1983, and then 5 more in 1984. It wasn't until 1985 that it got a full season.
Knowing is half the battle. I'm 49 and this was all me. I remember G.i joe , he man Transformers , volition (the lions and the cars )
Thundercats. To put it short the 80s was awesome.
1. Superfriends came way before G.I. Joe. Super friends came out in the 70s.
And G.I. Joe was an afterschool cartoon. It was never on Saturdays. It came on during afterschool around 4 o’clock in the evening and it was on channel 11.
'84 myself.. and they definitely got us... I remember how upset I was in those last few years of '96-'98 where they basically ended Saturday morning and after school cartoons... and made us watch Jack Hannah play with Animals..
Damnit, I wanted Xmen, Spiderman, Power Rangers, and so many more...
I don’t remember GIJOE being in Saturday morning cartoon lineup. I remember watching it after school
You're right in not remembering it. It wasn't.
I watched after school too. How old are you if you don't mind saying. I'm 49.
@@drnockaable
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@@drnockaable
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle
You are correct. The show was syndicated, so when it went daily, it aired at whatever morning or afternoon timeslot your local syndication channel aired it. Prior to it going daily, there were miniseries that aired in syndications, usually on weekends, but that was once in a blue moon until the toyline reached peak popularity.
A lot of these essayists get this wrong. Guess you had to be there. ^_^
I grew up in the Chicago area and GI Joe was NOT a Saturday morning cartoon. It came on during the weekdays; 3 to 3:30pm. Transformers came on right after. I would rush home from school to catch both programs.
That would be tight. I was born in Aurora… but moved away as a baby. I always knew I missed something.
Yup WGN channel 9 baby!
Trust me. We were fully aware of the link between the entertainment and the advertising. We just didn’t care. Most of us also had parents who didn’t have problems telling us “No”.
I was a child in the 80s and never felt like buying the toys. Enjoyed the cartoons though.
As a 3 year old I sat down to watch cartoons and got visibly irritated when the commercials came on.
Kids aren't stupid, they know what ads are. I'd probably describe it wrong and you'd think I knew no difference, but oh boy did I ever.
Nah, it wasn't the shows. It was ALWAYS the commercials. I am almost 50 and my son went his whole life with no "regular" TV so no commercials at all. He loved all the old shows as I had them for him to watch but he NEVER lusted after toys like we did in the 80s.
The G.I. Joe toys from the 80s are still one of the best plastic boy toys ever made. And yes, the advertising helped to safe all of my pocket money to buy as much figures and vehicles. But the cartoons also stimulated hours of joyful play (indoors and outdoors), creating mindblowing adventures and battles and the construction of cobra and g.i.joe bases. It motivated me to draw my heroes, and write stories about them.
I was 'brainwashed' to get inspired and 'brainwashed' to play and to create. I can imagine much worse forms of brainwashing, as we see in our world today. Besides G.I.Joe helped to teach a generation of boys the use of a compass in good and bad (evil) behaviour, and helped to understand that freedom is something we need to protect.
Hasbro, thank you, for the joyful hours of creation and play! Yo Joe!
Very well said.
So they tried to sell us superb toys through excellent cartoons. What a criminals!
I'm an 80s kid too and I loved the commercials as much as the cartoons. To me those old 80s commercials are still more entertaining than some of the crap on Disney.
I loved GI Joe as a kid. All the kids on our block had the toys and watched the cartoons. Good times 😊
I will never forget waking up one morning to my boyfriend at the time singing the G.I. Joe theme song in the shower, complete with the announcer dialogue. I fell so hard! Nostalgia is mighty!
In the 80s,GI Joe also taught us good morals and patriotism
Lol that's unacceptable nowadays on today's world you have to hate everything and everyone slightly right of Marx.
They also prepared us for future conflict with evil adversaries without boarders.
Cobra teaches us how to rule the world.
Unquestioned "patriotism" is the very essence of brainwashing.
Even here in Europe 💪🏻 Muricaaaa
It brainwashed kids to be respectful to others. At the end of each episode had a different message. Current shows for kids have zero messages. Only violence
I remember the phrase "Now I know." "... and knowing is half the battle."
Whoever made this was the kid in class that would tell the teach she forgot to grade yesterdays homework.
Did the kids all run out to the stores and buy these toys on their own? Why aren't parents held responsible for any of this? None of this happens in a vacuum. We have personal responsibility for how we respond to marketing. We aren't helpless and we certainly aren't "brainwashed."
For real. Between this and the Mad Men video, Nerdstalgic has been promoting "victim complex" style thinking a lot lately
@@thebiguglyalien2032 It is very strange. I totally get the idea of doing a video on the dance between toy companies and the FCC and how it shaped Saturday morning cartoons for a generation of kids. But the rest seems like a bit of a reach.
I used to do chores all week and get paid 3.25. That was enough to buy a single GI Joe figure. I would have an elaborate story about how either the Joe's or Cobra would rescue or recruit the new figure. The show inspired imagination and endless missions.
Brainwashed or not, I'm glad i grew up in the 80's! I'm 45 years old and I still collect giJoe and Masters of the universe toys.
Same
Same
Same.
I grew up with GI Joe and I was born before 9/11. I think it’s a mix of GI Joe, post 9/11 patriotism and a Cold War veteran grandpa that brainwashed me into joining the military. I fought terrorists and communists but never had lasers shot at me; I’ve been lied to
G.I.JOE was a syndicated cartoon that aired weekdays, not Saturday mornings.
Grew up watching it. Was my favorite along with looney tunes, flintstones, jetsons. Grew up during the eighties.
And I did end up joining the Navy as I guess a real American hero. Didn’t plan to join as a young man, but I did.
@@jonathanlego4930 do you think Gi Joe influenced you to join?
@@schemar17 no. I just enjoyed watching it. But then someone my parents knew , told them how Gi Joes are violent and that I shouldn’t play with the toys or watch the show. So my toys were thrown away. Then I got into baseball cards.
And joining the Navy was an effort to provide for my family. A classified ad advertising to be a postal clerk, I answered it. Worlds greatest navy is what the guy on the other end of the phone said. I had to learn how to swim but I was determined to do what needed to be done, provide for my wife and daughter.
@@jonathanlego4930 thank you for your service, you are a true American hero👊
If only we'd known about the dangers of television marketing instead of learning a bunch of useless lessons about how to be brave, responsible, smart, and respectful. Such a shame. I'm a child of the '90s and I remember the huge shift toward educational programming. Some of the shows were cool, but most of us just got bored. We spent 40 hours a week learning at school, and all we wanted on a Saturday morning was to kick back with what we considered some good stories, and the ratings of even the well-known educational shows likely reflected that. With action cartoons mostly out of favor, studios scrambled to put something out, and we ended up with little more to watch than empty, vapid comedy. Again, some of this was great, but I distinctly remember being disappointed with the lack of "serious" (to my young mind) shows to watch. I wanted more Batman: TAS and I always ended up with more crappy Scooby Doo reruns.
Its crazy to me that GI Joe stopped airing in 86. I was born in 86 and it was still huge until i was about 8 or 9
The a real American hero franchise had cooled down by the late 80s and really got cooler a few years later and was on life support by say 1993 which was 2 years after 1991s dic season 2 ended. You could tell things were about the end come 1994 when there the last of the reruns from sunbow on USA network and the reruns of syndicates dic stopped airing and the comic book was featuring transformers and then star brigade. While the toys also had the star brigade aliens. You also had gi Joe street fighter figures and even then (I was ten going on eleven in 93) I was like "huh?"
The last time I saw a real American hero figure in stores was in 1995 and the next thing I know a real American hero was replaced by gi Joe extreme. So gi joe period regardless of what incarnation was definitely not huge in the mid nineties
By the way the sunbow stopped airing in 86. It was picked up by six in 1989.
It didn't stop airing in 1986; there just weren't any new episodes produced after that point. Reruns were being aired into the 1990s.
Growing up in the 80s was the best. Wish we could go back
They definitely got me with He-Man toys back in the day.. They were advertising those toys Monday-Saturday mornings.. I would watch those commercials and want those action figures so bad that practically every dollar I made from chores was going towards them..
I loved GIJoe! The live action just haven’t been able to muster that nostalgic feeling for me. Cartoons in the 80s were awesome.
Independently of it’s obvious pro armament message, the OG Gi Joe cartoon showed us how different people (Whites, Blacks, Asians, etc) can work together against the corrupt (I really enjoyed how Cobra Commander was not just the generic “I’m a Naz!/Communist villain”, but a guy who has connections with powerful warmongers and millionaires).
Well said 👏🏾
Yeah it was great for america especially its the most diverse nation of the world
yeah lets see you tihs on the 2nd amendment when you no longer are able to own ANY weapons to defend yourself with tell me how that goes or better yet go to the uk and ask the families of those shot how they feel about not being able to defend themselves with nothing but a spoon you give up your snug and you give up your freedoms PERIOD end of discussion
Gi joe was my childhood, I hold it dearly and as a adult collector of them now the feeling the cartoon and toys gave me in the 80s was magical. Thank you for the brainwash
I’m more pissed about the constant government over reach than anything else
The cartoons such as GIJoe, Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Thundercats, Swat Cats, Supetman, Spiderman etc all carried an important lesson of Good vs Evil...it built character and imbued morals in us which I cherish till date...
Today i c youngsters with very less morals & values and very few who have them.
Times hav changed.
I don't think it had much effect on me. Certainly wasn't brainwashed. Just sometimes thought, "That you looks cool. I think I want it." But honestly, I think Rescue Heroes was most of what I got. Found out pretty quick I didn't actually enjoy the toys. I don't have enough imagination. Took my mother longer to learn that, though lol.
No one was brainwashed. They put a product out and advertised it in clever ways and it was a product that kids enjoyed. Those damn executives were so damn evil by making toys that were wildly popular! How dare they!
As a kid, I always felt bad when I would watch a cartoon and there were no toys for them. I would want to recreate the episodes or make my own version of the show. Toy tie-ins are popular for a reason.
@@MichaelEarl Network executives can already do some evil stuff normally. Does Nerdstalgic even have to try so hard to make them look bad?
I watched the cartoons with my brothers...and played with the G.I. Joe toys when they were over. My brother still has them in his basement. I have our baseball cards and my son has our Legos. I don't care that it was all a commercial. It was entertaining and had a decent good guys vs. bad guys plot.
Wrong: plenty of adults that grew up with GI Joe didn’t want to join the military mainly because of what the remanence Vietnam veterans with PTSD. Plenty of adults dissuading adolescence from joining. High School shop teacher even told me “they (US Gov) own you.” Still joined and valued my service to this Nation.
Every youtube video gets this one thing wrong about GIJoe;
It wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon. It was an after school cartoon that aired around 4pm Monday through Friday. The same goes for transformers he-man and Thundercats.
In Europe it was both. In the 90's it even rehearsed what it showed on Saturdays.
@@JKRavenBlood they showed GI Joe in europe?
In no market in the US, in no year, was G.I. Joe ever in any network's Saturday Morning Cartoon lineup.
Joes came in a bit late to India. I grew in the early-mid 90s and Gi joe was a huge success. Almost everyone had a joe growing up and we hardly had any "marketing" here. The toys by themselves were enough to be sold out. I still remember the first joes I got, storm shadow and beach head. It was only a bit later that we got cartoon network and gi joe show.
Seeing the original GI Joe PSAs just feels wrong, I need a porkchop sandwich to recover
I do seem to remember that gi joe was a big thing back in the day and I'm not even American. Kids all wanted these figures. Just goes to show how successful the marketing was and how influential were these shows to an entire generation.
I dont think it made it over to here in the UK at the time. Thundercats, transformers and He-man all did though.
It definitely made it to Mexico and it definitely fit into the more macho culture here.
@@ashaw1016 The toys were released under the Action Man line in the UK so I reckon the TV networks weren't that interested.
@@AkumaKristian they seem quite different though, it was all that large barbie doll size. So not the smaller size that usually seems more popular for action figures.
@@ashaw1016 Yeah, let me make a slight correction. The original toys from the 60s/70s were released as Action Man. The two brands had become more distinct by the time the show launched.
What I learned from this video is to blame ACT with why my two favorite afternoon cartoons GI Joe and Transformers stopped airing. These shows didn't "brainwash" a generation to buy toys. They had good stories that made children want to buy the toys. The GI Joe and Transformers dealt with grown up themes of fighting for something, death, loyalty, etc. The beginning of GI Joe the Movie was probably the most patriotic thing I saw directed towards children. I miss the days when we taught our children that our country and its ideals is worth fighting for. From GI Joe to Hulk Hogan to watching Red Dawn, the 80s was a good time to be a kid.
It was "concerned" people/parents like them that ruined shows like Captain Power and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Michaelangelo not using his nunchucks). If I could go back in time I'd love to say what was on my mind and what I thought of their concern.
I noticed cartoons in the 2000s where all they did was yell at each other and go 1000 mph....and I wonder why ppl have no patience and massive OCD.
The Netflix show "The Toys that made us" goes way more into depth on the GI Joe toys if you want to learn more about this topic
I like GI Joe. Japanese manufacturers like Figma should take a crack at making some action figures. They have been making a killing at making various toys recently especially anime figurines. They take more care, polish, and pride than most western toy makers.
I only remember seeing GI Joe as an afternoon show, after school, Monday thru Friday. I don’t recall it ever being on Saturday mornings. Maybe I’m wrong it’s been awhile
You're right. They screw up little details like this all the time, it seems.
@@FrenchCelt or they are just trying to push bs like saying gi joe was bad for kids
do these clowns even WATCH whats on tv these days? >.>
@@inuyasha989 I can say this much, I watched GI Joe and Transformers after school every day in Junior High School, and thinking back on them, they were very wholesome and taught great life lessons.
whoever produced this video missed at least one fact - super friends came out well before the gi cartoons.
Like many other commenters, GI Joe defined my childhood to an extent. It wasn't brainwashing, or anything else of the sort, at least not like what younger generations see today with all of the propaganda leading them down permanent paths of self-mutilation and emotional distress. The cartoon and toys were interconnected. I could never amass a collection that let me recreate any given cartoon episode, but the figures and vehicles I did have led to some memorable battles. I kept getting GI Joes into the early '90s, long after any sense of realism left the toy line, but Lift Ticket and Low Light could still hang with whatever neon colored new-gen Joe I had to defeat Cobra. There are YT channels devoted to creating stories using not only original GI figures, but other vintage toy lines to create rather decent narrative arcs.
As a solid late Gen-Xer, I can attest to the time that GI Joe saw its greatest popularity. We still did regular nuclear attack drills, as I grew up less than 100 miles from DC, and my high school still had a fallout shelter in the basement. The late Cold War era marked a time of uneasiness, with our military having fairly recently suffered its first "loss" in Vietnam, and the "Ugly Stupid Stinking Russians" having their own debacle in Afghanistan. We had acorn fights and later BB gun wars (one pump max was the rule), Reagan was President, we knew we were going to triumph over Communism, and American kids like me dreamed of one day becoming Duke, General Hawk, or Lt. Falcon. I did my time post-9/11, retired from a military career wholly unlike those listed on the file cards of my old action figures, and now just watch nostalgic content.
Sears could be accused of brainwashing kids into wanting toys just as easily. Their annual catalog contained dioramas of different scenarios that made us kids want everything they sold. Then we'd get to the video game section, with the simple box art and brief description piquing our curiosity. There was a solid barrier between our wants and reality, though: our parents. Unlike so many of today's kids (admittedly including my own), we could watch cartoons daily, study the Sears catalog, and stare longingly at the Kmart toy aisles, without ever having a chance of getting what we wanted. "I want these GI Joes and an NES". Come Christmas, I was lucky to get a Go-Bot and a Lite-Brite. My kids, like so many others, can just say "I want" and all but expect they'll get it at the next semi-important moment, even a sibling's birthday or National Audobon Day. What can I say? Largely due to GI Joe and my life decisions partly influenced by that cartoon and toy line, I have a higher disposable income than my parents had, and things are much more convenient these days.
I grew up in the ‘80s. G.I. Joe was a weekday afternoon cartoon, not a Saturday morning. Also, it was strictly an ‘80s cartoon, not a ‘90s.
DIC's GI Joe series which picked up after GI Joe the movie, aired from 1989 to 1992, so it ran into the '90s a little bit.
I showed my son GI Joe and Transformers several years ago. We ended up watching the entire run together. At one point he turned to me and asked, "Dad, why can't they make good cartoons like that anymore?". I just answered, "I don't know, son."
She-Ra and The Princesses of Power is the best modern reboot of an 80s cartoon IMO so unless your one of those people who care about keeping your son all macho man and never exposing him to any femininity then I’d recommend the She-Ra reboot
You say "because of the Government, son."
I’ve encountered some good new ones. I guess you & your son need to look for them a bit harder.
Have you seen the cartoon “Final Faction?” It’s very much like something from the 80s and 90s and it’s on TH-cam for free. It’s also got a toy line at Dollar Tree.
GI Joe was not a Saturday morning cartoon; and the Flintstones was a *prime time* animated sitcom (and a rather tight parody of The Honeymooners), so its cigarette ads were no more or less nefarious than the cigarette ads that were legal and ubiquitous everywhere else on TV back then. The Simpsons didn't invent cartoons for an older audience so much as rediscover it after an anomalous period where they had declined into kiddie stuff. Cartoons used to play before every movie and during WW2 cartoons encouraged soldiers to use condoms and Donald Duck encouraged you to pay your "Taxes to fight the Axis" promptly. The idea that cartoons were for little kids was something that a few age cohorts grew up with, but it would have been completely foreign before that.
I like Nerdstalgic but this particular video's only real revelation to most of its viewers will be that GI Joe specifically was the one to pioneer the cartoon-as-toy-commercial model that everyone is well familiar with at this point. (That, plus the PSAs. Truly a trailblazer!)
The 80's were great. I was blessed to have experienced my childhood during that awesome decade.
GI Joe was a weekday cartoon in NYC, not Saturday morning.
I feel like I remember GI Joe being on in the afternoon after school not on Saturday morning, but maybe I'm wrong. Either way, me and my brother had a lot of GI Joe toys.
Naw, you're not. It was a weekly syndicated show.
I bought my son some of the retro wave gi joes that came out in 2020. Gi joes were my favorite toys when I was his age. He loves them. They are still his favorite toys and he's a gamer. So that says alot about how fun they are to play with. I picked up quite a few to collect, but I end up giving him one or 2 a year now for birthdays or Christmas. He really loves them
The problem was the more general creeping normalization of consumerism rather than the risk that kids might want a couple of toys from one show.
I’m a 90s kid. I played with my dad’s old GI Joes. I was so excited when I found all of the VHS tapes at a garage sale. Didn’t even know there was a cartoon until I found the tapes. When I finished watching them I was bummed to learn it was canceled.
awesome video! Just a quick correction G.I. Joe wasn’t a Saturday morning cartoon well not in my city anyway. It came on @ 4:30pm everyday Mon-Fri lol I used to haul ass home from school everyday to make I didn’t miss an episode 😁😁
You made a good point. While our nostalgia might be sad that Saturday morning cartoons no longer exists, it has reduced the advertisements targeting kids (not saying TH-cam ads are any better...)
I lived through the supposed targetting/braining washing and I'm not even mad about it. My parents were only going buy so many toys, so at some point I stop asking for things especially after my dad got laid off. I had a variety pack of toys ranging from knock offs to the actual items. I played with what I had and I was fine. I did have a love for Jets(Yes I did want a Skystriker...but who didn't in the 80s?) as my favorite characters were typically pilots like Ace McCloud of Centurion or flyers like Starscream, Skyfire and the Aerial bots. I suppose that had a hand in my enlistment in the Air force. But if that's the worst that came of it all I think I ran the gauntlet of corporate greed fairly unscathed.
😆 I served in the Army cause my love and respect for this countries heroes started with GI Joe.
G.I. Joe wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon.
1:20 - So's all TV shows. That's how they get their budget.
2:20 - Prime time =/= Saturday morning
4:20 - At the same time there were also toy ads for Joe's.
4:26 - Ron Friedman isn't anything special.
5:01 - Thundercats wasn't based on a toyline.
5:06 - Neither was Superfriends until the very last series...
5:15 - Again with Thundercats...
5:24 - There's literally no difference in the structure of toy based and non toy based shows. As evident by you persistently labeling Thundercats as one. Toy company commissions a studio to create a cartoon - they make a cartoon, they're in the business of making cartoons, a creative symbiosis beneficial for both.
5:42 - Toy propaganda.... can you make it any more sinister sounding?
5:44 - A lot of parents were BSing how these shows were Communist and devil worshiping propaganda...
6:05 - Wast majority of He-Man episodes were structured around moral lessons. Something your ilk would mock as preachy...
7:06 - And yet video game and toy based shows continued to get made... Your narrative stinks.
7:45 - "Blatant brainwashing"... sez a peddler of BS.
8:08 - EVERY SHOW IS MADE TO MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE SINCE EVER.
8:21 - We? I'm sorry, but you're nothing but a cynical BS peddler catering to the masses incapable of critical thought (something which you projected onto 80's shows...)
8:30 - Oh, yeah, it's not like there's literally an episode about television being used for brainwashing ("The Wrong Stuff")...
You bloody dirtbag.
Gi joe taught me disipline...loyalty...discernment...n to be cool in the face of danger....I still walk around like I'm snake eyes.......
I loved those 80’s cartoons. I didn’t care that they were basically toy commercials. They were awesome. Kids from that era had imagination and creativity. I wrote a lot of short stories based on what I liked to imagine. The creativity helped me with critical thinking skills to come up with unconventional solutions to difficult problems I faced later on in life. The toys were also a reward for doing well in school and bringing home a favorable report card. My parents didn’t mind buying the toys. The toys kept us out of trouble. A childhood without toys isn’t a childhood at all.