Okay folks, let's get it right. G.I. Joe (the smaller, highly articulated version of the 80's) was an organization of highly specialized soldiers, not an individual, as inferred in the article. Snake Eyes was a member of the G.I. Joe team. He was the commando element. The arch-nemesis of the G.I. Joe team was a terrorist organization known simply as Cobra, that was headed by Cobra Commander. I could go on and on about G.I. Joe but my girlfriend is sitting right here beside me as i write this, mocking my OCD geekery, but i really had to get that off my chest. Transformers, anyone?
TOYS
Forty-Year-Old Virgins
Updated: 1:52 p.m. ET Dec 15, 2007
From the magazine issue dated Dec 24, 2007
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At 25, Stephen Brown thought his toy-playing days were over—until his mom tried to clean out his old bedroom. "Looking at my 'Star Wars' guys, I couldn't pull the trigger," says the Atlanta advertising executive, now 34. Over the next decade, he spent more than $5,000 on a Pac-Man lunchbox, a Mr. T Chia Pet and enough childhood tchotchkes to fill a man-size closet. But Brown isn't a collector. "These are for play, not profit," he says. It's a mentality shared by a growing number of Gen X- and Yers: they want their stuff back, whatever the cost. "I'm taking a bath," says Chris Anderson, a 40-year-old Dallas marketing manager, who spent $1,000 on games like Mattel's 1977 handheld Electronic Football. Tom Miano, owner of Serious Toyz in Cold Spring, N.Y., recently sold a box of 30 scuffed He-Man figures for $330, despite missing weapons and limbs. At $15 to $30 for each action figure, re-staffing the Cobra Command center (home to G.I. Joe's arch-nemesis, Cobra Commander) isn't cheap. So what's driving this rejuvenile movement? Marketing, mostly. Toys from the 1970s and '80s came with unprecedented tie-ins, enclosing their youthful fans in a complete universe of bedspreads, backpacks and lunchboxes, not to mention theme songs that echo through the decades. "They create immediate connective tissue," says Brown. It takes a big boy to admit that.
© 2007
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