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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 8103863" data-attributes="member: 14159">I'm talking about GI Joe: A Real American Hero, the action figure, comic, and cartoon line that began in 1982.GI Joe, in it's original version of a 12 inch figure was released in 1964, but sales slumped during the Vietnam War.  They tried re-tooling it into the GI Joe Adventure Team, with GI Joe leaving the Army and being marketed as a more generic action-adventure character, but that didn't last and they ended selling GI Joe in 1976.When Star Wars came out, the Kenner action figures for it really popularized the smaller 3 3/4 inch action figure size.  Hasbro thought that between the change in public attitudes towards the military by the early 1980's, and the new 3 3/4 inch figure popularity, they might be able to re-start a new GI Joe product line.The result was GI Joe: A Real American Hero.  As I noted, Hasbro was vague on characters, and really hadn't thought through plots and villains at first.  They knew they wanted a variety of figures, and a cartoon and comic book. . .and Marvel Comics had a disused idea for a SHIELD task force they'd come up with a few years before but not made, which could easily be re-tooled into an American special forces unit, and instead of fighting Hydra, they would fight another reptilian-themed terrorist group, Cobra, which was created essentially as a Hydra copy.</blockquote>