The Cheap Action Figure That Became Super Popular

If you look at the top of this email (under the ad, unless you’re a supporter who receives an ad-free version, to subtly make a suggestion), you’ll see the logo banner for the newsletter. The words “Now I Know” are prominent and, hopefully, somewhat self-explanatory. But the subhead — “That’s Half the Battle” — may require some explanation. It comes from the 1980s animated TV show “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” a staple of that generation’s childhood based on a line of action figures made by toymaker Hasbro. The show could fairly be considered an advertisement for the toys, so Hasbro and their production partners added a public service announcement at the end of each episode.

The PSAs all followed the same basic pattern. A group of kids would do something kind of stupid, like hang off the side of a cliff, causing them to fall into the sea. One of the Joes — that is, the good guys from the toy and TV show series — would appear on-site and solve the problem. The kids would thank the Joe for helping them out and the Joe would give them advice to not have it happen again, e.g., “never play around water alone.” The kid then said “Now I know!” and the Joe would reply “And knowing is half the battle!” You can watch a collection of these PSAs here.

None of that has anything to do with today’s story, but I figured I’d share. Today’s story actually begins with a different problem for Hasbro’s efforts to bring GI Joe to kids: tight budgets.

Let’s start with a picture.

One of the original GI Joe characters, pictured above, is Snake-Eyes, the team’s commando-slash-ninja (pun not intended). He’s dressed all in black, armed with some blades. The image below is one of the newer versions of the Snake-Eyes toy, and it has a lot of detailing as a result. But that wasn’t always the case. Here’s the original toy, released in 1982:

You’ll note that the original Snake-Eyes was very, very basic — all black, from head to toe, with not a spec of other color to be found. And that was the point.

When the GI Joe toy line came out in 1982, it didn’t have a following yet. It was based on a 12-inch action figure GI Joe toy line from the 1960s and 1970s, but that toy hadn’t been on shelves for nearly a decade. The success of Star Wars and its action figures — all measuring 3.75 inches — inspired Hasbro to reboot the Joes at the same specs, but unlike Star Wars, there wasn’t a massive movie franchise to spark the sale of the toys. Hasbro launched a GI Joe comic book that year and had a plan for an animated TV show a year later, but the initial release of the toys required came with significant budget pressures. Hasbro wanted to release nine different characters as toys, but they just didn’t have the money. A big problem was the level of detail there were after. One of the biggest costs associated with action figures is paint application — paint costs money, as does the effort to ensure that the right parts of the toy are painted the right color. And the initial GI Joe toy line featured eight characters with a lot of detailing.

Snake-Eyes was that solution. Someone at Hasbro had the idea of coming up with a character that had no paint at all — a black-clad ninja. They gave the character’s head a unique design, with a mask and eye shield hiding the facial features — and therefore, details that would require paint — that every other character had. The rest was to be made up of parts that were found on other characters, with random accouterments that are hard to make out because they’re not painted. As a result, Snake-Eyes was born. As the GI Joe Collector’s Club newsletter from April 2006 explains (pdf), “the very first Snake-Eyes was a way of shaving a bit of money off the initial production costs of the first year of GI Joe. An untested toy line at the time, the budget for paint applications went over on everybody else, so Hasbro worked out that if they could just eliminate the paint applications from ONE figure, they’d be all right.” Or, as Star Wars (and action figure) fan site Bantha Skull explains, “Instead of ‘cheapening’ the first 8 figures, they decided to make one figure ‘deco-less.’”

While the goal was to cut costs and keep the other eight characters as cool as possible, the result was even better. Snake-Eyes is generally regarded as the most popular of the GI Joe characters and an overnight success. Per Bantha Skull, “the all black-clad, uzi-carrying ninja was the instant draw of the original nine figures.” And that popularity persists today. Whenever a publication puts out a list of the top G.I. Joe characters, he’s bound to make the list — he topped IGN’s list in 2013 and CBR’s more than a decade later. The character even had a feature film about him released in 2021. And that honor is well-deserved: he not only can save the day, he also saves the budget.

Bonus fact: The original GI Joe action figures — the ones from the 1960s — were popular, which was great for Hasbro, but also created a problem: competitors could easily produce their own knockoffs, and there was little Hasbro could do about it. The toy company couldn’t get a patent or trademark a human figure clad in army gear — Joes needed to have some sort of differentiation to warrant legal protection, but Hasbro hadn’t built anything notable into the toy. Well, not intentionally, at least. As Smithsonian explains, “Luckily for Hasbro, fate intervened and early production errors gave the first G.I. Joes a facial scar and an inverted thumbnail. These design flaws became the signifying marks of the true Hasbro G.I. Joe and helped Hasbro pursue cases of infringement.”

From the Archives: Why Knowing is Half the Battle: A deeper dive into the history of the GI Joe PSAs.