The Snow Cat is one of my favourite vehicles. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read my blog posts. I grew up in northern Canada, after all, and half my childhood happened in winter. It seemed like Star Wars and GI Joe were the only toy lines that even acknowledged that snow existed. So it […]
Christmas 1984 and Christmas 1985 were similar for me. Both started with a big GI Joe toy from Santa (Killer Whale and Transportable Tactical Battle Platform, respectively), and stockings with GI Joe figures and Transformer mini-cars. Both included Transformers from my Grandma (Mirage and Inferno/Red Alert). And in both cases, I got large Transformers from […]
Growing up, selecting a group of friends to invite to a birthday sleepover was always a juggling act. When I turned ten in 1987, I decided to only invite three friends, starting with my best friend, Donny. I also invited Carlos, who had been a friend for as long as I could remember. He was […]
You ever get the feeling that a toy might have started as an inside joke…? In 1985, Hasbro released the Cobra Rifle Range, a set that allowed the inept cadre of soldiers Cobra Commander had assembled to practice the skill they seemed to lack more than anything: hitting a target with their rifles. In both […]
Our house growing up had a central, split-level staircase covered in ultra-stylish, fire red, shag carpet. The stairs led up from the entryway to an open-concept, L-shaped hallway on the second floor that spanned the distance from my parents’ bedroom to the dining room. The floor of that main hallway was a continuation of the […]
Of all the environment-specific figures, the underwater troops might be my least favourite. As a child, I could imagine my bedroom floor being anything – jungle, grasslands, desert, snow, water, the surface of the moon, but imagining swimmers under my carpet required significant suspension of disbelief. Regardless, I owned all the frogmen – Torpedo, Eels […]
The USS Flagg, the GI Joe aircraft carrier, was a presence that hung over my life in grade three, and the years that followed, as it was such an enormous toy and clearly what everyone was gunning for leading up to Christmas in 1985. But there was absolutely no chance I was going to get […]
A byproduct of growing up in a cold environment is a preference for snow-based figures and vehicles. Snow Job and the Polar Battle Bear are among my all-time favourites. I’ve also become fond of troops, as a larger representation of the Cobra forces, and in the simple, aesthetic appeal of having multiple figures in matching […]
