[announcer] The president of the United States.
[people cheering and whistling]
My fellow citizens, to a few of us here today,
this is a solemn and most momentous occasion.
G.I. Joe, the toy that built this company
has been dead for a couple of years.
Kenner is just killing us with Star Wars.
[Reagan] We're at war with the most dangerous enemy
that has ever faced mankind
in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.
[Joe Bacal] We'll bring G.I. Joe to life.
We'll ride the wave of patriotism
that's sweeping over the country by telling a great story.
We have every right to dream heroic dreams.
A story of real heroes that fight evil
with brains and guts and teamwork, instead of "the Force."
We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow.
[Bacal] They'll feel the camaraderie of an elite military unit,
and they'll want to buy each and every one of their comrades.
This is a strategy with legs! We'll make these characters real to kids.
They'll want to be part of the G.I. Joe team.
And when they buy them all, we'll make more, so they can buy them too.
[Reagan] You and I have the ability, and the dignity,
and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
G.I. Joe. A Real American Hero.
[narrator] This was the moment that Stephen Hassenfeld
gambled the fate of a toy company on an action figure.
It was a massive bet.
[narrator] This wasn't just any action figure.
G.I. Joe was the very first action figure.
G.I. Joe attack! Go, go!
[narrator] From four simple soldiers,
to a legion of characters and an all-out marketing assault...
It hit me right in my wheelhouse.
[narrator] ...that led to a billion-dollar franchise
and one of the world's most collected toys.
It was magnificent.
[narrator] G.I. Joe has spanned the decades
with a family legacy lasting three generations.
G.I. Joe put me through college.
- [narrator] And the battles that raged... -It was diabolical.
...both in children's bedrooms and behind the scenes.
An ongoing source of conflict for most of my father's life.
[narrator] These are the brave warriors who risked it all...
You can't keep a good brand down.
[narrator] ...to convince boys to play with dolls.
This is not a doll.
We're gonna show you the greatest new G.I. Joe toy line ever invented!
These are The Toys that Made Us.
♪ It's an eight-part documentary series About the toys that we all know ♪
♪ Plastic creations That last for generations ♪
♪ And we still cannot let go ♪
♪ Little molded figures That gave us big dreams ♪
♪ We'll go back in time And behind the scenes ♪
-It's The Toys that Made Us -Toys that Made Us
♪ Toys that Made Us is here ♪
[narrator] For over 50 years, G.I. Joe has been waging war on parents' wallets,
and winning every single battle.
Over the years, G.I. Joe has been more than just a poseable, noble soldier.
In no particular order, he's been a ninja,
a scuba diver, a human bullet, a lady nurse, a Lady Jaye.
That cadence really propelled everything.
There was constant change
and characters turning over through the line.
[narrator] Oh, there's more. In fact, G.I. Joe came in all shapes and sizes,
and at latest count, includes more than 500 characters.
There's a carrot-shaped supervillain, oh, and a shrieking, whiny bad guy.
[Cobra Commander] I'm surrounded by incompetent idiots!
[narrator] But to kids, G.I. Joe is just one thing.
Cool. It was very cool.
It's just innate in boys, just something about conquering,
and winning and defeating an enemy. It's almost hardwired into us.
[narrator] And nothing has tapped more into that hardwiring
than G.I. Joe's expansive military world
that extended beyond the toy store, to the page and the screen.
-Yo, Joe! -Yo, Joe!
[narrator] But before G.I. Joe was just a twinkle on his father's Johnson Rifle,
in the early '60s,
America was still sweeping up the ticker tape
from its heroic World War II performance 18 years earlier.
We looked at service members as real heroes
and that that was something that kids aspired to.
I remember coming home from school every afternoon
and the local TV stations would show cowboys and World War II movies.
It was ingrained in American culture.
[narrator] As soaring patriotism wafted across the country,
in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a little toy company named Hasbro
was making a more humble, down-to-earth living.
Hasbro's biggest, most successful toy was Mr. Potato Head.
[announcer] Just stick in eyes, then ears.
[narrator] In those days, potatoes sold separately.
[announcer] It's such fun to do.
[narrator] Hasbro's original founders, the Hassenfelds,
were happily encouraging children to play with their food.
Because apart from the beautiful fashion model Barbie,
there wasn't much else.
But then again, beauty is in the eye of the potato.
Back in the early 1960s, there was no male action doll for boys.
[narrator] No offense, Ken.
But all this was about to change.
Because there was a man who had a plan, and his name was Weston. Stan Weston.
He thought he could repeat the success of Barbie with boys,
using the military as the hook.
[narrator] Stan had cracked it.
With a piece of cardboard and a glue stick,
he put together a presentation
that no toy company could refuse.
First stop was Hasbro and the Hassenfeld family's newest president, Merrill.
Merrill just basically said, "No, we're not in the doll business."
[narrator] Hmm. Okay, then.
[Bozigian] You've got to understand, in 1962, Hasbro was making
color-by-number sets. The basics.
-[narrator] And let's not forget... -Mr. Potato Head.
[narrator] So, Merrill wasn't willing to bet the farm.
But there was somebody else in that meeting,
the head of Hasbro's research and development, Don Levine.
Not only was he a toy guy, he was an Army vet.
Don Levine saw something in it.
But it needs more, the concept needs more to get Merrill excited.
So, later on, Don passes an art supply store,
and he sees this in the window.
Artist's mannequin.
Poseable.
He takes and buys a half a dozen of them.
His team looks at them and says,
"But the boss told us he's not interested in this."
Don says, "I don't care.
I want you to do this.
He's going away on vacation. We've got two weeks to pull this off."
See, they stop work on everything else. They go to work on this.
[narrator] Heading up the covert operation,
Don Levine was determined to blow the boss away.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Everything was accurate replicas of real military.
[narrator] But how would toy guys know what real weapons looked like?
[Bozigian] Jerry Einhorn was Don's product manager.
He went to the National Guard armory about two miles away from Hasbro.
General Holland loaded his car up with M4s, M16s, bazookas.
Hasbro copies everything down to the finest detail.
Merrill comes home,
and says, "So what's been going on since I've been gone?"
Don looks at him and says, "I want to show you a new concept,"
and unveils G.I. Joe, the way he envisioned it.
And he said, "I really believe this is our shot, boss."
And Merrill backed down and said, "Get Stan on the phone. Get him up here."
So now Stan comes to Rhode Island.
Merrill says, "We're gonna do G.I. Joe. We're gonna make you an offer."
[narrator] Oh, but not a very good one.
Merrill Hassenfeld, he offered my father $50,000 and a 1% royalty.
-[narrator] Or... -A flat $100,000 with no royalty.
-[narrator] And guess which one he took? -A $100,000 buyout.
[narrator] Whoops.
As we'll find out later, that probably wasn't the best decision.
However, it wasn't that dodgy deal that Stan Weston felt ripped off by.
Levine passed himself off as the creator of G.I. Joe rather than my father.
I truly believe Don is the creator of G.I. Joe.
Inspired by Stan, there's no doubt about it.
But it never would've happened without Don Levine's genius.
This bickering is senseless, Cobra Commander.
[narrator] While the bickering over G.I. Joe's inception continued,
in 1963 at Hasbro, what was indisputable,
they now owned a boys' doll line.
I said, "Dad, I'd rather play touch football on Saturday
than to play with a boy doll."
Others might call it a doll.
So not only was it an ambitious endeavor,
but because they were covering the military,
Merrill and the team also realized that they couldn't leave any flank exposed.
So, they had to double down.
They were gonna produce figures for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,
and leave no flank for another competitive company to come in.
So, literally, this idea became so big and expensive that,
had it not succeeded, it may have bankrupted the company.
It was a massive, massive bet.
[narrator] That's right, "it."
At this point, it didn't even have a name yet.
Mr. Armyhead, maybe.
And one night, I'm sitting in my den and I'm watching television.
And a black and white movie comes on. It's called The Story of G.I. Joe.
I said, wait a minute, this is fate.
Poor devil. Gonna be famous now.
[narrator] So, it had a name.
But it was what G.I. Joe was known as that was the problem.
-It was a doll. -This is not a doll.
This is not a boys' version of Barbie.
How do you take this figure and stop calling it a doll?
What they did was, they expunged the word "doll" from their vocabulary
and said, "G.I. Joe is an action figure."
And that was the inception of the phrase that's lasted, today, over 50 years.
If I hear anyone call this a doll, you're getting fined.
The dolls were... Excuse me, the action figures were made here.
[narrator] Using the same business model that had worked so well for Barbie,
Hasbro put all their efforts into creating one figure
with the option of purchasing many different accessories.
[announcer] There is box after box of regulation military gear,
helmets, rifles, tents, flags, sandbags, machine guns.
[narrator] Finally, G.I. Joe was a go.
♪ G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe Fighting men from head to toe ♪
G.I. Joe was a big hit pretty much right away.
I mean it had an amazing commercial,
but it was something that hadn't been seen before.
[DePriest] It was a fairly expensive toy. It was typically three to four dollars.
That's like 30, 35 comic books for a G.I. Joe. That was a fortune.
But I think parents also realized the quality of G.I. Joe.
You look at the figure. It was solid.
The clothes were cloth, and they were thick and they had buttons.
The details were exceptional. This wasn't a cheap toy.
And so parents would invest in G.I. Joe for their kids.
[narrator] But as other toy companies saw G.I. Joe's sales skyrocket,
it goes without saying that everyone wanted to get in on the action, man.
We use two words. You can call it a copy or you can call it "parallel marketing."
[narrator] But Don Levine had seen this coming.
So he brought a knife to a potential legal fight.
And I said, let's put a scar on his face.
[narrator] But that didn't stop Mego with their parallel-marketed/direct copy,
the Fighting Yank.
They had an easy way to get around a facial scar.
We sculpted the head so it was a different head.
But the body was sent over and was copied exactly.
[narrator] Problem solved.
But Hasbro had another thumb to the nose for would-be copycats.
Somehow, we had put the nail
on the inside of the thumb.
And sure enough, when they copied us, they did the same thing.
And we saw the thumb, and we looked at each other and said,
"We are some dumb suckers."
[narrator] Mistakes happen.
And in the mid-'60s, America made one of their very own.
In Vietnam, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Vietnam happened and the serviceman was basically kicked aside.
You can start to see the shift in people's attitudes towards war.
[narrator] And G.I. Joe toy sales.
Hasbro had to distance their all-American war hero from a hugely unpopular war.
G.I. Joe's biggest enemy was peace, love and happiness.
The team at Hasbro switched gear away from military into...
[announcer] The Adventures of G.I. Joe,
starring G.I. Joe and his action equipment!
[narrator] G.I. Joe made a quick pivot
from fighting traditional front-line battles to things like...
It was a giant, menacing octopus.
It was still cool. It was still G.I. Joe.
But it had a different flavor and it was exciting.
And then in the 1970s, you really saw it explode.
Suddenly, an earthquake.
[DePriest] The concept was re-branded The Adventure Team,
and different characters were introduced.
[announcer] Five rugged men with life-like hair.
They're outfitted for action,
and they take their orders from this man, the Adventure Team commander.
The Adventure Team has the situation controlled.
[chuckles]
"The Adventure Team has the situation controlled."
[narrator malfunctioning] And so, it also seemed that Hasbro...
Exactly.
Sales explode. They continue to grow year after year after year after year.
[narrator] And his hair grew too.
G.I. Joe came out with flocked hair.
[narrator] But G.I. Joe's grip on the market
was about to get incredibly tight.
[announcer] Here is G.I. Joe with kung-fu grip.
Kung-fu grip is still something everybody talks about.
It's one of those things that basically gave him the power to hold things.
If you've ever tried to put something in Barbie's hand,
it doesn't really work all that well.
So the kung-fu grip was just a fun way of saying, "Hi, my fingers bend."
[narrator] Even with his powerful kung-fu grip,
G.I. Joe began struggling to hang on to his success,
thanks to an oil embargo that made G.I. Joe's solid plastic body
a solid financial problem for Hasbro.
[DePriest] This muscle body was introduced in 1975,
in an attempt to make G.I. Joe lighter and less expensive to manufacture.
[narrator] But the changes didn't stop there.
Bullet Man, first, which was trying to keep the 12-inch going.
And that didn't work either.
It was just a G.I. Joe with a cone on his head.
♪ Bullet Man, the human bullet ♪
[D'Aguanno] Didn't make any sense.
[narrator] Nothing could stop G.I. Joe's decline. Not even a log pile.
Neither Bullet Man, Intruders, strongmen from another world,
or Eagle Eye Joe could save the brand.
Dad was really, truly passionate about G.I. Joe.
You want to try to do whatever you can to rescue that brand.
And sometimes you have to learn when to cut your losses.
[narrator] About now might have been a good time.
[boy] Here comes Super Joe Commander.
[Bozigian] G.I. Joe was wearing Spandex pajamas instead of uniforms,
and that lasted one year.
And that was the end of G.I. Joe.
[narrator] In 1978, G.I. Joe's line was cut and its 14-year run ended.
Without their flagship toy,
Hasbro had to rely on older lines, strange hip-gyrating party games...
[announcer] Great Moves!
...and by going back to their roots, so to speak.
We were almost out of business, like, '78, '79.
And I was told we were two weeks away from closing the doors.
[narrator] There to wedge his foot into the closing door
was Merrill Hassenfeld's eldest son, Stephen.
[Alan Hassenfeld] My brother, his absolute passion
was the first day he could come into the business,
he wanted to come into the business.
[narrator] Stephen was hungry with ambition.
In fact, so hungry, you could say he was hungry, hungry with ambition.
♪ Playing Hungry Hungry Hippos ♪
[narrator] Under Stephen's management,
Hungry Hungry Hippos saved Hasbro from being swallowed by failure.
It was a whole spirit there of, "We're gonna turn this company around."
But we had to get through '78 and then '79.
[narrator] And they did. But after that, they were on their own.
Because in March of 1979,
Merrill Hassenfeld, the father of G.I. Joe, passed away.
Or was the father...
-My dad. -[narrator] Or was it--
Don Levine is the creator of G.I. Joe.
[narrator] Well, anyway, Merrill was at least an uncle.
Riding on the back of a hungry hippopotamus,
Stephen Hassenfeld was now CEO.
But the question was, would he ever bring back his father's legacy,
the very first action figure? Uh, not likely.
They told us, "We're beyond that now.
The kids are into Star Wars 3 3/4-inch figures.
We don't need G.I. Joe."
[narrator] Well, that's not what Ronald Reagan thought.
Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes...
they just don't know where to look.
[narrator] In 1981, as actors became presidents,
America's impressive arsenal of weapons
were trained on those furry hat-wearing baddies
who were threatening western McValues.
Once again, it was cool to be a patriotic good guy,
among other things that were cool at the time.
[Bozigian] There was a whole spirit of patriotism.
[commentator] And the United States has beaten the Soviet Union!
So, yeah, there was a political climate that had changed.
We are Americans.
[narrator] The air was once again heavy with combustible patriotism,
and all G.I. Joe needed to burn bright again was a spark.
The spark was Bob Pruprish.
[narrator] Here to save the day was senior VP of boys' toys Bob Pruprish.
It's about time you guys showed up.
[narrator] And he quickly called for backup.
[Bozigian] I joined with Bob and started work on
trying to figure out a way of bringing back Joe.
[narrator] But these guys wouldn't be able to save G.I. Joe on their own.
-They'd need more help. -We're in a pinch, Snake.
And that help would come in the form of Hasbro designer Ron Rudat.
I was excited to work on Joe, 'cause I loved the military.
And we all start talking, brainstorming. What are we gonna do to excite Stephen?
And we did challenge ourselves to say
we're not gonna just do your standard military route stuff.
We have to bring something different to the party.
And seeing that Star Wars was doing really well at that time
with their figures,
Bob thought that we could do the same thing with G.I. Joe.
Come back in that small size.
When we looked at the marketplace,
and we saw five points of articulation with Star Wars,
we said, "Well, we can't just come out with
another 3 3/4-inch figure that's gonna copy Star Wars."
[narrator] But there was no need to copy Star Wars.
The answer was right under their poses.
The heritage of G.I. Joe we always saw was poseability.
[narrator] So, hoping to embrace this trademark element
of the original G.I. Joe,
the Hasbro team just copied some other toys instead.
♪ There's lots to do with CHiPs You can pose them any way you want ♪
[Bozigian] So we found these Chips' figures from Mego,
painted them olive drab, added clay pouches,
clay guns, maybe a half a dozen figures.
Made couple of model kit Jeeps and a tank, and we showed that at a line review.
[narrator] A line review attended by Stephen Hassenfeld.
The pressure was on as the team readied their pitch...
-Let's hear it. -...for resuscitating G.I. Joe.
You've got a bunch of people sitting in a room.
They may have been there for two or three hours already.
So, we said, we've got to shake them up.
And Steve D'Aguanno, being the theatrical showman that he was,
comes out with a riding crop like General Patton
and a steel pot helmet and starts smacking the table and starts saying...
"We are gonna destroy the enemy!"
"We're gonna show you the greatest new G.I. Joe toy line ever invented!"
And I was slamming the riding crop, smashing their coffees.
And he makes this whole dramatic presentation.
And we brought out whatever we had.
Stephen Hassenfeld leans back in his chair and says,
"No.
You haven't given me a hook, a reason to bring it back.
How are kids gonna get excited about this?"
So, he said, "You have two weeks to convince me."
That was the brilliance of Stephen Hassenfeld.
He could tell you "No," but at the same time, it was a challenge.
'Cause he knew he had a team of people who might not take "no" for an answer,
and would figure out a way of doing it.
[narrator] With only two weeks to figure out how to do it,
Bob Pruprish convened a war room to map a plan of attack,
this time, including Joe Bacal and Tom Griffin,
of Hasbro's advertising agency, Griffin-Bacal.
In the meeting, I mentioned,
"How does anybody know who these characters are?
We don't have a $30 million movie like Star Wars.
We don't have a TV show."
I said, "We don't even have a comic book,"
remembering the DC G.I. Joe comic book that I had as a kid.
Once I read the comic book, I went and bought my first G.I. Joe.
That sparked an idea with Joe Bacal.
Next thing I know, Joe is coming back to Hasbro,
having met with Marvel Comics.
What got Marvel excited about a G.I. Joe comic book?
At the time, in the early 1980s...
Congratulations. It's a potato.
...regulations said that when you advertise a toy to a kid,
the commercial can only have seven seconds
of animation or whatever, special effects.
The rest of the 30-second commercial has to be toys.
So Joe says to Marvel,
"There are no regulations on advertising a book.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna advertise,
for the first time in the history of comic books, a comic book."
Now, if I'm Mike Hobson, the publisher of Marvel Comics,
and somebody walks in and says,
"We're gonna advertise a comic book on television..."
Cha-ching!
So he says to the team, "We're doing this."
[narrator] With Marvel on board,
it was time for one final do-or-die pitch to Stephen Hassenfeld,
with the fate of G.I. Joe in the balance.
Let's hear it.
[Bozigian] Joe walks out into the middle of the room and says,
"We can't advertise toys on television using animation.
-But we can advertise--" -A book.
-[Bozigian] All it was, was a book. -A book?
A comic book.
So why aren't you holding up a comic book?
Because we didn't have time to do a mock-up.
That's fine. Go on.
This is the story of G.I. Joe.
And...
we already have the jingle.
-[chuckles] -[sighs]
And then we hear...
♪ He'll fight for freedom Wherever there's trouble ♪
♪ G.I. Joe is there ♪
-♪G.I. Joe! ♪ -♪ A Real American Hero ♪
♪ G.I. Joe! ♪
It's deathly silent.
Stephen is looking straight ahead, not saying a word.
And we're thinking, we're dead again.
And he said,
"You lived up to the challenge.
I'm going to see my father."
And he left the room.
And then it hits us.
What do you mean, he's going to talk to his father?
His father died two years ago.
Stephen went to the cemetery
and visited his father's grave and told him G.I. Joe was back.
We did it. We hit a home run.
[narrator] Like his father a generation before,
Stephen Hassenfeld was betting the family company on G.I. Joe.
Suddenly, it was all hands on deck...
[man] Put your backs into it, laddies!
[narrator] ...as Hasbro's marketing and design teams scrambled to mobilize.
[Bozigian] We're on a timetable now to get this thing done.
We pulled every resource that Hasbro had in R and D.
[narrator] And the most important resource the Joe team had was inside this tank.
At that time, I was the only guy
at Hasbro doing any kind of character designs.
-He was a machine. -[laughs]
[narrator] It was Robot Ron's job to come up with all the characters,
and how they looked. But not the names.
What are we gonna do? Have G.I. Fred, G.I. Steve, G.I. John?
[narrator] To create the best platform for narrative,
Marvel gave Ron and the designers a fairly important concept.
Make G.I. Joe the name of the unit,
with the best soldiers, and the best sailors, and the best airmen,
and the best marines, and when there's trouble, you call in G.I. Joe, right?
[narrator] Right. With arguably the most important aspect
of the entire toy line sorted, out came the pencils.
[Rudat] Many times I would do eight to ten rough sketches of one design.
And we'd plaster them up on our wall, and you'd pick and choose what you want.
We like that head. We like that chest. We like those bullets. Put those on that.
[Rudat] He can be this guy, he can be that guy.
It's how we did it.
[narrator] As the toys were taking shape, over in New York,
the lucky writer for the G.I. Joe comic
had been selected from Marvel's impressive stable of talent.
Nobody works on toy books unless you're a total loser.
[narrator] Enter Larry Hama,
a low-level Marvel editor with a background in illustration,
and music, and acting, who also served in Vietnam.
I didn't really do anything all that interesting.
[narrator] Not true. He was in the Army Corps of Engineers. Anyway.
I didn't know he was on MASH, so... [chuckles]
[narrator] After years of drawing blanks,
when Larry was presented with the opportunity to write G.I. Joe...
I took it. [laughs]
[narrator] For decades, G.I. Joe'd been a single scar-faced anonymous soldier
with a deformed thumb.
Finally, through the mind and pen of Ron Rudat's design,
G.I. Joe was poised to become an infantry of personalities,
ready to keep the world safe from villains and evildoers alike.
This is the first 12.
The first figures that Hasbro gave me were all G.I. Joes.
We had a meeting between Hasbro and Marvel,
and the first thing that we brought up was,
"Who do they fight?"
And they said, "Well, we don't have anybody for them to fight."
Uh, hello?
Our attitude was, kids aren't gonna buy a bad guy.
What's the story gonna be? I mean, they just gonna march?
They'll use all the other toys in their toy box as the bad guys.
We envisioned G.I. Joe fighting Star Wars,
fighting whatever else was out in the marketplace, right?
And we finally sort of talked them into it.
And they said, "All right, what do you have in mind?"
There was a Marvel editor named Archie Goodwin,
and off the top of his head, he said,
"Why don't we have G.I. Joe fight Cobra?"
And everybody went...
[crickets chirping]
"Great." [laughing]
So that gets communicated back to us.
We now have to create the bad guy enemy force.
[narrator] Delving into the dark depths of his mind, Ron Rudat created this.
The logo itself, that's me. I designed that logo.
The '80s was very much good versus evil.
The Soviet Union was evil, we were good.
And so Cobra versus the G.I. Joes, it wasn't that hidden of a metaphor,
and we just totally bought it.
So now there will be a terrorist organization called Cobra.
[narrator] Just hold it, hold it right there.
So, one of the greatest enemy forces in toy history ever
was made up by some guy off the top of his head in a meeting?
I don't know if it was off the top of his head
or he'd been thinking about it, but Archie Goodwin said, "Cobra."
[narrator] Hang on, hang on. Just wait a minute.
Can you imagine if other iconic toy lines had no arch enemies?
Like Luke without Vader.
He-Man without Skeletor.
Optimus Prime without Megatron.
The Smurfs with no Gargamel!
Or is it Gargamel without the Smurfs?
[all laughing]
[Gargamel] Those rotten blue bumblers!
It turned out to be a great thing.
Not only for the toys but for the comic books.
[narrator] The comic books which Larry needed to write.
As an ex-Army engineer turned actor turned writer,
it was time for Larry Hama to take his shot.
And Hasbro needed a direct hit.
I remember thinking after I wrote the first one...
You know, I think I've shot my wad here. I don't know what to do next.
[narrator] While Larry was blowing it,
over at Hasbro, the team was under pressure to make their figures cheaper.
Oh, no, this is a terrible problem.
We don't want to make our figures suckier by taking off, say, 10% of the deco.
Instead, they said, "We know what we do.
We're gonna keep these guys as is,
and we're gonna take all the deco off one figure."
That figure was Snake Eyes.
[narrator] Will kids buy a bland, paintless figure?
Only time will tell.
But after two grueling years,
the figures and the comics were almost ready to launch.
Meet Breaker, Flash, Grunt, Scarlet, who was Ron Rudat's personal favorite.
Sexy.
[narrator] And bland old Snake Eyes,
as well as the Cobra Soldier, Officer, and Commander.
The G.I. Joe regiment was assembled and it was time to once again
represent American justice and freedom for all.
Shame about this thing.
Due to the continuous success of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back...
[boy] Place him in the prisoner retention unit.
[DePriest] ...Hasbro decided to delay the introduction.
They were gonna wait, basically, a year.
[narrator] So the team had a gap year.
But instead of backpacking through Europe, Larry Hama got organized.
It's a lot of characters.
I made up my own dossiers
on what their traits were and psychological profile.
[narrator] Thanks in part to George Lucas, the backs of the upcoming toys
would now be adorned with a cut-down version of the dossier.
So in a way, that extra year that the team had to really develop
and really, you know, sharpen and refine G.I. Joe
was, I think, instrumental to its success.
Because when it launched, G.I. Joe took off like a rocket.
[announcer] The Legend of G.I. Joe.
I'm a comic book kid and I'm a toy kid.
And this was like the explosion of the two.
[narrator] Everyone gave the new line a thumbs up,
which, by the way, were perfect this time around.
Everyone was happy. All "tanks" to G.I. Joe.
This is the G.I. Joe Mobat.
[announcer] You can make it go left, right, forwards and backwards.
We sold well over 400,000 of these.
[boy] What a tank!
[announcer] Each sold separately.
[narrator] G.I. Joe made $51 million in its first year
and well over $100 million in its second.
I'd call it diabolical, the way we took money
from little kids' pockets throughout the year.
[narrator] Like all diabolical plans, and the evil geniuses who hatch them...
[Cobra Commander] Hear this!
...they always want more.
The comic book only got us so far in terms of awareness and sales, right?
[narrator] It was the great Hasbro general himself, Stephen Hassenfeld,
who kept the campaign alive to crush the enemy.
That being children's waning attention spans.
From the comic book, then the first G.I. Joe TV cartoon was created.
♪ It's G.I. Joe against Cobra and Destro ♪
Stephen again, vision that he has, understands
we've got to keep the adventures of G.I. Joe alive with kids.
[narrator] It wasn't just the adventures of G.I. Joe they were keeping alive.
There's stuff that you can do in a comic
that you can't do on Saturday morning animation.
Nobody gets killed.
You know, if you shot down a Cobra plane, then you always saw the parachute.
The idea was the Cobra guys were trying to kill you.
They're just really bad shots.
[gun firing]
I thought it was morally bankrupt not to have...
death.
[narrator] Larry Hama, now available for children's parties.
Anyway, surprise, surprise, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was a hit.
Not a fatal hit, obviously. See? There's a parachute.
I remember watching and looking at it and saying,
"I have that character and I own that vehicle."
It almost was affirmation of what I owned
was now popular because you could see it on TV
and couldn't just read about it in a book.
With a TV show,
you got the kids' imagination every single day.
[narrator] G.I. Joe tackled the '80s,
with the help of "Refrigerator" Perry, of course.
Watch out, Cobra, Fridge is coming through.
[narrator] And the line had achieved quite an impressive status.
Read that. Torch's penchant for sudden and unexpected violence
is matched only by his utter depths of stupidity.
[laughing]
Ages five and up.
[all laughing]
[narrator] G.I. Joe was a household name,
despite the galactic popularity of Star Wars.
Prepare the plank, Weequay.
[narrator] But the G.I. Joes were holding their own...
[boy] G.I. Joe to the rescue!
[narrator] ...against the Ewoks and the other toys
in Kenner's Star Wars line.
In large part, because Star Wars toys clocked out at 92 figures,
while toward the end of the '80s, there were approximately
250 G.I. Joe figures for collectors to choose from.
Every three months, basically, you'd find a new G.I. Joe assortment
at retail with fresh characters to get.
[narrator] To keep up with demand,
the Hasbro team were pushing themselves hard.
[D'Aguanno] We did a Jeep, a plane, a whatever.
Snow vehicles, boats, underwater vehicles.
[narrator] The team created dozens of vehicles,
and the sky was the limit.
[boy] Get the G.I. Joe Sky Striker!
[Kunitz] Our vehicles, we knew we had to design them
not only for the kids, but for animation.
And it was exciting seeing them on film.
♪ Cobra Rattler ♪
♪ It's the wickedest weapon yet, you know? Rattler's gonna get G.I. Joe! ♪
-[boy 1] Cobra attack! -[boy 2] Get the G.I. Joe hovercraft!
One of the more interesting G.I. Joe vehicles was the WHALE,
the Warrior Hovering Assault Launching Envoy.
It was a huge hovercraft
that actually had a button you could push on the back
that made it look like the fans were actually operating.
It launched depth charges, it launched a sea sled.
It was magnificent.
[man] We have liftoff!
[narrator] In 1987 came the Defiant.
It was a very impressive and beautiful toy.
[narrator] But there's a vehicle from 1985 that's the pride of the fleet.
Almost no one had one. Everyone might have saw one at the store,
maybe knew a kid that had one.
But probably the most amazing toy ever made.
[announcer] Here it is, the USS Flagg aircraft carrier.
[narrator] At a whopping 7'6",
the USS Flagg was inspired by the scale of the US Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
[Vonner] My best friend got the Flagg. And we all went to his house.
And we're just standing there. This thing is so huge.
Like, how do you even play with it? Like, what are you supposed to do with it?
I remember when they first showed it to me. Holy smoke! [laughs]
It was bigger than my coffee table.
[narrator] And, at $109.99,
it was more expensive than a coffee table too.
It just shows you how gangbusters G.I. Joe must have been in the '80s,
that that was a logical plan.
To make a seven-foot-long mold, to make a ship that was that big
that you could land those planes and stuff on.
It's ridiculous. They must have been rolling in it.
[narrator] They absolutely were.
[Hama] A lot of people don't seem to get the fact
that the vehicles, that's the main profit margin.
The action figures themselves are almost like loss leaders.
That's what drives it.
[narrator] As vehicles were driving sales, the financial figures were growing,
thanks to the favorite figures.
And do you know who's the most popular of them all?
I mean, everybody's favorite is Snake Eyes, of course.
-Snake Eyes. -Snake Eyes.
[narrator] That's right. The one they didn't even bother to paint.
But he just looked badass, 'cause he was this ninja,
he had this cool black outfit, hung around with a timber wolf.
And it was crazy stuff, but it worked.
[narrator] Snake Eyes is the undisputed king
of the G.I. Joe 3 3/4 toy line.
I will dispute some of that.
[narrator] What, like, Storm Shadow?
Snake Eyes' slightly less popular, yet still very popular sword brother?
I'm not so sure he was the number-one-selling action figure.
[narrator] Who then? Zartan? Duke? Baroness? Lady Jaye?
Jinx? Blowtorch? Cover Girl?
Another favorite of Ron Rudat's, by the way.
I... made the buttons come down a little lower. [chuckles]
I think some of the figures that popped at store level
probably would be more successful.
[narrator] Oh, you mean like this one?
[Bozigian] That's an illustration of me, because I became the character, Law.
[narrator] With so many characters needed to fulfill
the demands of a high-turnover G.I. Joe world...
-[gun firing] -[grunts]
...the team started making action figures of themselves.
Ron Rudat had decided that
I was gonna be Thrasher, the driver of the Thunder Machine.
[narrator] Even the great designer himself, Ron Rudat,
featured as Leatherneck.
The face looks very much like him on the packaging, and so this--
[man] You sure it's not Tom Selleck?
No, no. I can tell you it's Ron.
[narrator] I'd like to see Magnum, PI do this.
Next time, use the sunscreen.
Wear a hat and a shirt, and look for some shade when it's really sunny.
[narrator] Okay. Maybe Magnum, PI is cooler.
By the late '80s,
the G.I. Joe re-launch had made $600 million.
And it seemed like the line was invincible.
But in 1989,
one of G.I. Joe's most important figures was lost, leaving the toy world shocked.
Needless to say, Steve, you know, who was my best friend,
died very early in '89.
And my brother really was the modern-day architect...
of the toy industry.
[narrator] Hasbro had been in the Hassenfeld family for 66 years.
So the obvious successor to Stephen would be his younger brother, Alan.
You'd think.
I didn't really feel that comfortable taking over the whole thing.
[narrator] But he did anyway.
And it didn't take Alan long to find that Hassenfeld knack for making big toy deals.
All of a sudden, Hasbro acquires Kenner.
It's Kenner.
And we became the red-headed stepchild.
[narrator] And that would make Kenner the blond-haired, blue-eyed favorite.
Or sometimes dirty blond.
Kenner made Star Wars toys. So what would they make of G.I. Joe?
[Bozigian] The reorganization let a lot of good people go.
My whole G.I. Joe team was decimated.
I went from managing over $250 million worth of business to managing Play-doh.
I worked my ass off.
[narrator] Not even the guy who designed the Cobra logo was safe.
I don't know.
[stammers]
That's the way it goes.
[narrator] In 1999, Ron Rudat was another casualty of big business.
But the G.I. Joe brand would live on to fight another day.
[announcer] New G.I. Joe Extreme.
[narrator] But without the team that convinced Stephen Hassenfeld
to bring G.I. Joe back from the brink a decade earlier.
In 1994, the Real American Hero line was canceled, along with the comic.
Those are decisions financial people make.
[narrator] There may have been a lot of hurt egos in the halls of Hasbro,
but there was certainly no pain in its bank balance.
You've seen one sheet of $1,000 bills, you've pretty much seen them all.
[narrator] The G.I. Joe brand'll go on to make $1.2 billion dollars
by the end of the '80s alone.
With, at one stage, two out of every three boys
ages 5 to 11 owning a G.I. Joe.
It spawned both animated and live-action movies,
computer games and, of course, more toys.
It's now considered the most collected toy of all time.
It's an incredible achievement
that, 60 years earlier, when Stan Weston pitched to Don Levine,
nobody could have predicted.
But like the original Joe, Stan Weston also carried a scar for his entire life.
[Steve] My father decided to take
the flat $100,000 buyout fee with no royalty.
By my father's calculations, he would've went on to earn $30 or $40 million
over the span of time that G.I. Joe was selling.
This is not a good story.
[chuckles] I mean, it might be for you, but it wasn't...
[narrator] Stan Weston may not have received millions of dollars,
but he did get something else he'd been after his whole life.
[Stan] What I got is the satisfaction of when I eventually go bye-bye,
which I hope isn't soon...
the headline will say,
"The father of G.I. Joe...
has died."
There's only one person that signed the contract at Hasbro,
and you're talking to him.
[narrator] With the death of Stan Weston
only weeks after we recorded this phone interview,
the last soldier of G.I. Joe's inception had fallen.
From Stan Weston's pitch to Don Levine's vision
to Merrill Hassenfeld's brave decision to make a doll for boys,
and to Stephen Hassenfeld, for re-igniting the torch
that still burns for so many today.
I get letters from different Joe guys
thanking me for their childhood and growing up.
I had a young guy come up to me and say, "When I was young, my father left us.
And the only person I had to talk to were my G.I. Joes."
The people who worked on Joe were tireless, tirelessly dedicated to it.
[Hama] I remember thinking after I wrote G.I. Joe,
I don't know what to do next. I never lost that feeling.
We got to play for a living. What's better than that?
I could ask for nothing more than to work on the toy I love
and inspire a new generation of kids
to have that same kind of experience, that same magic.
[Rudat] I made a lot of kids happy and I made a lot of adults happy.
My work is gonna live on forever.
♪ G.I. Joe is there G.I. Joe ♪
G.I. Joe became America's hero.
[narrator] This is G.I. Joe. The world's first action doll...
This is not a doll. This is an action figure.
[narrator] And now we know.
And knowing is half the battle.
♪ G.I. Joe! ♪
[boy] Yo, Joe!
[theme song playing]