So the year is 1980 something, the year of the Tomahawk's release, 1986 maybe?. I had circled it in the wishbook and hoped Santa would know I had been the best kid in the world. Christmas morning me and my brothers wake up at the buttcrack of dawn to inspect our loot. My mom and dad drag themselves into the living room where me and my brothers fling socks and underwear aside to get to the good stuff. My oldest brother is a teenager and gets that kind of stuff and some sports stuff. My other brother is starting to get away from toys and more outdoorsy. Mom has done her homework and everybody is happy. In my pile is that beautiful dual rotored chopper. Mom snaps about 1000 pictures of her babies while Dad smiles to hide that he had spent about a half years salary on this stuff
With everyone happy on Christmas morning everyone heads back to catch a morning nap after breakfast. Except little AVE.

My oldest brother, the model car expert, had promised to help me with the assembly of the Tomahawk. But I couldn't wait. Open the box and toss the melon headed pilot to the side. No time to waist on this helicopter, it can hold so many figures!! So I sit with the instructions and blueprint and begin my assembly in the little bit of floor space I have. As I use my already loosened teeth to break the smaller items from the sprue, (safety first, I'm too young for a knife) I notice my front tooth is getting a little wigglier. And then it happens as I'm on my last sprue, the tooth pops out and the blood follows. I scream as my new toy is coated in fresh carnage. My mom jumps to the rescue and runs to the living room to find her baby boy with blood gushing from his mouth. Dad's mad that I didn't wait like I was told. My oldest brother is mad that he didn't get to help me. My other brother is mad that he missed me hurting myself and bleeding. I'm mad that I didn't get to finish my Tomahawk and Mom is mad about the blood on the carpet. And we haven't even had Christmas lunch yet.

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I kind of want to see that story done in a cartoon form now.

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Just like AVE's other brother.

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Some nice stories here, the ones from AVE in particular.

At the age of six I was into He-Man, Playmobil and Lego. My older brother got the Dragonfly and the Snowcat on his birthday. That and the G.I.Joe cartoons being broadcasted in the Netherlands (and seeing them on Great Brittain's Sky Channel) got me interested in those little soldiers. From then I wanted to play with G.I.Joe, so my He-Man collection wasn't expanded from that day on.
When I turned seven years old I don't believe there was a single birthday or Sinterklaas (kinda like Santa Claus, celebrated on December 5th) in my youth on which I didn't ask/get something from the G.I.Joe line. Anything G.I.Joe was the perfect present.
I started my collection with Hawk V2, Viper and the Rifle Range Unit. Got them on my 7th birthday.

Ofcourse I saw lots of promotion material in catalogues, stores, on tv and in the cartoons. I was always enthousiastic about new stuff coming out, but I also felt a little sad, because I saw pictures and cartoons of cool figures like the Crimson Trooper, Storm Shadow, Dreadnoks, Snake Eyes, the Moray Hydrofoil, Check Point Alpha etc. Stuff that wasn't available anymore.....

When I got older, my mom surprised me on (I think) my 12th birthday: I found a Moray Hydrofoil at the breakfast table!!! OMG! Imagine how that felt, like finding a treasure that you thought you'd never see in real life. She got it from a kid who sold his stuff. Kids would be selling their Joes on flea markets probably for the first time around those years so I started to visit them too from that moment on.

My childhood Joe collection was amazing. During Christmas of 1986 my uncle worked for Milton Bradley in Springfield MA. What many don't know is Hasbro bought MB. Anyway, my uncle now worked for Hasbro via MB. I'm not sure what he did exactly other then something to do with toy testing.

Long story short. I got the entire 1986 Joe figure line along with the Terrordrome for Xmas thus turning my handful of figures into a full collection.


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This is what I got on my 11th birthday.



Behind the box of the Rolling Thunder you can see the watchtower of a (mostly wooden) G.I.Joe base my dad made for my birthday. That was so awesome and unexpected!



A better view of that custom G.I.Joe base. It also included a control room, rope ladder, barbed wire and an escape slide tube. In the weeks before that birthday I noticed my Wild Bill was missing. Ofcourse such things happened a lot as a kid, that figure would eventually turn up somewhere. Right after my birthday I got Wild Bill back from my dad. He had used it for measurements to create that base in the right scale, hahaha! Man, I was so happy with that thing, it had a lot of play value.

And yup, that's the European version of the Rolling Thunder so no hubcaps.

My first three Joes where a straight arm Zap, a cobra officer and Thunder with the first vehicle being the slugger. Zap broke, The Officer got stolen and Thunder is sitting on my book case looking at me right now.

I only ever really asked for joes for Christmas and birthdays. Biggest Christmas I recall was getting the whale and the TTBP. I'd usually get some figures too. I had the Havoc, The Thunder Machine, Tomahawk, and a smattering of other stuff. I usually had a good supply of of construx for my joes to use. They'd typically fight mutant creatures and robots cobra made that came from other toylines people bought me. So yeah Optimous Prime and He man both badguys.

favorite Joes, Thunder, Recondo, General hawk (who would get a set of outback arms and a torso for when he wasn't jacketed) Mainframe, Dusty, Lady J(bought her three times thanks to a thieving best friend)Airtight, BBQ, B.A.Ts Ripcord, Stalker V2 (still one of the meanest headsculpts ever), LnF Tripwire, Law and Order... honestly i could keep going. Every joe I had I loved.

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