Toys
Hasbro for many years avoided producing a Greenshirt figure, as several members of the designing and writing teams didn't want to have "nameless" G.I. Joe figures for various reasons. This was circumvented with the 2005 "Infantry Team" figure six-pack, which featured six figures designed to look like the cartoon's Greenshirts. Each figure was given a separate filecard with a blank file name and codename for the buyer to fill in their own details, in essence making them "named" characters. Two of these are darker-skinned men.
In the UK equivalent of the toy line, produced by Palitoy and known as Action Force, the Grunt action figure was re-designated as a generic infantryman, available as a mail-in promotion in 1985-6. These characters also appeared in the contemporary Battle Action Force comic. It is not clear whether there was any direct connection between this and the "Greenshirts" of the American cartoon.
After Hasbro and Marvel took over the toy-line and comic in 1987, the generic "infantryman" figure disappeared.
In 2008, as part of Hasbro's 25th Anniversary G.I. Joe line, a 5-figure boxed set was released featuring Cobra villain Firefly opposed by four generic G.I. Joe troopers.
In 2011, the Steel Brigade, a term used from 1987 to 1992 for a special mail-in offer of a G.I. Joe figure with a personalized Filecard, was re-released in the Greenshirts' role. They are available as the standard trooper, and the "Steel Brigade Delta", a vehicle driver included with the V.A.M.P. MK-II.
Read more about this topic: Greenshirts (G.I. Joe)
Famous quotes containing the word toys:
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“The great passion in a man’s life may not be for women or men or wealth or toys or fame, or even for his children, but for his masculinity, and at any point in his life he may be tempted to throw over the things for which he regularly lays down his life for the sake of that masculinity. He may keep this passion secret from women, and he may even deny it to himself, but the other boys know it about themselves and the wiser ones know it about the rest of us as well.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)