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:
“The Child’s Toys and the Old Man’s Reasons
Are the Fruits of the Two seasons.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)