I had a better name for this post. I forgot it.

After all these years, I have no idea what to expect when I  throw this toy. Except that for the poor guy clinging to the bottom, it will suck.

Living in deepest darkest Africa and being addicted to plastic crack as a nine-year old child was not always easy. There was no internet. No Ebay, Bigbadtoystore, no Yojoe.com. No central place to get my fix. My grasp on the G.I. Joe world and its wealth of fantastic toys came from pouring over the few promotional catalogues (or leaflets) I had to hand. The selection we actually found on store shelves was generally pretty poor. Mind you, I'm not counting the figures in that statement. In the heydays of the late '80s and early '90s, carded figures clogged the aisles in every major supermarket. In my most lucid dreams I go back there. It's an image that gets me a little silly. But the items little South African kids were most starved with were the vehicles.

Well, not all the vehicles. There were a handful of vehicles that were in plentiful supply, so here is a small collection of some of the commonest finds in the South African market. How many did you have?

GLIDERS
Made of flexible plastic, these were toys that broke the fourth wall as far as I'm concerned. While most vehicles required imaginative play to make them 'fly', G.I. Joe and Cobra's gliders 'Can fly up to 40ft with figure attatched'. So at some point in your adventure, you would clip your figure to this thing and chuck it as hard as you could. That never sat well with me. I was the kid who treasured these toys, the kid who made up little scenarios they would act out. Climbing to the top of the jungle gym and throwing a glider seemed a little out. But I can see the appeal. And so did Hasbro.

 Little did I know it, but back in 1983 G.I. Joe and Cobra both had working glider toys. So nothing new here. I will say the construction and material of the 1991 gliders was an improvement. The 1983 versions were made almost entirely of foam board - like those planes you'd get in rectangular paper packets and put together by sliding the wings through the flat fuselage? For some reason I remember never having enough plastic nosecone/propeller pieces. They flew much better with those attached. As the Gliders were essentially flat and broad, they were sold carded and not boxed. I remember not expecting a G.I. Joe as I unwrapped it because of the enlarged card. I remember well my relief when I saw the G.I. Joe logo emblazoned across the top.

This is Skymate. The first Aussie G.I. Joe and a glider pilot. Yes, he has 'mate' in his codename. He also has a Kangaroo on his very fetching pink hat. He came with a very pink boomerang too. Who thought it was a good idea to have an Austrailian on the team?

My favorite one-time cousin, Kevin, had once again given me a winning gift. But tended to do that. This is the man who not only got me my first Supersoaker, but my first two Supersoakers. What a guy. He's an American and also a big kid, everything I aspired to be at the time! Still do. Once the figure and his gear was attached, the debut game commenced. It took on the form of a game of catch in the front yard, Kevin and I just throwing it back and forth for... about 3 minutes. I was never much of a sportsman. But Kevin will always rock.

She did alright, managed to hit the cameraman actually after snapping into an unexpected right turn. One thing is for sure, she's a stealthy bird. You'll never see/hear her coming.

I recall seeing Skymate getting some love in the DIC cartoon. Certainly upped the studliness of the Aussie SAS man. He was regarded as a baddass commando infiltrator type. With a pink cap.

BATTLE COPTERS

I am convinced that the guy flying this 'copter is Wildcard, the fella who drives the Mean Dog and has a habit of wrecking things. You don't believe me? Hit up Yojoe.com and do the research. If I am right, having a guy with Wildcard's 'talent' might not be the most suitable pilot material. Major Altitude? B.S....

In the same vein as the Gliders, these too were toys that 'Actually Fly!'. At least with the Battle Copter you felt you were getting a vehicle as these puppies came in a box. The flying mechanism was a simple rip cord pull which would get the rotors spinning fast enough for the helo to overcome gravity. The more vigorous the pull, the higher it would go - you know the drill. It was the same toy any number of generic toy companies cranked out... except you could strap a Joe or Cobra pilot to this one. It was of course a pretty nauseating flight for said pilot as these things would spin like crazy. To accurately simulate helicopter flight you might need  something akin to a tail rotor. But these guys were tough mutha's and laughed in the face of uncontrolled spins of death.


The Gliders and Battle Copters both debuted (as far as I can glean) in issue #127 of the original Marvel comic run.

This was one of the initial stories to use Joseph Colton, the original G.I. Joe.  That's him in the foreground, the colourist must have mistaken him for Rock & Roll because his hair should be brown. G.I. Joseph has still got it tho, Battle Copter pilot and all.

 Larry Hama's ingenuity stretched once again to accommodate the whims of a massive toy company, the gliders were used by Cobra as an insertion method to fly from one Manhattan skyscraper to another. Duke, Stalker and Joe Colton pursued Cobra by snapping together three Battle Copters after quite a funny exchange with the Drug Elimination Force.

Duke: 'You hotshots can get back on the case as soon as you unload those big crates you've got on board'
Bullet-Proof: 'The ones marked "some assembly required"?'

Well I think it's funny, okay.

I recall seeing Skymate getting some love in the DIC cartoon. Certainly upped the studliness of the Aussie SAS man. He was regarded as a baddass commando infiltrator type. With a pink cap.

SEPTIC TANK

'Woo hoo! Let's go out and do some polluting, boys!' True story,  the box proclaims 'The Cobra Septic Tank blasts the enemy with its massive water-firing cannon, spreading lethal toxins into the planet's fragile environment!'
Huh? Is it a water cannon or lethal toxin-spreader? Writers couldn't decide whether they were talking about a tank or a toy tank. Duh.

I must say the humor in this tanks' name was lost on me until I got older. I was driving... somewhere, and I saw an advertisement for septic tank specialists with the tagline 'We Take Your Shit'. Ha ha.

Back on topic. We got all of the initial Eco Warriors here in S.A. And boy did we get the Septic Tank. The proliferation of this vehicle was legendary. I remember still seeing it in Reggies stores long after G.I. Joe's time in the sun had passed. I got it, as a undiscriminating child whose basic consumer principle was

'The box says "G.I. Joe". Buy it.'

But even as a child I knew bright orange does not a cool tank make. And then I saw this ad in a reprint of G.I. Joe issue #9...

Toys arriving in the post? This blew my 9 year-old mind. This must be the coolest thing ever. I can't wait for e-shopping...

What is this!? A black Septic Tank? Called a Cobra HISS? But this doesn't make sense. All the figures riding on it are from 1988, including the original Toxo-Viper. I was not that stupid, I was very aware the Septic Tank was a toy of the '90s. So that means the Septic Tank was a reuse of this HISS mold! And so I immediately got a black permanent marker and coloured my Septic Tank black. Marginal improvement.

I cobbled the cannon from a generic space buggy made by a defunct toy company. I also had to colour around the Cobra symbol because of course I had already applied the decals. 

In spite of the Septic Tank, or perhaps because of it, I have never purchased a HISS in all the times it has been re-released. I guess the mold never held much appeal for me. But for the longest time it was the only Cobra tank I had and it served me well. I remember very vividly screwing off the turret and jamming as many figures as I could into the vehicle's hollow shell. I was a sucker for APC's.

BARRACUDA

Price tag: R45,37. Yes, that means you would get R4,63 in change from a fifty. Woe betide they skimp the 3 cents. Seems absurd to us in 2012, don't it?

Another bizarrely common vehicle. Honestly, could Prima Toys or whoever the local distributor was not have tossed us a few Badgers? Hammers? Locusts? No, we got a shit-ton of one-man submarines. It's not terrible. perhaps a bit uninspired. And there was no escaping that very fixed and unmoving spring launcher at the back end. One-man subs are not exactly science fiction, and the SHARC had gone off the market eons before so the time was right for the arrival of this thing. It's certainly no SHARC. It seems like a step backwards from a jet-engined flying submersible but I had a good deal of fun with it. It was not without gimmickery. Included (apparently) was a weight block and an effervescent tablet. Each would be placed inside a separate compartment in the Barracuda. The sub would sink and release a stream of bubbles if it was placed in deep-ish water, eventually returning to the surface. The tablet and weight have long since disappeared. Heck, I have no memory of them, I must have tossed them immediately. But maybe I can get the same result with Panado. Or baking soda like the instructions say. Yeah, like hell I'm sacrificing Panado, come to think of it. I'll give it a bash and get back to you. The instructions also urge you to 'tie a string around feeder tube of spring action launcher. This will prevent the sub from "swimming away" '. Thanks Hasbro.

DARKLON'S EVADER

R39,99 from Dion. And I will say this for Darklon, anyone who rides onto battle in this, with as many golden handgrenades strapped to his calf deserves either serious respect...

...or pity.

C'mon, who didn't have this? In hindsight it is a pile of shit. But I loved it as a lightie. I loved its loony driver, loved that the guns could be detached and used as baddass personal weapons. But daaaammn was it common. I remember a time when it seemed my local Dion just stocked this, Fang II's and Pulverizors. Like wall to wall.

But you know the beauty of all of these oddities? I loved them all. I might now be spoiled for choice, but back in my collecting infancy, when what you saw was what you got, I found place for all of these. Each toy enjoyed many fantastic adventures. I think it's fair to say that in a heartbeat, I'd trade away the mass of stuff I have accumulated as an adult for the few toys I had back then and the abandon and imagination of my childhood.