This is how nostalgia works: I haven't seriously thought about G.I. Joe in literal decades, and all at once it's all I care about again.

This sort of thing has happened often enough that I know this is a passing phase and not a new-normal. It'll be a brief fling, somewhere in duration between a fever and a summer crush. Already I can feel myself cooling on the Joes; in the past month, I've watched approximately 40 episodes of the animated TV show and it's starting to feel like work. I have roughly 80 (!) episodes to go, plus the animated movie.

This isn't about the TV show though.

I have another piece cooking that will delve into how the show reflected a PG brand of '80s American jingoism, which is suddenly back in vogue. (If you think that's something, wait till I compare Cobra to the right-wing element overtaking our democracy; the overlap is nearly a complete circle.) But like many kids, I came to the toys via the cartoon, and thus it's hard to separate the two. And that's per design—in the '80s, toy companies realized they could release 22-minute commercials disguised as TV shows, and kids would be compelled to want plastic incarnations of their animated heroes.

We didn't mind.

G.I. Joe invented 'action figure' as a term and also a type of toy. Action figures were and remain my very favorite toy. I'm still not immune to their siren call—if I end up at Target or similar, I'll browse the toy aisles just for the heck of it. I even recently started browsing eBay for G.I. Joe lots. The toys were awesome, better even than Star Wars. And though they don't look quite so awesome with 2024 eyes, I wish I still had mine.

My memories of G.I. Joe are closely tied up with those of Christmas. Few things are more exciting than a tree bursting with presents that have the distinct outline of an action figure encased in plastic and cardboard.

One Christmas, my mom and stepdad decided to G.I. Joe us to death. Their words, relayed to my brother and me in the aftermath of our unwrapping spree, when we were dumbstruck at our bounty. I don't remember exactly which toys we got that year, but from rewatching the cartoon and YouTube videos of the toy line, I can confidently say we had most of the action figures. And a ton of the vehicles. That might be my favorite childhood Christmas.

It came at the tail-end of my childhood, which cuts both ways—I remember it because I was older, but the toys didn't stick around as long for the same reason.

I can't now think of G.I. Joe without remembering how it became the vanguard of my own burgeoning maturity, and how my once-beloved toys paid a price that seems tragic in retrospect.

I killed G.I. Joe slowly, across several years. Many of them died quite literally.