GI Joe

[rowyn]

[Sitting in the theatre, watching the opening credits roll.]

Lut [leaning over to whisper to me]: "I've never seen any of the cartoon or other media for G. I. Joe, so no matter how badly they mangle the source material I can't be offended by it.
Me [giggling]: "Yeah, I saw a few of the cartoons as a kid, but I don't remember them. I don't think they'll be able to offend me either."

[15 minutes in:]

Me: "Wait, G. I. Joe is supposed to be a NATO operation? Are you kidding me?"

---

It was chock-full of explosions, pretty things, and fight scenes. I was bored halfway through. About what you'd expect. Best exchange:

Duke [in power armor and lying atop a car, gasping as he recovers from crashing onto it]: "OK, that was crazy. What happened to you?"
Ripcord [next to him, in similar condition]: "I went through the train. What happened to you?"
Duke: "I jumped over it."
Ripcord [pause]: "You can do that?"
Duke: "Yeah. You should've read the manual."
Ripcord: "There's a manual?"

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Wow! Well, I guess I ran into it because when I was a little kid, there was still this idea that dress-up action figures were cool for young boys, and thus I had a Six Million Dollar Man "Steve Austin" action figure, with optional cybernetic arm attachments, and "Mr. Goldman" with his exploding briefcase, and some weird android dude with interchangeable faces and pop-off cybernetic limbs, and an inflatable secret base dome set that at the time was large enough that I could actually fit inside it. But then, at the time, I could also fit inside my parents' laundry basket.

Now I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic about cardboard boxes and magic markers. Har! (Huge cardboard boxes + markers + duct tape + scissors = Best toy EVAR in my mind back then.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

^_^ Those were the days, except it was repurposed electronics bits and gardening supplies to look like 'ray guns' and the like.

[rowyn]

My favorites were Legos and these nice wooden building blocks we had. You could make anything out of those things!

[rowyn]

I always liked modular toys where you could swap things on and off, like clothes or guns or whatever. I actually didn't like that all Barbie's best outfits were sold with a new doll, because I didn't want another *doll*, I wanted clothes to put on my current doll!

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. My sister had either a Barbie doll, and although there were clothing sets sold separately, my mom went with the homemade option.

Some time back when she was a stay-at-home mom, before she got a job, she would make lots of custom outfits using fancy-looking remnant fabrics and such from craft stores and various notions salvaged from old clothes and such. At one point, she made an "apartment" for my sister's Barbie out of a sturdy cardboard box, a little remnant section of carpet (when we recarpeted our house), some crimped fabric and a dowel (for drapes for a window with a scene cut out from a magazine), and furnishings made from various boxes and repurposed empty containers with pasted on bits of fabric and pattern paper for faux textures. I THINK there was a "vanity" with a "mirror" made from a piece of aluminum foil carefully kept smooth, but I can't be sure whether that was the case or just an embellishment of memory.

I had no interest in playing with Barbies (no guns, no explosions, no space ships, no fun), but I was still awfully impressed with the whole setup. No doubt it had some sort of influence on my building of gaming terrain later on down the road. ;)

[rowyn]

I can certainly tell where your instinct for making stuff comes from! :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, I got it from both sides! My dad would get all sorts of junk cheap from estate auctions - basically grab-bags of stuff that might or might not include the occasional useful tool, but usually just involved a bunch of scrap metal. He'd let me pick out odds and ends to "build my own toys" (often involving various types of glue, duct tape and, much later on, welding - with supervision, of course), and he'd routinely start welding bits together and sawing wood for various projects around the house - work tables, benches, trailer hitches (or an entire trailer), a computer desk (which I'm still using), etc. Probably the most fun I recall was when my dad converted the garage temporarily into a "shooting range," and made an attachment for the air compressor to fire BBs into a target made of styrofoam with plywood backing. (We wore protective goggles, just in case.) My dad also introduced me to some of my earliest experiments in mold-making, using lead melted down from cast-off tire weights, or plastic melted down from butter-dish containers (that is, the kind of plastic that can be re-melted - not the stuff that burns and lets off fumes).

But then, my dad also helped restore a TBM that had a cameo appearance in the extended version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, did most of the work on refurbishing my first car (a 1950 Dodge Diplomat), built a hovercraft (from a "kit"), built a Mustang II small plane (from purchased plans) ... Yeah, I'm way behind on doing anything to compare.

At least I fixed Gwendel's computer chair over the weekend? =)