Welcome to the Terror Drome: Memories of a Retail Utopia
A friend from JD writes in with this great essay. Take it away, my good man....
When I was growing up, the predatory behemoth known across the land as Wal-Mart was a rarity. Sure, they still existed here and there, but the Cult of Sam’s presence and influence was nowhere near as what it is today. In the pre-Walton days of retail, there were many smaller department store chains for your varied shopping needs. Not necessarily “mom and pop” stores, the smaller chains that found their business confined to a particular geographic area, such as Children’s Palace, Rose’s, Magic Mart, and Hills, were often the only place to find the hottest action figures or the coolest vehicles for people. These small retailers were even more important to kids living in a rural or isolated area, such as myself, and that’s where my story begins.
When I was a kid, I had to work for my allowance, which might come as a shock to the children of today, with their parent-supplied cell phones and computers. I was given, nay earned, a 5 dollar a week allowance, but only if I kept up my chores around the house (cleaning my room, helping with kitchen clean-up, and doing what I was told would net me many a woman’s heart but has yet to pay off: doing my own laundry). The 5 dollars was paltry next to James up the street whose parents gave him 20 dollars every week for doing nothing more than not beating up his sister on a daily basis, but it was a whole 5 dollars. And in those days, 5 dollars could buy you two G.I. Joe action figures from Rose’s, a small department store chain that spread through five or six states in the Mid-Atlantic region. And that’s exactly what my five dollars got me, on a weekly basis. Five dollars would get me Snake Eyes and Stalker, or Cobra Commander and a Cobra Officer, or Lifeline and Sci-Fi, and so on.
The thing that was most interesting looking back on this was that I never wanted for anything. Now, by that, I don’t mean that I had everything handed to me, but more that if I wanted a figure, say Destro for example, I could be pretty much guaranteed that when I cleaned my room and took out the garbage and got my five dollar allowance, when I went into Rose’s that weekend, I would find Destro hanging on the pegs in the G.I. Joe section waiting on me. If I wanted a figure, I had very little trouble finding it. Sure, there were figures that I had to “hunt” for like Storm Shadow or the Baroness, but never more than a month went by that I had trouble locating a figure for my collection. And it was good, since from the launch of the RAH line in 1982 until I became “too cool” for the RAH line in 1989, I had gotten one of every basic action figure without a single hole in my collection, and I had very little or no difficulty in finding them.
Hasbro, back in that time when they were not being run by crack-smoking monkeys (my apologies to an old friend for cribbing his phrase), put out a fairly diverse collection of Joes with figures, vehicles, and playsets for every possible price range. There were no secondary lines to appeal to older collectors or paint variants or that kind of thing on a massive scale (the only one I recall offhand was Zarana’s head variants, and my only concern was getting the one that didn’t look ugly): Hasbro realized it’s bread and butter was in the 3.75 inch Joes and they didn’t stray from that. They also didn’t saturate the market with 50 characters a year either: If I remember correctly, no year’s offering of figures went above 13 characters during my time as a Joe collector. There were 26 figures offered overall in a single year: 13 new ones and the 13 from the previous year. Once a figure had done its two-year tour of duty, it was retired, but not completely, since Hasbro would make older figures available through a mail-away catalog in case you missed them. There were no retailer exclusive vehicles released to an individual store that many people didn’t have access to; the Christmas catalogs of JC Penney and Sears would often sell exclusive items, but there was never even an inkling in my mind that I had to act fast and get them or else Hasbro wouldn’t make any more. It was a line of figures that didn’t adhere to this type of mentality, and it was fun.
The most memorable experience of that time period for me was when Hasbro released what I considered the crown jewel of the G.I. Joe action figure line: the Cobra Terror Drome playset. While many others would argue that point (I’m looking at you, U.S.S. Flagg owners), the Terror Drome was the biggest piece that I could afford. Well, that I couldn’t afford, since it was a massive 50 dollars and it would take me ten weeks to come up with that kind of money. By the time I had the money to pay for it, someone else who came from a more affluent family would no doubt have snagged it off the shelf at Rose’s. That’s when my mother said one word to me that made everything better: LAYAWAY.
I had never heard of this concept until my mother mentioned it, but to a 10 year old kid, it was like having a light switch flip on in my head that said, “All this and more can be yours if you exhibit a little bit of patience.” So, on the next Sunday trip, I didn’t buy the extra Viper figure I had planned on getting, and put a five dollar deposit down on the Terror Drome, which my mother was nice enough to carry back to the Rose’s layaway desk ten feet away (I have no doubt that this is what contributed to her present back problems). For the next ten weeks, I would make a regular trek to the Rose’s layaway desk and give the clerk five dollars that I would normally be spending on something stupid, like that horrid Visionaries line that Hasbro started up around that time, or Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (which I eventually did waste my money on, but that’s neither here nor there). Then, on one fine day in June of that year, it finally hit me: ONE MORE PAYMENT AND THE TERROR DROME WAS MINE.
The final payment was made and the clerk could see my obvious excitement when I handed the five dollars to her. Me, a stupid little 10-year-old kid, had saved every dollar he had been given, nay earned, over the last three months, and now he was going to take home the first ever Cobra Headquarters playset that he paid for out of his own pocket. It was truly a magnificent day in my household, made even more so by the fact that a Rose’s employee carried the box to the car, thus sparing my mother’s back from further trauma. I got home and tore into the box, applied all the labels myself, put it together myself, and sat there in the middle of my bedroom saying, “Wow this is big. Where am I going to put it?” The Terror Drome had arrived and G.I. Joe would rue this day for the remainder of my imagination, which would undoubtedly last the rest of my life and play itself out in every imaginable scenario, none of which involved a genetically mutated Cobra Commander Snake Person, because honestly, who could concoct something that stupid? Nothing else would ever be on my mind but coming up with new stories to act out with this toy. Nothing was on my mind but making make-believe war.
As 1989 entered, it turned out that I had other things on my mind. Like whether “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” would be a better album than “Somewhere in Time” (it wasn’t) or whether or not my friend William would be able to get that old ragged Playboy out from under his brother’s bed so I could see some boobs (he did and boy did I). G.I. Joe just didn’t seem cool anymore. Well, let me rephrase that: People knowing I still liked G.I. Joe didn’t seem cool anymore. So, Snake Eyes, Hawk, Stalker, Destro, and their ilk were ignored for the better part of two years while I concentrated on “more important things” like heavy metal and the opposite sex. It took a relative to show me that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me or what I was interested in; if something made me happy, I should do it and to hell with what was seen as cool. I was already something of a misfit amongst my peers anyway, so further alienation didn’t really bother me at the time. After having this conversation with my uncle, I walked into a Wal-Mart (irony of ironies) and walked out with my first G.I. Joe figure in two years, appropriately enough of a Snake Eyes that was released right about the time I quit in 1989.
What was most compelling in retrospect was that even though I was two years behind on my collecting, I was still able to, with very little difficulty, locate every figure I was missing from 1989 to 1991 save one (the Stalker with the kayak, which I had actually seen at the aforementioned Rose’s shortly after I “quit”). I didn’t have to call my friends and ask them if they had an extra Deep Six laying around that they could sell to me, nor did I have to get on the internet (which I had no idea existed at that point) and ask someone if they saw one on their next trip to Wal-Mart, could they pick one up. I simply had to walk into Wal-Mart (who by this point was, literally, the only retailer in town) and Deep Six was there. The extent of my difficulty obtaining a figure was how hard it was for my rapidly growing hands and arms to negotiate the small gap between pegs to see what lurked near the back of the peg.
Around 1992, though, G.I. Joe finally died for me. It had nothing to do with growing up or growing out of it, or my increasingly pacifistic beliefs contrasting with a toy line that was pretty much the opposite of pacifism. It had to do with the fact that the ideas for the figures had become completely moronic. When I was a kid, it was Joes vs. Cobra, with Destro kind of sneaking around in the background, playing each side against one another. Now Hasbro, exhibiting the thinking that has typified the last ten years of Star Wars toys, decided that the old ways of doing things just weren’t working. Larry Hama, the creator of the RAH line, had always pushed a sense of what I refer to now as “cautious realism” with the Joes and Cobra that was entertaining, but that also didn’t shy away from the realities of war. Despite the popularity of the realistic characters and weaponry that sprang forth from Hama’s military background and imagination, Hasbro fell into the trap of trying to do what I had left the RAH line for a few years earlier: to be cool in the eyes of others, in this case retail, and more specifically, the now-lumbering beast known as Wal-Mart. The age-old conflict of Joes vs. Cobra was secondary in the new world of retail; fighting a terrorist organization wasn’t enough in this day and age. The Joes needed a new enemy more insidious than Cobra. An enemy that would unite these archenemies against the REAL enemy and destroy the RAH line once and for all.
Yes, G.I. Joe and Cobra put aside their ten-year struggle against one another and united against a common foe: DRUG DEALERS. This was the first time that I realized one could laugh and feel sad inside at the exact same moment. It was also the point where, albeit subconsciously, I realized that it had become less about the military equipment and characters and more about a “moral message” and marketing. And that’s when I gave up completely. The RAH Joes would make comebacks over the years at retail, but they failed every time, despite the best efforts of people who wanted the old RAH Joes who fought for freedom, wherever there was trouble, because RAH Joes weren’t hip anymore. They didn’t fit into Wal-Mart’s demographic of what they thought toys were. Hasbro kept trying to “hip” up the line, with the massive disaster of “G.I. Joe Extreme” and the impending disaster of “Sigma Six” and its anime “Joes against Robots” trendy trainwreck style, all to keep WM interested in a more eye-catching line.
When the Joes were still available, they started to adhere to the problems that plagued many other lines: namely, exclusive items, chase figures, and so on. The days of walking into a department store and finding a Cobra Commander any time I wanted were gone. Now (figuratively speaking) I would have to hunt for six months to find Cobra Commander because the version I wanted was exclusive to a K-Mart store in eastern Indiana, which only got one case, and all those figures were now on Ebay at four times the original retail price, since, after all, they were HOT VHTF RARE CORBA COMMANDER K-MART EXCLUISVE RECALLED.
The point I’m trying to make with all this is that despite being constantly told that things are so much better in this day and age, both on a large and on a small scale, how life is so much more convenient, I have to dispute that. Sure, they’re only toys and the simple fact that I have spent the better part of two hours typing this no doubt qualifies me for psychological counseling, but I fail to see how a world where a toy can no longer be purchased off the shelf of a store without resorting to early morning toy runs on a daily basis, sneaking around to open cases behind the backs of employees who purposely don’t open cases just to spite people who want to buy them, and making finding a 4 inch action figure the equivalent of finding a decent apartment with rent control as it relates to difficulty, is living in a “better time.” And that’s coming from an adult. Just think what it’s like for the kids that spend their week cleaning and doing dishes and laundry, earning their five dollar a week allowance to buy that Clone Trooper action figure they’ve seen online, only to make the weekly trip to Wal-Mart with their mothers and find nothing staring back at them but Neimoidian Warriors. Oh well, I guess he could always save up his allowance for a few weeks and then get one off Ebay from a guy right down the street who just happens to have 12 of the Clone Troopers (VHTF RARE RECALLED, by the way) for a low Buy-It-Now price of 12.99.
Welcome to the Terror Drome, indeed.
When I was growing up, the predatory behemoth known across the land as Wal-Mart was a rarity. Sure, they still existed here and there, but the Cult of Sam’s presence and influence was nowhere near as what it is today. In the pre-Walton days of retail, there were many smaller department store chains for your varied shopping needs. Not necessarily “mom and pop” stores, the smaller chains that found their business confined to a particular geographic area, such as Children’s Palace, Rose’s, Magic Mart, and Hills, were often the only place to find the hottest action figures or the coolest vehicles for people. These small retailers were even more important to kids living in a rural or isolated area, such as myself, and that’s where my story begins.
When I was a kid, I had to work for my allowance, which might come as a shock to the children of today, with their parent-supplied cell phones and computers. I was given, nay earned, a 5 dollar a week allowance, but only if I kept up my chores around the house (cleaning my room, helping with kitchen clean-up, and doing what I was told would net me many a woman’s heart but has yet to pay off: doing my own laundry). The 5 dollars was paltry next to James up the street whose parents gave him 20 dollars every week for doing nothing more than not beating up his sister on a daily basis, but it was a whole 5 dollars. And in those days, 5 dollars could buy you two G.I. Joe action figures from Rose’s, a small department store chain that spread through five or six states in the Mid-Atlantic region. And that’s exactly what my five dollars got me, on a weekly basis. Five dollars would get me Snake Eyes and Stalker, or Cobra Commander and a Cobra Officer, or Lifeline and Sci-Fi, and so on.
The thing that was most interesting looking back on this was that I never wanted for anything. Now, by that, I don’t mean that I had everything handed to me, but more that if I wanted a figure, say Destro for example, I could be pretty much guaranteed that when I cleaned my room and took out the garbage and got my five dollar allowance, when I went into Rose’s that weekend, I would find Destro hanging on the pegs in the G.I. Joe section waiting on me. If I wanted a figure, I had very little trouble finding it. Sure, there were figures that I had to “hunt” for like Storm Shadow or the Baroness, but never more than a month went by that I had trouble locating a figure for my collection. And it was good, since from the launch of the RAH line in 1982 until I became “too cool” for the RAH line in 1989, I had gotten one of every basic action figure without a single hole in my collection, and I had very little or no difficulty in finding them.
Hasbro, back in that time when they were not being run by crack-smoking monkeys (my apologies to an old friend for cribbing his phrase), put out a fairly diverse collection of Joes with figures, vehicles, and playsets for every possible price range. There were no secondary lines to appeal to older collectors or paint variants or that kind of thing on a massive scale (the only one I recall offhand was Zarana’s head variants, and my only concern was getting the one that didn’t look ugly): Hasbro realized it’s bread and butter was in the 3.75 inch Joes and they didn’t stray from that. They also didn’t saturate the market with 50 characters a year either: If I remember correctly, no year’s offering of figures went above 13 characters during my time as a Joe collector. There were 26 figures offered overall in a single year: 13 new ones and the 13 from the previous year. Once a figure had done its two-year tour of duty, it was retired, but not completely, since Hasbro would make older figures available through a mail-away catalog in case you missed them. There were no retailer exclusive vehicles released to an individual store that many people didn’t have access to; the Christmas catalogs of JC Penney and Sears would often sell exclusive items, but there was never even an inkling in my mind that I had to act fast and get them or else Hasbro wouldn’t make any more. It was a line of figures that didn’t adhere to this type of mentality, and it was fun.
The most memorable experience of that time period for me was when Hasbro released what I considered the crown jewel of the G.I. Joe action figure line: the Cobra Terror Drome playset. While many others would argue that point (I’m looking at you, U.S.S. Flagg owners), the Terror Drome was the biggest piece that I could afford. Well, that I couldn’t afford, since it was a massive 50 dollars and it would take me ten weeks to come up with that kind of money. By the time I had the money to pay for it, someone else who came from a more affluent family would no doubt have snagged it off the shelf at Rose’s. That’s when my mother said one word to me that made everything better: LAYAWAY.
I had never heard of this concept until my mother mentioned it, but to a 10 year old kid, it was like having a light switch flip on in my head that said, “All this and more can be yours if you exhibit a little bit of patience.” So, on the next Sunday trip, I didn’t buy the extra Viper figure I had planned on getting, and put a five dollar deposit down on the Terror Drome, which my mother was nice enough to carry back to the Rose’s layaway desk ten feet away (I have no doubt that this is what contributed to her present back problems). For the next ten weeks, I would make a regular trek to the Rose’s layaway desk and give the clerk five dollars that I would normally be spending on something stupid, like that horrid Visionaries line that Hasbro started up around that time, or Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (which I eventually did waste my money on, but that’s neither here nor there). Then, on one fine day in June of that year, it finally hit me: ONE MORE PAYMENT AND THE TERROR DROME WAS MINE.
The final payment was made and the clerk could see my obvious excitement when I handed the five dollars to her. Me, a stupid little 10-year-old kid, had saved every dollar he had been given, nay earned, over the last three months, and now he was going to take home the first ever Cobra Headquarters playset that he paid for out of his own pocket. It was truly a magnificent day in my household, made even more so by the fact that a Rose’s employee carried the box to the car, thus sparing my mother’s back from further trauma. I got home and tore into the box, applied all the labels myself, put it together myself, and sat there in the middle of my bedroom saying, “Wow this is big. Where am I going to put it?” The Terror Drome had arrived and G.I. Joe would rue this day for the remainder of my imagination, which would undoubtedly last the rest of my life and play itself out in every imaginable scenario, none of which involved a genetically mutated Cobra Commander Snake Person, because honestly, who could concoct something that stupid? Nothing else would ever be on my mind but coming up with new stories to act out with this toy. Nothing was on my mind but making make-believe war.
As 1989 entered, it turned out that I had other things on my mind. Like whether “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” would be a better album than “Somewhere in Time” (it wasn’t) or whether or not my friend William would be able to get that old ragged Playboy out from under his brother’s bed so I could see some boobs (he did and boy did I). G.I. Joe just didn’t seem cool anymore. Well, let me rephrase that: People knowing I still liked G.I. Joe didn’t seem cool anymore. So, Snake Eyes, Hawk, Stalker, Destro, and their ilk were ignored for the better part of two years while I concentrated on “more important things” like heavy metal and the opposite sex. It took a relative to show me that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me or what I was interested in; if something made me happy, I should do it and to hell with what was seen as cool. I was already something of a misfit amongst my peers anyway, so further alienation didn’t really bother me at the time. After having this conversation with my uncle, I walked into a Wal-Mart (irony of ironies) and walked out with my first G.I. Joe figure in two years, appropriately enough of a Snake Eyes that was released right about the time I quit in 1989.
What was most compelling in retrospect was that even though I was two years behind on my collecting, I was still able to, with very little difficulty, locate every figure I was missing from 1989 to 1991 save one (the Stalker with the kayak, which I had actually seen at the aforementioned Rose’s shortly after I “quit”). I didn’t have to call my friends and ask them if they had an extra Deep Six laying around that they could sell to me, nor did I have to get on the internet (which I had no idea existed at that point) and ask someone if they saw one on their next trip to Wal-Mart, could they pick one up. I simply had to walk into Wal-Mart (who by this point was, literally, the only retailer in town) and Deep Six was there. The extent of my difficulty obtaining a figure was how hard it was for my rapidly growing hands and arms to negotiate the small gap between pegs to see what lurked near the back of the peg.
Around 1992, though, G.I. Joe finally died for me. It had nothing to do with growing up or growing out of it, or my increasingly pacifistic beliefs contrasting with a toy line that was pretty much the opposite of pacifism. It had to do with the fact that the ideas for the figures had become completely moronic. When I was a kid, it was Joes vs. Cobra, with Destro kind of sneaking around in the background, playing each side against one another. Now Hasbro, exhibiting the thinking that has typified the last ten years of Star Wars toys, decided that the old ways of doing things just weren’t working. Larry Hama, the creator of the RAH line, had always pushed a sense of what I refer to now as “cautious realism” with the Joes and Cobra that was entertaining, but that also didn’t shy away from the realities of war. Despite the popularity of the realistic characters and weaponry that sprang forth from Hama’s military background and imagination, Hasbro fell into the trap of trying to do what I had left the RAH line for a few years earlier: to be cool in the eyes of others, in this case retail, and more specifically, the now-lumbering beast known as Wal-Mart. The age-old conflict of Joes vs. Cobra was secondary in the new world of retail; fighting a terrorist organization wasn’t enough in this day and age. The Joes needed a new enemy more insidious than Cobra. An enemy that would unite these archenemies against the REAL enemy and destroy the RAH line once and for all.
Yes, G.I. Joe and Cobra put aside their ten-year struggle against one another and united against a common foe: DRUG DEALERS. This was the first time that I realized one could laugh and feel sad inside at the exact same moment. It was also the point where, albeit subconsciously, I realized that it had become less about the military equipment and characters and more about a “moral message” and marketing. And that’s when I gave up completely. The RAH Joes would make comebacks over the years at retail, but they failed every time, despite the best efforts of people who wanted the old RAH Joes who fought for freedom, wherever there was trouble, because RAH Joes weren’t hip anymore. They didn’t fit into Wal-Mart’s demographic of what they thought toys were. Hasbro kept trying to “hip” up the line, with the massive disaster of “G.I. Joe Extreme” and the impending disaster of “Sigma Six” and its anime “Joes against Robots” trendy trainwreck style, all to keep WM interested in a more eye-catching line.
When the Joes were still available, they started to adhere to the problems that plagued many other lines: namely, exclusive items, chase figures, and so on. The days of walking into a department store and finding a Cobra Commander any time I wanted were gone. Now (figuratively speaking) I would have to hunt for six months to find Cobra Commander because the version I wanted was exclusive to a K-Mart store in eastern Indiana, which only got one case, and all those figures were now on Ebay at four times the original retail price, since, after all, they were HOT VHTF RARE CORBA COMMANDER K-MART EXCLUISVE RECALLED.
The point I’m trying to make with all this is that despite being constantly told that things are so much better in this day and age, both on a large and on a small scale, how life is so much more convenient, I have to dispute that. Sure, they’re only toys and the simple fact that I have spent the better part of two hours typing this no doubt qualifies me for psychological counseling, but I fail to see how a world where a toy can no longer be purchased off the shelf of a store without resorting to early morning toy runs on a daily basis, sneaking around to open cases behind the backs of employees who purposely don’t open cases just to spite people who want to buy them, and making finding a 4 inch action figure the equivalent of finding a decent apartment with rent control as it relates to difficulty, is living in a “better time.” And that’s coming from an adult. Just think what it’s like for the kids that spend their week cleaning and doing dishes and laundry, earning their five dollar a week allowance to buy that Clone Trooper action figure they’ve seen online, only to make the weekly trip to Wal-Mart with their mothers and find nothing staring back at them but Neimoidian Warriors. Oh well, I guess he could always save up his allowance for a few weeks and then get one off Ebay from a guy right down the street who just happens to have 12 of the Clone Troopers (VHTF RARE RECALLED, by the way) for a low Buy-It-Now price of 12.99.
Welcome to the Terror Drome, indeed.
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