Blood for the Baron!

reading the recent post on hasbro q + a got me thinking on something recently.....and that was why g.i.joe isnt as popular as it was,and why the red shadows could almost never be again......

assuming alot of us are 40 downwards,lets take a real look at what made af so popular.....
we know that successful toys,such as transformers have no basis in reality.nor toys such as he-man etc,successful in their day,could never be real.
but action force was so different.as kids we all knew z force was like the real army.it existed.same with sas.apart from possibly several vehicles the sas WERE real.q force as well with vehicles which are now reality such as the sealion.space force we forgave because with films like star wars,and things like blakes 7 and startrek we believed it could happen.one day.
however the enemy was most realistic of all.a masked madman living in a castle somewhere like the swiss alps.we'd seen it in bond films.it could happen.the black major...we all knew of mad traitors from the army...captain black from captain scarlett for example...we were all listening to mum and dad talking about a new found laser gadget...a mad japanese expert on lasers was believeable.even a mad frenchman,an expert driver who pulled robberys from jewellers with no mates was very possible.
what im getting at...is kids today have TOO MUCH REALISM to believe.and its a shame.
Baron ironblood...would have long ago had his castle bombed by the u.n. the first chance he got to commit a terrorist act he would have been gone.bombed by the u.n or the u.s.look at bin laden.if he's still alive,every time he remotely appears to emerge they bomb where he is into dust.
red laser,vulture,red wolf,the black major...none would survive in this day and age.they would be hunted and captured.
DNA,sattelite tracking etc,have all finished off the chance of any madman ever building a private army and getting away with it.look at waco.classic real life,bit of a threat there.bang.done.
and i wont even get started on death robots wondering the countryside,and cloned kraken wondering about,because even though kraken have become a possibility in terms of cloning kids want different monsters than this.they want high tech not relics from the ice age.perhaps if the kraken appeared in the tv series supernatural it might do better.mutons are still not not even a close possibility.
kids want playstations with villains who create zombies,killer machines,yes they do....but they want it fighting them in a wiii not standing as a piece of carved plastic-they dont want a background story and they dont really want classic good and evil like we knew......the black major dropping a man from a building was classic bad guy.captain buckingham hanging on by his toes to grab him and save him was classic good.they want to save the day...but they want it to be them.
we knew so little and we enjoyed it so much...because at the time it was believeable.all that is left is what we knew...a much more basic world with a little glimmer of a view into the future,getting in dads ford cortina car but wondering what a hyena tank was like.
i sit and listen to kids now as im driving them to school on coach,i hear what they say and how they think.........and il tell you what.......
.....as i child i far prefered what i had then and if i was a child now...i think id still prefer action force over anything.but the edge we had was we could believe.they cant now.they are bombarded by news,stabbings,killings,hit and run,drugs,drink,paedos at every turn.we were sheltered from it.we never knew as much.we could be bad.but we were innocent(mostly!!)
isnt it a shame that its been lost forever.we never realised friends.but we were very lucky.
were'nt we????

Why we fight.... we fight to preserve what we have and have had

Very interesting stuff, Duple, here's my twopenniesworth;

The biggest rival to the toy and comic industries isn't so much knowledge, as technology. You state yourself that we were able to believe in the reality, we knew that the SAS were very real, the toys came out not long after the embassy siege and they were the coolest thing ever at the time. My point is that we weren't particularly sheltered. But these days it's all about computer gaming, it's interactive, and rather than control the gameplay, you can live it - hey I'm a big gamer. So by that token play was moved up a level, leaving figurines and even stories behind. It's a shame, and attention spans have quickened as a result, which is not a good thing IMO. But it won't last, every boom has it's crunch, I'm reminded of the Star Trek Voyager episode where they travel back to the present day, and we are referred to as "post-industrial barbarians". They refer to this stage of humanity's development as a "technological adolescence" and I think that says it all beautifully. Of course WWIII soon followed...

I remember when I was at a particularly low ebb about the whole reality gig a few years back, I turned to my father, a historian, and asked him if things had always been this bad. He said that they had, but that thanksto global media coverage, we were far more aware of it now. It was much easier to sweep scandal under the carpet then, but it does still happen. But we haven't conquered terrorism, we never really conquered the Nazis, they just grew stealthier. How many people know that Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, was a convicted Nazi money-launderer? Terrifying implications there. Of course we grew up in the shadow of WWII, just look at Battle comic as an example of the times, we were in the height of the Cold War, I think we actually had a far better idea of what was really going on than the scare tactics used by today's media conglomerates. I'm not particularly clued up on today's teenagers, but they seem to have very little regard for truth or history.

Krakens from the paeliolithic trapped under ice? I think they touched upon that in the X-Files movie, but there is a very worrying trend in today's culture in that Sci-Fi is taking a hammering. Everything has been axed, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate, Andromeda, Firefly and now Battlestar Galactica too have all fallen under the knife - you are just not allowed to imagine any more, as we did as kids. Conspiracy or not, TV entertainment is 90% mundane dross and it is taking it's toll. Outer space used to be widely regarded as the future of mankind, and has now slipped back to the stuff of fools, and it makes me crazy.

But yes, innocence has been lost, along with integrity and decency it would seem. I still step aside for old people and hold doors open for strangers - but they don't say thankyou, they look at me like I'm weird. Whatever, I probably am. Getting back to what you were saying about Good vs Evil I think we're in a far greyer time now, we all now that sometimes the ends do justify the means, and we all know that sometimes people are faced with impossible choices, it's not as clear-cut as it was then, but that's because it was actually bullshit! However, the good thing that came from that bullshit was that kids aspired to be heroes, to do the right thing and to know where the lines between honour and regret lie. Being virtuous just ain't cool these days and it's a crying shame.

I have to agree with the Baron. Todays society doesn't want heros it would rather stick it's head in the sand and pretend that evil is not evil and hope it goes away, or talk you into the gray areas of amorphous thinking...that it's really not evil.
Second the radical decline in the toy department is due to technology. Where we as kids would love to be outside and play "GI Joe" or in most of your cases Action Force, where I was running around being Flint and you were running around being Skip, these kids are sitting infront of TV's or computers playing video games. Where we played with our action figures on rainy days they play on computers. Where we rode bicycles and dirtbikes, they play games where they race motorcycles on the computer instead of actually doing it. While computers have opened up the world to all this information, it has also insulated todays generation in that they don't interact and socialize like we did. It is a totally different world. It is sad and it is a shame.

is it that your wearing your helmet at the time you hold the door open baron? but yes this is a classic example i think chivalry has sunk to its lowest ebb.what is a "gentleman" anymore?
you knew what the black major did was wrong,but you loved him for it he was the classic bad guy you LOVED to HATE.you always wanted him to do well but he never did.because in the end the good guys always beat the bad and we loved it and we soaked it up!!! i dare say it partly also made the difference as to why we DO hold doors open!!!

Hmmm, I just had a disturbing thought - that this is exactky the kind of thing they were saying about us twenty years ago. Except of course they were out in the fresh air doing the gardening rather than sitting in dingy corners on their computers...

whats a garden?

I think it's where they used to grow paper.

Dupleman, I am a little worried. You kinda start sounding like my grandfather when he was talking about how good things were in his days.

The Baron wrote:this is exactky the kind of thing they were saying about us twenty years ago.

Exactly! History repeating, over and over and over...

To our parents our music was nothing more than noise "How on earth can you listen to that rubbish!", we did not have any manners, we did not dress properly, etc. Our parents heard exactly the same thing from their parents: rock & roll was the devil's own work, their manners stunk chewing bubble gum, they did not dress properly in their jeans, etc. Our grandparents were not behaving properly either, because the quickstep was not a proper dance to do either. How far do we need to go back?

thedupleman wrote:and if i was a child now...i think id still prefer action force over anything.

Nonsense, every kid is a product of its era. If we would be kids today, we too would be too fat, we would sit on our arses all day long playing Playstation III, we all would have a cell phone and be on the internet 24/7.

thedupleman wrote:whats a garden?

A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials. The most common form is known as a residential garden. Western gardens are almost universally based around plants. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological gardens.

you know the strongest thing going right now is star wars, that's one toy line gijoe cant keep up with, and every one thinks this toy line is going to die , when the movie comes out, its going to help the line , if any thing, and i see how they try to bring back he-man, thunder cats, etc, but this belongs to are generation , this generation now belong it ps3, computer's, hell, the cartoons arnt the same any more, i guess there's nothing really any one can do to change it,