welcome to my g.i.joe world

growing up, i never really played with toys. i know that's hard to imagine by the fact that i surround myself with toys now in my adult life, but as a child i never felt a real connection to children my age. and so i always wanted to get gifts that involved adult things, like board games to play with adults in the family. i avoided kids as much as i felt they were avoiding me. boys wanted to do crazy insane physically-painful manly things of which i had absolutely no interest. girls wanted to play with barbies, which i found very intriguing but i knew it was supposedly wrong for me to do so as a boy. so i shied away from it all and found things to do with adults. and this way i could use my brain, not my emotions, and connect with others.

then i found g.i.joe. it wasn't just toys. it was an entire story. characters rich in backgrounds, fantasies of saving the world or taking over the world or simply being important to others, devices that were filled with color, imagination, and small significant extras. this world suddenly opened up to me and it was neither for me to play with adults, nor did i play with other kids. this was my world. this was my fantasy. this was my time to imagine and play and enjoy and express and live.

and i lived this world wholly. once i journeyed into my g.i.joe world i fully embraced it. i was obsessed to the point where i had to have every single piece of the world. figures or vehicles or anything i had missed from the store, i would special order. for my birthday and christmas time, my family knew that the only thing, the ONLY thing i wanted was more and more g.i.joe. whenever i got the chance i would save up my money to buy more. and some of the most thrilling times in my life are the times when i would be taken to Children's Palace or Toys 'R Us or other toy outlets and find the g.i.joe aisle and just stare and read and want and desire and look for hours and hours. i never really cared about any of the other aisles. it was all i wanted right there. except for the intense desire to know what next year's crop of new figures and vehicles and such would be.

my younger brother would engage in the other toys, transformers, he-man, star wars, what have you. i would sometimes dabble a little into them and then quickly return to the only toys that mattered. g.i.joe wasn't just a toy for me. it was an opportunity to envision an alternate reality where an entire universe was happening and i could pull the strings and i could build the stories and i could create the land and sea. my room in my parents' basement was a complete series of staged actions and activities with the characters ripe in poised movement and entire scenes carefully orchestrated and visualized.

i even went further than the toys that came out of the store; i created some of my own. with hammer, nails and plywood and other materials, i fashioned my own versions of fantastical vehicles which i knew should also be part of the universe and which i longed to make real.

i certainly had my favorite characters, dusty and the baroness are two i could never put down, for complex and yet simple reasons and each is a long story for another time. but the reality is that the entire world of characters was my outlet into fantasy and imagination. the cartoon that went along with the toy production was simply the icing on the cake. i could never stop watching the shows and whenever it would come on television in the afternoons after school, i honestly felt like the television gods made that show just for me. it was my show. these were my toys. this was my world. sometimes i would let my brother or sister join in briefly, but this was my world and they were only entering where i lived.

i ponder all of this now at the time that there is a new live-action movie of the story that so enriched my childhood. of course as a child i would often daydream of a movie being made and who would play cobra commander and who would play the baroness and others. and i would consider what a fascinating movie it would have to be and how they might get it wrong or they might do it right, and how they had to have so-and-so cast and all the trappings of a young mind fantasizing about what could be if hollywood knew the world of g.i.joe the way that i did. now that i am about to watch that movie i often dreamed of some 25 years ago, i don't actually care if it's a good or bad movie or produces sequels or is popular or anything. of course i certainly don't want to walk out of the theater angry or depressed. but the reality is that the story of g.i.joe is really inside me. and watching it up on the screen is just a culmination of seeing my life now, with the toys all put away and g.i.joe so far back in my history and remembering my bedroom in the basement and the time has passed to where i'm leading a new and different life than i ever really imagined, and i feel a tug of a sense of self, of a time when i knew exactly how happy i could be from just being a part of this universe of imagination.

the movie itself is just hollywood's interpretation of my story and my world and it doesn't much matter how they do it. what matters to me is that it feels as if hollywood is doing this movie just for me. just for me. i'm a child who wanted this movie so bad and wanted everyone to share in this world so much, and they have finally decided to do it, just for me. it's my world and they're making an interpretation of it. it's a bit self-involved i know, but it's how it feels. my happiness in finding the world of g.i.joe as a child is now culminating in a big glossy movie on the big glossy screen and others may be going to see the movie too, but it's my world and others are simply entering it for a short while to see what all the fuss it about.

so welcome to my g.i.joe world everyone.