After a good thrifty period, I've started to buy a bunch of stuff again. Stuff from Amazon.com. Stff from half.com. Stuff for the show. And last Saturday I was hungrily eyeing the new iPod, though I held off knowing that could find one for $50-$100 cheaper on Ebay. But the fact that the door to my TDK Mojo player broke is certainly pushing me.

I finally broke down and bought a DVD copy of Dragon's Lair, even though it was kicking my ass last time at Paul's. Actually, I remember it kicking my ass back in the actual video arcades too, but of course I was paying 50 cents a play. It was always a game that was so fascinating in its different appearance -- a cartoon you could control! But always a bitch to play. Now that I have the DVD version, I finally "get it". You have to get into the mindset that you're not actually controlling the animation within the cartoon, but just changing what scene will play next.

But that wasn't the real piece of 80s nostalgia I bought. I certainly had childhood activities back then that did NOT screw me for 50 cents every 2 minutes. And this time, I found a 2 DVD set of G.I. Joe! And before I go any further, some 80s trivia for you: "GI Joe" was not a particular person. It was the code name of the whole top-specialist task force, created to combat an international terrorist organization called "Cobra".

Now this was something I was OBSESSED with as a boy, especailly in second grade. That was when the series was almost brand new (at least the wave of toys for the 80s; I know toys with the name "GI Joe" go back to the 1960s). I collected the action figures and the vehicles that went with them. I bought some of the comic books. I had some of the other merchandised products with the logo stuck on it, like a scuba mask and a web belt. And like many around this time, I liked army stuff in general. I had hundreds of the mini plastic figures. I had a plastic army helmet and canteen. My favorite outfit was by far my camoflauge shirt & pants. I wanted to join the GI Joe fan club, but even though my dad supported me in the idea, my mom succeeded in talking me out of it. Or at least gave such a strong impression that it would be a tremendous hassle, that it wasn't worth asking for. ("Well it's $5, and you get a belt which you already have, and some poster, and these dog tags which we can get somewhere else, and...")

But the cartoon show was something I watched regularly. Every day I'd come home from school and turn on TV56 to watch, in this order: the last bit of Voltron, GI Joe, Transformers, and The Thundercats. GI Joe was honestly not my favorite out of all those, but again, I did hit a huge obsession period in the years before that. I guess I lost interest for the same reason I lost interest in Garbage Pail Kids: they were coming out with way too many to keep up with, in terms of both perchasing them and just keeping up with the plots, and on top of that I was just outgrowing toys.

The TV show all started with one mini-series. Cobra creates "The Mass Device", a laser that can transport anything but it runs on 3 incredibly rare elements. Cobra and GI Joe travel to 3 different places on the earth to find the only sources of these elements. With the commercial breaks, it was probably over 3 hours. This is the one I remember the most fondly. It was airing well into past my bed time, so my dad said I couldn't watch it. I watched it upstairs in their bedroom anyway, while he was downstairs. But my dad caught me -- he took the time to feel the cable box later, and realized it was hot.

So now, 20 years later, I finally get a chance to see this again. And I vividly remember a lot of the scenes. It brought a tear to my eye now and then. I remember how amazing it was as a kid, to see my toys and the characters from my comic books come to life. The enemy's logo helped inspire a club I formed at the time, called "The Cobra Club", but that's another story.

"Yo, Joe!"