How G.I. Joe Brainwashed An Entire Generation 

As a kid that grew up in the 80's and being told all my cartoons were just half hour toy commercials... my response is, I don't care... They were absolutely AWESOME.

I don't recall GI Joe being a Saturday morning cartoon. That thing was after school during the week in the 80s.

"GIJOE had long since disappeared from Saturday mornings" that's because GIJOE didn't air on Saturdays. GIJOE like Transformers, He-man, She-Ra and many others were Monday through Friday cartoons. Many of GIJOE's early adventures were 5 part series and specifically made to air Mon-Fri. I love the videos that say more about the writer or content maker than the actual video says about its subject matter. Tell me you were born after 1993 without saying you were born after 1993.

The title of this video should be: "Not understanding the 80s at all and seeing the generation as 'problematic'". 80's kids weren't so stupid as to not realize that their favorite TV shows were glorified toy commercials.

GI Joe cartoons in the 80’s were better written than 90% of the movies today.

Alot of us kids in the 80s were very aware of the marketing, but that alone was not the reason we wanted the toys. The cartoons were engaging that it inspired alot of imaginations to continue the adventures of GI Joe or My Little Pony once the cartoons ended and we went outside to play. Even it you were poor, a friend might have an extra GI Joe for you to borrow. Maybe that's the genius in the marketing in the 80s, the toys were for us to play with.

I've been rewatching the old GI Joe cartoon. It still holds up and I'm not embarrassed to say I like watching it.

For being 20 minute commercials for toys, they sure had incredible story lines, themes, and heroic acts of courage. These helped me get through childhood and still serve me today.

It's amazing that this was a problem 40 years ago but not when social media and apps throwing enough ads at you render said app virtually useless

The poster is clueless. GI Joe was a classic.

I am a Gen X father now and I will say it here and now that I LOVED MY 80s CHILDHOOD! Of course they were 20 minute toy commercials - we knew that back then. I had parents with the amazing power of "no!" Got toys at birthdays and Christmas and that was it. I loved my cartoons and will always have fond memories of cereal, friends, awesome cartoons, Atari and Nintendo, arcades,, freedom to go out and do stupid shit before the lights came on and classic WWF!

G.I. Joe A Real American Hero! was never a Saturday morning cartoon, nor was it on any Network television (ABC, CBS, NBC). It was strictly syndicated on Weekday afternoons, and each season began with a 5-part series that was shown Monday thru Friday.

I am 43yrs old. Im seriously sad that my son (5) will never know that almost Christmas feel of waking up before his parents on Saturday just to watch cartoons. And that slight fear of, “if i don’t watch it Saturday morning i may never get to see it” He will also never fully appreciate the fact that he can just bring up anything he wants to watch whenever he wants to watch it.🤷‍♂️

DUDE! It's YOU AGAIN! ! The guy who makes videos about the 80s who wasn't born yet , but pretends they were there. GI Joa was not a Saturday morning cartoon. It aired after school. Also If you'd been a kid in the 80s , you'd know we were down with the whole scheme to get toys any way we could. We felt in cahoots with the creators because it's geared towards . . oh the heck. Dr Mindbender put you up to this to finally brainwash us here and now but Xr's know that Knowing is Half the . . .

GI Joe did teach patriotism toward the USA and the value of teamwork. Also, it brought an interest of the military to young people after years of post Vietnam resentment towards the military. It also showed that a motley crew can still work as a team and accomplish the mission. There was one episode in which GI Joe and Cobra teamed up together to defeat an evil tycoon.

G.I. Joe was epic The PSA’s were not out of place. I moved a lot as a kid and my parents weren’t around and I was an only child. The morality of those PSA’s partially raised me and the characters were my friends

80's is the golden era of toys. With everything being digital now, VR, there will never be another great era of toys. I'm so happy I experienced it.

I have no regrets about my love of transformers and gi joe. They were icons, along with those saturday morning cartoons. Saturday always was the Best. Day. Ever.

Whoever made this was the kid in class that would tell the teach she forgot to grade yesterdays homework.

Well, we know this guy works for Cobra Commander. Yo Joe!!!

There is always a huge omission in these RU-vid docs about this era. It was not Marvel and Hasbro magically getting together - there was an ad agency in the middle who's client was Hasbro. Griffin-Bacal Advertising - literally the 1980s version of Mad Men- made those first commercials and then started Sunbow Productions who sub-contracted it all out to the Japanese studio Toei Animation, and co-producing them with US animation studio DPE Films who was bought by Cadence and renamed: Marvel Productions. Sunbow did ALL the Hasbro toy cartoons - Jem, Inhumanoids, My Little Pony, Visionaries - before the entire industry imploded a few years later. The business story is much more fascinating than the witch-hunt of parent groups trying to shut the toy-toons down.

People had a major problem with toy ads, but no one seems to have a problem with the non-stop drug ads that run now, many of which have awful side effects. Makes sense.

I feel bad for the generations after me who didn’t get to enjoy the brainwashing of GI Joe. I’m going to sit my kids down and make them watch every episode. Once they are fully brainwashed they beg me to buy them GI Joe toys, but little do they know that the toys I buy will actually be for me! Bwhahahaha!! (Cobra Commander would be proud of my evil plot).

I thought this video was going to be about how GI Joe convinced a bunch of kids to enlist when they got older. I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s, so GI Joe wasn't on air anymore, but I found the tapes at my local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and would rent them all the time. Fast-forward several years later I joined the military.

By the logic of this video's producer, it's fair to say that Star Wars brainwashed an entire generation too.

The Toys That Made Us is mind-blowing in revealing how the toy lines were made. Some crazy entertaining stories and larger than life characters in that documentary series.

I don’t remember GIJOE being in Saturday morning cartoon lineup. I remember watching it after school

We was just having fun as kids 😂😂😂😂 Our generation wasn’t the first to have toys 😂😂😂😂. Nobody blinks an eye at how the adults have always got rope in living beyond their means with their shows and commercials 😂😂😂😂😂. GI Joe was just plain fun. Stimulate kids imagination through playing with the figures. And even as a grown up, you have an instant connection with others who watched it.

Every youtube video gets this one thing wrong about GIJoe; It wasn't a Saturday morning cartoon. It was an after school cartoon that aired around 4pm Monday through Friday. The same goes for transformers he-man and Thundercats.

Who cares, the cartoons allowed us kids to escape the pressures of school and life for a couple hours on the weekend and weekdays after school. The last thing we needed was more educational programming.

I have mixed feelings about this video, but you raised several valid points and are 100% correct about toy companies in the 80's exploiting young minds for large profits (Hasbro is still at it today). However, I very much enjoyed the fantasy & using my own imagination to create new ideas & stories w/ my action figures and they'll always have a special place in my heart because it was pure fun & adventurous. Corporate greed is one thing, but us kids had some amazing creative treasure back in the day & I'm thankful to the creative minds that gave us lovable & memorable characters, along w/ fantastic tales of heroism & friendship that still hold up today.

I guess I was in that number of people who were brainwashed because I played with a lot of GI Joe toys. And the GI Joe movie from 1987 I still love that intro.

It feels like some facts were massaged to fit the story. I'm sure it aired somewhere on Saturday mornings, but as many have commented, in most areas it was a weekday cartoon. The first two GIJoe mini-series did not have any PSA tags at the end. He-Man was the first cartoon to do that probably due to the lashback to the GIJoe miniseries. The full series of GI Joe started in 1985 and also put in PSAs to provide some "edutainment". I also struggle with the use of the word "brainwashing" due to the negative connotation. You'd have to be able to prove that the kids weren't predisposed to liking the toys in the first place. I think "conditioned" would be a more fitting word choice. A cartoon tie-in did not guarantee success, so the toys had to be fun on some level as well.

It brainwashed kids to be respectful to others. At the end of each episode had a different message. Current shows for kids have zero messages. Only violence

Give me a break. G I Joe and Transformers were such detailed toys, that, as a kid, I was obsessed. Loved em. Same with gundam and others. That in turn sparked my imagination in a lot of ways and helped teach me how to draw.

As a 48 year old with a 9 and 11 year old It has been interesting how little my kids and their friends care about pretend-play with action figures compared to what I recall being all-consuming to my life in elementary school. But I have been able to sell off my old toys to other adults to put it in to my grown-up hobby of board games with miniatures. several of my GI Joe figures sold for $100+ each.

I was clueless about this when I was a kid, but dam it man, the 80s had the best cartoon. My family was too poor to buy the toys, but waking up Saturday Morning watch cartoon with a big bowl of cereal was bliss

The effect of that show was astounding. I was a kid in a small town in India and I owned around 90 GI Joe action figures.

I was a child in the 80s and never felt like buying the toys. Enjoyed the cartoons though.

I don’t care if those programs were only toy commercials. The 80’s were awesome and many of those advices are part of the moral code of my generation. Yo Joe!

I grew up in the Chicago area and GI Joe was NOT a Saturday morning cartoon. It came on during the weekdays; 3 to 3:30pm. Transformers came on right after. I would rush home from school to catch both programs.

In the 80s,GI Joe also taught us good morals and patriotism

Saturday morning cartoons may have been ads for toys, but they were fun, and a great way to take a break from 5 days of school. Hell, they've been showing shows like G.I. Joe and Transformers on Tubi, and I've been on cloud nine. Looking back, the writing, voice acting, and animation on certain shows were quality, and they still hold up today. Edit: and as someone mentioned in the comments, G.I. Joe and Transformers were actually weekday cartoons, not Saturday morning cartoons.

I grew up in the 2000s and watched all the 80s cartoons and I had the toys and I don’t regret one single minute and I still watch today

What I learned from this video is to blame ACT with why my two favorite afternoon cartoons GI Joe and Transformers stopped airing. These shows didn't "brainwash" a generation to buy toys. They had good stories that made children want to buy the toys. The GI Joe and Transformers dealt with grown up themes of fighting for something, death, loyalty, etc. The beginning of GI Joe the Movie was probably the most patriotic thing I saw directed towards children. I miss the days when we taught our children that our country and its ideals is worth fighting for. From GI Joe to Hulk Hogan to watching Red Dawn, the 80s was a good time to be a kid.

GI Joe was a little behind He-Man on release (Like a week), and they were both Monday-Friday shows, as I recall, not Saturday morning ones.

'84 myself.. and they definitely got us... I remember how upset I was in those last few years of '96-'98 where they basically ended Saturday morning and after school cartoons... and made us watch Jack Hannah play with Animals.. Damnit, I wanted Xmen, Spiderman, Power Rangers, and so many more...

As a 3 year old I sat down to watch cartoons and got visibly irritated when the commercials came on. Kids aren't stupid, they know what ads are. I'd probably describe it wrong and you'd think I knew no difference, but oh boy did I ever.

So they tried to sell us superb toys through excellent cartoons. What a criminals!

I'm an 80s kid too and I loved the commercials as much as the cartoons. To me those old 80s commercials are still more entertaining than some of the crap on Disney.

Nah, it wasn't the shows. It was ALWAYS the commercials. I am almost 50 and my son went his whole life with no "regular" TV so no commercials at all. He loved all the old shows as I had them for him to watch but he NEVER lusted after toys like we did in the 80s.

I loved GI Joe as a kid. All the kids on our block had the toys and watched the cartoons. Good times 😊

The G.I. Joe toys from the 80s are still one of the best plastic boy toys ever made. And yes, the advertising helped to safe all of my pocket money to buy as much figures and vehicles. But the cartoons also stimulated hours of joyful play (indoors and outdoors), creating mindblowing adventures and battles and the construction of cobra and g.i.joe bases. It motivated me to draw my heroes, and write stories about them. I was 'brainwashed' to get inspired and 'brainwashed' to play and to create. I can imagine much worse forms of brainwashing, as we see in our world today. Besides G.I.Joe helped to teach a generation of boys the use of a compass in good and bad (evil) behaviour, and helped to understand that freedom is something we need to protect. Hasbro, thank you, for the joyful hours of creation and play! Yo Joe!

I love how because of the removal of the like/dislike ratio how much easier it is to tell the audience opinion by simply comparing views to likes

Trust me. We were fully aware of the link between the entertainment and the advertising. We just didn’t care. Most of us also had parents who didn’t have problems telling us “No”.

Did the kids all run out to the stores and buy these toys on their own? Why aren't parents held responsible for any of this? None of this happens in a vacuum. We have personal responsibility for how we respond to marketing. We aren't helpless and we certainly aren't "brainwashed."

Brainwashed or not, I'm glad i grew up in the 80's! I'm 45 years old and I still collect giJoe and Masters of the universe toys.

Grew up watching it. Was my favorite along with looney tunes, flintstones, jetsons. Grew up during the eighties.

I look at people that weren't kids in the 80's and actually feel sorry for them. It was a GREAT time to be a kid!

G.I.JOE was a syndicated cartoon that aired weekdays, not Saturday mornings.

Its crazy to me that GI Joe stopped airing in 86. I was born in 86 and it was still huge until i was about 8 or 9

Wrong: plenty of adults that grew up with GI Joe didn’t want to join the military mainly because of what the remanence Vietnam veterans with PTSD. Plenty of adults dissuading adolescence from joining. High School shop teacher even told me “they (US Gov) own you.” Still joined and valued my service to this Nation.

I will never forget waking up one morning to my boyfriend at the time singing the G.I. Joe theme song in the shower, complete with the announcer dialogue. I fell so hard! Nostalgia is mighty!

Sir ... ... this is a silly video. Find original arguments to push agendas.

I grew up with GI Joe and I was born before 9/11. I think it’s a mix of GI Joe, post 9/11 patriotism and a Cold War veteran grandpa that brainwashed me into joining the military. I fought terrorists and communists but never had lasers shot at me; I’ve been lied to

If only we'd known about the dangers of television marketing instead of learning a bunch of useless lessons about how to be brave, responsible, smart, and respectful. Such a shame. I'm a child of the '90s and I remember the huge shift toward educational programming. Some of the shows were cool, but most of us just got bored. We spent 40 hours a week learning at school, and all we wanted on a Saturday morning was to kick back with what we considered some good stories, and the ratings of even the well-known educational shows likely reflected that. With action cartoons mostly out of favor, studios scrambled to put something out, and we ended up with little more to watch than empty, vapid comedy. Again, some of this was great, but I distinctly remember being disappointed with the lack of "serious" (to my young mind) shows to watch. I wanted more Batman: TAS and I always ended up with more crappy Scooby Doo reruns.

I loved GIJoe! The live action just haven’t been able to muster that nostalgic feeling for me. Cartoons in the 80s were awesome.

I used to do chores all week and get paid 3.25. That was enough to buy a single GI Joe figure. I would have an elaborate story about how either the Joe's or Cobra would rescue or recruit the new figure. The show inspired imagination and endless missions.

The 80's were great. I was blessed to have experienced my childhood during that awesome decade.

Knowing is half the battle. I'm 49 and this was all me. I remember G.i joe , he man Transformers , volition (the lions and the cars ) Thundercats. To put it short the 80s was awesome.

I watched the cartoons with my brothers...and played with the G.I. Joe toys when they were over. My brother still has them in his basement. I have our baseball cards and my son has our Legos. I don't care that it was all a commercial. It was entertaining and had a decent good guys vs. bad guys plot.

Gi joe was my childhood, I hold it dearly and as a adult collector of them now the feeling the cartoon and toys gave me in the 80s was magical. Thank you for the brainwash

Not the biggest fan of the overdramatic tone. I much prefer when this channel tries to look at both the positive and negative side of things to present a more nuanced argument. This one feels more like a vaguely conspiratorial video about something that was already pretty obvious ("Did you know this cartoon was made to sell toys???").

GI Joe was better than anything this channel could conjure up.

The cartoons such as GIJoe, Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Thundercats, Swat Cats, Supetman, Spiderman etc all carried an important lesson of Good vs Evil...it built character and imbued morals in us which I cherish till date... Today i c youngsters with very less morals & values and very few who have them. Times hav changed.

I don't think it had much effect on me. Certainly wasn't brainwashed. Just sometimes thought, "That you looks cool. I think I want it." But honestly, I think Rescue Heroes was most of what I got. Found out pretty quick I didn't actually enjoy the toys. I don't have enough imagination. Took my mother longer to learn that, though lol.

Independently of it’s obvious pro armament message, the OG Gi Joe cartoon showed us how different people (Whites, Blacks, Asians, etc) can work together against the corrupt (I really enjoyed how Cobra Commander was not just the generic “I’m a Naz!/Communist villain”, but a guy who has connections with powerful warmongers and millionaires).

Joes came in a bit late to India. I grew in the early-mid 90s and Gi joe was a huge success. Almost everyone had a joe growing up and we hardly had any "marketing" here. The toys by themselves were enough to be sold out. I still remember the first joes I got, storm shadow and beach head. It was only a bit later that we got cartoon network and gi joe show.

They definitely got me with He-Man toys back in the day.. They were advertising those toys Monday-Saturday mornings.. I would watch those commercials and want those action figures so bad that practically every dollar I made from chores was going towards them..

Growing up in the 80s was the best. Wish we could go back

I grew up in the ‘80s. G.I. Joe was a weekday afternoon cartoon, not a Saturday morning. Also, it was strictly an ‘80s cartoon, not a ‘90s.

I showed my son GI Joe and Transformers several years ago. We ended up watching the entire run together. At one point he turned to me and asked, "Dad, why can't they make good cartoons like that anymore?". I just answered, "I don't know, son."

Seeing the original GI Joe PSAs just feels wrong, I need a porkchop sandwich to recover

here's the corrected title: "How to waste your time while I say I wasn't alive during the 80s, without saying I wasn't alive during the 80s".

Pfft! They brainwashed us into liking toys? Wow... that's horrible.... who cares. It was awesome.

I remember GI Joe PSA's teaching the right and wrong thing to do.

In the 80's kid's watched entertaining cartoons that were toy propaganda. In 2022 kid's have unrestricted access to the internet and are being fed real propaganda. The 80's cartoons are innocent and wholesome compared to what's going on today.

I feel like I remember GI Joe being on in the afternoon after school not on Saturday morning, but maybe I'm wrong. Either way, me and my brother had a lot of GI Joe toys.

Great video! The funny thing is I was absolutely obsessed with G.I. Joe and I never even watched the show. It was the combat theme of the toys that made me like them, and much of the later 90’s Lego sets.

Sadly kids today will never know how great these toy's were along with cartoons from these amazing lines. My childhood was hard due to my handicap and I was stuck indoors and couldn't do much but I had my toy's and video games along with TV movies and music!! The 80's was something truly special.

I bought my son some of the retro wave gi joes that came out in 2020. Gi joes were my favorite toys when I was his age. He loves them. They are still his favorite toys and he's a gamer. So that says alot about how fun they are to play with. I picked up quite a few to collect, but I end up giving him one or 2 a year now for birthdays or Christmas. He really loves them

The Netflix show "The Toys that made us" goes way more into depth on the GI Joe toys if you want to learn more about this topic

GI Joe was not a Saturday show. Weekdays at 4 or 430. It was amazing and I was fully brainwashed I to buying but too broke to get more than a dozen or so....so it wasn't as effective on me.

Give me Saturday morning cartoons over the garbage today. We knew and didn't care.

We knew that they were 30 minute ads but they also taught how to use our imagination when playing with the toys. Having a good imagination comes in handy sometimes. It can help you think of creative ways to solve problems. Saturday mornings before they dumbed it down taught me how to think which you could not really learn in school. School was mostly just memorizing what teachers told to know. Those cartoons taught me how to be me and not a machine repeating school lessons and stuff. At least in college the instructors wanted us to challenge what they said in class. Having an imagination helped me to be creatively challenge my professors. My parents and grandparents liked me and my cousins watching those shows because they knew where we were on Saturday. It kept us out of a lot of trouble (sometimes we created trouble because of our imagination 🤷‍♂️). After school cartoons were great too which this video never talked about.

I do seem to remember that gi joe was a big thing back in the day and I'm not even American. Kids all wanted these figures. Just goes to show how successful the marketing was and how influential were these shows to an entire generation.

And we never saw another ad again....

The problem was the more general creeping normalization of consumerism rather than the risk that kids might want a couple of toys from one show.

whoever produced this video missed at least one fact - super friends came out well before the gi cartoons.

Like many other commenters, GI Joe defined my childhood to an extent. It wasn't brainwashing, or anything else of the sort, at least not like what younger generations see today with all of the propaganda leading them down permanent paths of self-mutilation and emotional distress. The cartoon and toys were interconnected. I could never amass a collection that let me recreate any given cartoon episode, but the figures and vehicles I did have led to some memorable battles. I kept getting GI Joes into the early '90s, long after any sense of realism left the toy line, but Lift Ticket and Low Light could still hang with whatever neon colored new-gen Joe I had to defeat Cobra. There are YT channels devoted to creating stories using not only original GI figures, but other vintage toy lines to create rather decent narrative arcs. As a solid late Gen-Xer, I can attest to the time that GI Joe saw its greatest popularity. We still did regular nuclear attack drills, as I grew up less than 100 miles from DC, and my high school still had a fallout shelter in the basement. The late Cold War era marked a time of uneasiness, with our military having fairly recently suffered its first "loss" in Vietnam, and the "Ugly Stupid Stinking Russians" having their own debacle in Afghanistan. We had acorn fights and later BB gun wars (one pump max was the rule), Reagan was President, we knew we were going to triumph over Communism, and American kids like me dreamed of one day becoming Duke, General Hawk, or Lt. Falcon. I did my time post-9/11, retired from a military career wholly unlike those listed on the file cards of my old action figures, and now just watch nostalgic content. Sears could be accused of brainwashing kids into wanting toys just as easily. Their annual catalog contained dioramas of different scenarios that made us kids want everything they sold. Then we'd get to the video game section, with the simple box art and brief description piquing our curiosity. There was a solid barrier between our wants and reality, though: our parents. Unlike so many of today's kids (admittedly including my own), we could watch cartoons daily, study the Sears catalog, and stare longingly at the Kmart toy aisles, without ever having a chance of getting what we wanted. "I want these GI Joes and an NES". Come Christmas, I was lucky to get a Go-Bot and a Lite-Brite. My kids, like so many others, can just say "I want" and all but expect they'll get it at the next semi-important moment, even a sibling's birthday or National Audobon Day. What can I say? Largely due to GI Joe and my life decisions partly influenced by that cartoon and toy line, I have a higher disposable income than my parents had, and things are much more convenient these days.