Stuff You Should Know
SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: A Partial History of Action Figures
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the history of action figures?
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Chapter 2: How did Barbie influence the design of action figures?
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of G.I. Joe in the action figure market?
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Howdy, everybody. I hope everyone is having a loving and warm December with your friends and family. I'm here to introduce a classic episode for our 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist. And this one's pretty good, if I remember correctly. It is a partial history of action figures.
We all love action figures, and if I'm not mistaken, we might argue once again about the superiority of the tall, full-sized GI Joes that I grew up with of the little action figures that Josh grew up with. Let us know who's right. Thanks, everybody. Hope you love it.
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Chapter 4: How did the Vietnam War impact G.I. Joe sales?
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's right there to my immediate right, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know the podcast. The podcast. That's right. I'm excited about this particular podcast, Chuck, which you put together. This episode, I should say. Well, do you want to go ahead and announce the title for people that maybe didn't read it?
It is, well, you're going to select the title. What's the title? Oh, geez, I don't know. Everything you ever wanted to know about, actually, some stuff about action figures that you may already know. And some stuff that may delight you. That's a working title, huh? Yeah. Yeah, but we're talking about action figures.
Chapter 5: What role did Mego play in the evolution of action figures?
That's the point of what I think that exercise just was. Yeah, I was going to say everything you wanted to know, but this, I mean, we could do. I'm sure there are entire podcasts on action figures. For sure. Yeah, and if you have a podcast on action figures, write in. Let us know. We'll tweet it out for the people whose boat this floated.
This one definitely follows in the vein of the Barbie episode, which I have to say is one of my perennial favorites. I love the Barbie episode. Oh, yeah? Yeah, and Barbie actually makes an appearance in this one. Do you like to play with dolls? I like to play with action figures. I play with Barbies.
I had older sisters, so I played with Barbies whether I wanted to or not, so I made the most of it.
Chapter 6: How did the introduction of smaller action figures change the market?
I don't remember my sister having Barbies, but surely she did, right? Yeah, if she was a girl in America from the 60s on, yes, she had a Barbie. Oh, no, my sister grew up in the Soviet Union. Oh, well, there you go. She had a Martina. There probably was a Martina. But, I mean, that was a pretty good episode, and this one's kind of similar. It's got it all.
And like I said, Barbie kind of pops up in the beginning. She actually inspired action figures, like basically directly. When Mattel, I think it was Ruth Handler who invented the Barbie doll, right? Yes. And when she and Mattel released it, it was just a huge, enormous hit.
And one of the big reasons Barbie was, number one, such a hit, and number two, so appealing to toy companies, was that when you bought a Barbie, your buying experience wasn't over. There were always like more clothes and shoes and like my sister had the pool that you could hang out with and it had like a shower that actually worked.
Chapter 7: What marketing strategies were used for G.I. Joe and other action figures?
There's just a ton of extra stuff to buy. And so when you bought a Barbie, you wanted all the other stuff too. And toy companies wanted to figure out how to do that with boys toys, but they just couldn't quite figure it out because no one had ever come up with toys. a doll for boys, and that's kind of what it required. It was coming up with a doll for boys, and no one had cracked that nut.
But Barbie made the whole thing all the more appealing, I guess. Yeah, finally this dude named Stan Weston, who actually knew Ms. Handler, and he was in the toy racket, and I guess I shouldn't call it a racket. It's a bit of a racket. It's a bit of a racket. So he said, like you were talking about, there's tons of money to be made here.
He was a military history buff and so he had this, the light bulb went off over his head and he says, what if we could come up with a soldier doll or perhaps even a series of soldier dolls and maybe not call them dolls. Actually, he didn't come up with the name.
To be fair, his boss at Hasbro, VP Don Levine or Levine in 1963, he was pitched this idea and he went nuts over it and he's the one that said maybe we should call them action figures.
Chapter 8: What are some of the rarest and most valuable action figures today?
Right. Yeah. Stan Weston approached Don Levine at like that toy fair and said, I got a great idea. And apparently he gave him one hundred thousand dollars just for the idea. And then he since he worked with Hasbro, he's like, guys, I've got a good idea here.
So that roughly translates into about $782,000 in today money, which is good dough for an idea, but of course, any time you're the schmuck that comes up with the idea that you sell for even 782 grand and it goes on to be like hundreds of millions of dollar business, you probably always kind of feel like, I got taken for a ride. Yeah, a little bit.
I'm sure Stan Westman was like, I'll have millions of good ideas like these that I can sell for $780,000 a piece, I'm sure. He may have. Yeah, I don't know. It's certainly not one like G.I. Joe, right? Well, that's what we've been talking about. We've talked about G.I.
Joe a lot on this show, so it feels appropriate that we sort of go down that rabbit hole if we're going to be talking about action figures. Well, yeah, because G.I. Joe was the one that literally started the action figure craze. Every action figure that's out there from, like, Action Jesus to the Marvel superhero action figures, every action figure came from G.I. Joe.
And if you want to get feminist about it, every action figure, including G.I. Joe, ultimately came from Barbie.
Yeah.
That's a good way to look at it. Alright, here's a deal that I never knew. G.I. Joe debuted in 1964 before Christmas. It's almost as if they had planned that. The original, I knew all this stuff, the original was 12 inches and had 21 moving parts and the thing I did not know was that G.I. Joe was the collective name of all four of these armed forces dolls. You didn't know that?
I thought the guy was Joe. No, for my era, the main guy was Duke. And for your era, the main guy was Rocky. Well, depends on which one you had. Okay. So there was Rocky was the Army and the Marines. Skip was the Navy guy. And Ace was the Air Force guy, the fighter pilot. Right, so they ran out of names after name three and circled back to Rocky.
They ran out of names and they all were identical except for their clothing.
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