CHANGING GI JOE! A Study of the 1990s w/ Vinnie D'Alleva

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I recently had the opportunity to interview Vinnie Deleva, who is the former G.I. Joe brand manager during the 1990s, specifically from 1990 until the end of the three and three quarter inch Real American Hero line in 1994. As you can probably guess, the goal here was to add to my own mental registry and database in order to turn around and present and share the information with all of you. Vinnie and I end up talking about the time he spent as brand manager for the Transformers toy brand in the lead up to his time with G.I. Joe as well as his time as the brand manager for Hasbro's WWF wrestling line. Additionally, Vinnie shares some of his own favorite memories and the things he's proudest of having worked at Hasbro and I was able to ask Vinnie to elaborate a little bit on some of the sales dollars that were being generated through the G.I. Joe or Real American Hero toy line and we also discussed certain things such as a very key recalled item from this era. We also talked about how some toys were made simply because of cost saving measures and the benefits behind having done the solutions that they had for this particular challenge and we even go as far as to answer a long-standing mystery at least within many of the hardcore G.I. Joe fans and researchers. This will be a completely different kind of toy history video than you're used to seeing me do but in any case I was really excited to end up sharing it with all of you. So sit back and enjoy. Can you maybe introduce yourself and give a little bit of an overview about [00:01:31] Vinnie Deleva: what you did? Sure. I started off as a product manager and was at Hasbro for 10 and a half years. Moved my way up to the ranks until I was at VP and I was seven years of that 10 I was on boys toys. Worked on first Transformers and then WWF and then G.I. Joe and then I moved over to a new division that was called Hasbro Direct and I worked on and I worked on all those brands again and then also all of the other boys toys brands that we had the rights to after we acquired Kenner Parker Tonka. So I worked on Batman and DC Comics and Star Wars and host of other things. [00:02:13] Speaker 1: Because Transformers is right where the heart is it seems like you came in after the 89 line was planned so would you have had anything to do with some of the marketing on this on the 89 line? [00:02:23] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah I came in in February of 89. So the 89 year was well often in production so I was working on what we were going to do for 1990 which was the ill-fated Action Master line. So I was wrapping up Micromaster and Action Master was the next thing the company decided to do because put it this way you really can't have a boys action line without supporting content. And the management team cut the programming for Transformers because it was expensive and they were trying to make a number and they did the same thing a couple years later on G.I. Joe. They cut the funding for the show and that just makes it almost impossible to have growth in an action figure line. And so I came on the tail end of Transformers and unfortunately was on the tail end of G.I. Joe as well. [00:03:18] Speaker 1: Now I've often heard the story that G.I. Joe was the most profitable but Transformers always drew more revenue. Is that correct? [00:03:28] Vinnie Deleva: G.I. Joe was always pretty steady at around $100 to $130 million. G.I. Joe never went that high but Transformers tended to have a peak and then it started to decline. In the toy industry that's par for the course. So there's a peak and then there's a drop off and if you don't reinvent yourself then the drop off is permanent. So a lot of brands that have been around for a long time reinvent themselves. And that was part of the story that we were trying to do with Action Masters in Transformers and then eventually that we had to do the same thing on G.I. Joe. [00:04:13] Speaker 1: Okay fair enough and am I right in assuming that while Transformers would have a peak of $300 million am I right in assuming that there's a split in revenues with the car on number one and number two it costs more to make the product. [00:04:24] Vinnie Deleva: So that always ate up part of the margin am I right now because we you always price to make sure you keep the same margin right so Transformers always was had the appearance of being more expensive than another similar plastic toy because of the transforming part of it part of that was cost and part of it was perceived value. So there was always plenty of money to be made on both those lines to car got a royalty for the work that they did in that that deal. So that deal changed uh you know modified evolved over time um as they continued to develop product and now they're almost synonymous with Hasbro like they develop that line globally which is great. [00:05:08] Speaker 1: Oh fantastic okay so that $300 million would that have been a little bit before you came on like with that oh yeah that $300 million was in you know $85-86. [00:05:18] Vinnie Deleva: That makes sense because that was around the time of the movie and yeah the movie didn't do anything just didn't didn't do anything. Megatron Megatron in in Optimus Prime yes they were very important parts of the show but nobody nobody would thought that there would be such an uproar over the fact that you were changing out you know characters. It was part of evolving the line and not resting on your laurels um that turned to be not so good um because that led to a wave in Transformers of trying different manners of transformation without Optimus. Yes and that storyline in that content I think was not really understood enough by Hasbro at the time. Certainly you can't understand it now. [00:06:03] Speaker 1: Being four years old when Optimus Prime died it did impact you know I can speak firsthand. [00:06:08] Vinnie Deleva: I'm so sorry but he he was killed off before I got there so oh yeah I got there in 89 when that was all said and done. Did you go to work on Beast Wars after afterwards oh yeah okay yeah cool so Beast Wars was a really interest was a really interesting time um by that time we had acquired Kenner Parker Tonka Kenner Parker Tonka and there was a number of you know factions in the company that were trying to set up um centers of excellence they were called and so preschool was in Rhode Island. Play school? Play school or preschool? A preschool preschool which which included the play school brand okay but also all the licensed preschool like Barney and some of the other things that we did. Um and then uh Nerf and boys toys in girls toys the centers of excellence were in Cincinnati. Oh okay and so here I was in Rhode Island and in the first stage of this reorganization there was a lot of people that were let go and they they had two teams set up still in boys toys in Rhode Island. I ran one which was uh called the uh riot team for Rhode Island um Rhode Island something something um and Bob Swanson was in charge of the Tonka team and after a year they folded my team into Cincinnati and they gave me the opportunity to move there but I just I was not interested in going there. Um and I was made another offer to join um and I was made another offer to join the new Hasbro Direct team which seemed much more creative and much more interesting to me so I took that role um there and I ended up working on all the boys toys brands anyway um and had more flexibility because we could you know utilize um for example tooling that had already been you know paid for and we still have the rights to do it but nobody was doing anything. We did a line of um aliens figures where it was in a colonial marine and an alien as a two-pack and we did that for KB toys. Were you also the brand manager then for Beast Wars or were you doing a different role on Beast Wars? Yeah so before we moved over to um Hazard Direct we had a year as the riot team and we were charged with resurrecting Transformers and some of the people in Cincinnati had some really strange ideas on how to do that. And some of them were were very forceful about not even using the Transformers name or any character names from the original G1. They wanted it as different as it possibly could be because the feeling was the Transformers line had gotten very stale because it was the same thing you know just in slightly different ways. So um so we were we were looking at all different kinds of things we did all different kinds of exploration everything from you know more roleplay types of product that would turn into different robots. Um to uh different kinds of uh different kinds of articulation like ball and socket joints for articulation instead of just single plane which is what we had before. Um to uh different things we had before. Um to uh different kinds of exploration. Uh different kinds of exploration. Um more organic. So we showed all of these different concepts to our management team. Um and we thought we were going to do all of them. Um and they went through it. And when we got to the ones that had to do with the animals and they were realistic looking animals. And that was by a suggestion by Al Ferraro. Big Guyver fan. And Guyver was this sort of organic looking Ultraman type of character from from anime and from Japanese TV. So we incorporated that look into the robot forms of Beast Wars. And when we showed that the management team just jumped out of their seats and said that is it. Okay so you know the part of the formula back then was you know have um have a two pack with a mini comic book. So we did a crocodile and a bat as Megatron and Optimus. Yup. And we had developed all those you know characters before we decided we were going to put them as a two pack. I would not have chosen a bat or but we needed the right price point. So we had to go with what was done because we had a date to hit to launch. The management team did not want us to use the you know the existing names. But I convinced them to at least keep Optimus as part of the name and would be Optimus Primal. Right. They were they were fine with that. And Megatron was was Megatron. And I remember that we were we were wrestling with what are they going to be. And my favorite one of my favorite monster movies is King Kong. It's the fight between King Kong and the T-Rex in that movie that gave us inspiration to make Optimus the gorilla and the mammal. And Megatron the lizard or cold blooded and we made him a T-Rex. But over time we have like the insects and the reptiles be the bad guys. And then the warm blooded animals were in the birds where we're part of the good guys like that's how it ended up migrating. But we had a character called Dinobot put on the good guys only because we needed another good guy figure and there wasn't another one developed. So we had to make him work there. That's why that storyline had him be sort of like a reluctant trader in a way. I mean I wasn't really crazy about the animation but it was new. And the other struggle we had was pretty early on we used the name Predacons because we had used it before it cleared and we had a registered trademark. But I couldn't get up with a name to save my life on the good guys. So one day we decided to go down to lunch and our coordinator was driving and she had Maxima. I'm walking into the parking lot and I'm walking up behind the car and I see the name moniker of Maxima and I'm like wait a minute. What if we call the Maximals. And so I came back from lunch and went up to legal I submitted it in there it cleared and I'm like that's what we're going to call it. So we're going to call it Maximals and that stuck. So you invented the name Maximals. [00:12:52] Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh that's this is why I have you here is stories like this that I some of my friends don't think to ask this right. [00:12:59] Vinnie Deleva: It's a job as much as it's fun right and I won't tell you it's not fun because it is. But it's a job and you run into problems and you got to be creative to figure out how that is. And if I hadn't gone to lunch that day I'd be still thinking about what the hell is the name of the good guys. Because we could not come up with one that cleared. [00:13:20] Speaker 1: Do you recall that in other parts of the world like some Canadian stations advertised it and even made new animation for the logo as beasties and not beast wars. [00:13:29] Vinnie Deleva: Yes, because beast wars was was deemed as being too violent. Yeah. And so they they changed it. The reason we came up with beast wars was Kenner and always did a good job of this doing the second year of any movie related action figure line because the first year you just scrambling to get something done. But the second year you got a little bit more time and you know you can come up with some better ideas and I loved their Terminator future wars naming and branding. I lifted that to create beast wars. Wow. [00:14:06] Speaker 1: My mind's blown here because this this is a bunch of stuff I've not had a chance to ask. Yeah. And a lot of my friends are Joe guys or yeah, like G1 transformer guys. But yeah, I was 14 years old when beast wars came out. Okay, and I was like it was like that right age group. Right. And it's kind of amazing to hear all this. [00:14:22] Vinnie Deleva: And what other you may find this interesting. So one other kind of connection to that was a couple of years later when I moved over to the Hasbro direct line. You know, we did a lot of exclusives for the different retailers because that was also a trend at that point in time in KB toy was always really thirsty for, you know, action figure lines and trying to resurrect them and things like that. So I knew of transformers tooling that had come from Japan that in that was done in the UK that we had no plans on doing in the US because it's all based on more G1 oriented kind of things, you know, was more like vehicles. So we took some of that product and created machine wars for KB. And that was a lot of fun. But there was all kinds of arguments, all kinds of arguments with the Cincinnati team who by that time had taken over transformers because they dissolved my team. And anything we did, there was always this cry of, oh, it's going to eat into our market share and all that. And they just did not understand that, you know, in the toy industry, you should be so lucky that something that your sister division does eats into, you know, your volume somehow because it really is all additive. But they were taught to be very myopic and myopic they were. And so it was always a tussle with them. But we always find a way to make it work. Well, speaking of things that did last though, spend a bit of time on this. I remember every single one of those. So this, this has got a really interesting story. So LJN had this license for, you know, several years and they were, they were struggling. And so, um, the licensing company was shopping WWF around and our VP at the time was Neil Friedman, who has become a legend in the toy industry. And Neil was a huge fan of, of wrestling, huge fan. So he put, he selected me and, and, um, Dan Price was our design lead, um, to work on this. And Dan had developed a series of, of figures for another product line that never came to market called Haunted World. And it was something that they were working on with, uh, Takara. And it was all, you know, monsters that had some kind of transformation in them and different features in, in their bodies and things like that. So Dan used that as a jumping off point to create action figures that had features built into them that replicated different kinds of wrestling moves. You're just going to die when I tell you this, but at the time we wanted these to retail for 499. [00:17:10] Speaker 1: Hmm. [00:17:11] Vinnie Deleva: So it means we had to have it sell at 3, 399 is what our price was to our retail trade. And, um, so we're, we're developing this line and this was during the last days of Steven Hassenfeld, where he's still coming into the office and we needed his sign off in order to finish the deal. And I remember it was one of the only two times I got in front of him was to, to show him this line with Neil there. And, um, so we showed him what the profit margin was. Okay. And we were short by like one 10th of a point. Okay. And so he said, get me one, one 10th of a point more in profit to hit our target and go. So, so we changed the back of the package to be that, that gray sort of wasn't glossy. It wasn't printed. It was just black and white to get to the margin so that we could be at 3 99. [00:18:14] Speaker 1: So you would wholesale them for three 99 to have retailers put them out for 4 99. Is that what I'm saying? Yes. I see. [00:18:21] Vinnie Deleva: So not a lot of margin in there for the retailer, but that, that at the time, that's what promoted toys, toys that were on TV that were, you know, the drivers. That's what, that's what you got. [00:18:31] Speaker 1: So getting to kind of like the main reason why we're here. I remember it on the DVD Blu-ray set when you talk to Carson Metaxas about how GI Joe started. And I realized it was a few years before your time, but you also mentioned that the miracle on ice was one of the big things that kind of helped be a catalyst for GI Joe. [00:18:48] Vinnie Deleva: Well, that brought patriotism back in with that, that was a catalyst of creating, you know, a real American hero. That was all based on that feeling that was running through the country for, you know, the underdogs, the United States to win against the Russians. [00:19:04] Speaker 1: And this is kind of where I guess what you were leaning into earlier is after you make the Tonka acquisition. And I was able to find the February 1st, 1991 article that had, that said the deal was over half a billion. So now you've now a few months after you're on GI Joe, cause you got there mid 1990, right? Right. On GI Joe. And a few months later, now you've got this monster called Tonka that had Kenner, Parker and all these other previous toy companies. So can you comment a bit about the, maybe the contentious and internal, um, competition that would have picked up? [00:19:36] Vinnie Deleva: Well, it certainly was, it certainly was contentious. Um, we were, we were kept separate from each other. Okay. But I, I was tended always to be friendly with anybody that I met. So when I had the opportunities to meet people from Kenner, I wasn't afraid to go up and talk to them. You know, we saw them at sales meetings and, you know, trade shows and things like that. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but maybe 92, 93. There was an opening in Cincinnati for somebody to work on nerf. They made that announcement in Hasbro too. So here we are now openings that were at different divisions now became open, fair game for anybody to apply to. So I, I applied to it. I scared the living crap out of half of, of the team because they're like, what's, what's he doing? Well, how's he, how could he go there? Uh, but I was just curious in what I came to find out was they really weren't that interested in, in me personally. What they wanted to do is they wanted to pick my brain on how we operated differently from them. So I'm happy to tell them how I did my job and it was very different from how they did things. And not that one was better or, or worse. It was just, you know, very different. I even met with Bruce Stein, who was the president of the Kenner division at the time, because he wanted to know about it. So it was, it was a lot of fun. I was up there for like a day and a half, you know, to do the interviews and, and then, then came back. And then when I came back, my team made it known that they did not want me to go. I wasn't going to go anyway. So I stayed. We're happy. [00:21:18] Speaker 1: You did. I read about Bruce Stein a little bit in G Wayne Miller's toy wars. Actually. In addition to all that, you did mention, I believe in that interview with, with 3d Joes, that it was kind of like chasing a dragon with Kenner, because if there was a movie year, Batman could do upwards of 500 million in revenues. Well, he was trying to get to a hundred. Yeah. Yeah. And your baby, many of your babies are on this. And yes, even including Sergeant Savage in there. There were that many. Apparently this is from Carson. And then the Sergeant Savage is, I just threw in there. [00:21:58] Vinnie Deleva: Yes. Yes. I would say some of them, some of them are true segments and others are really just kind of features that were driven like sonic fighters and supersonic fighters. They weren't really a team that we wrote a story around. They were really just a feature that we were highlighting and developing, you know, an assortment around. Kirk did a great job in showing us all in boys toys what had been happening really in the world over the last, you know, three to four years. What he showed us was in 82, there really just wasn't anything else except for GI Joe and Star Wars. And then He-Man came. And every year there was more and more action figure brands because cable TV exploded. And now you had places to go other than the three networks and then the two, you know, VHF and UHF channels. When cable came along, all of a sudden now you can get content anywhere and retailers only needed to hear what was going on. But what everybody kind of missed is that there weren't any more kids that was just fragmenting the same market size with double, triple, quadruple the amount of action figure brands that had been there, you know, three or four years ago. And so everything was going to get small because kids don't have any loyalty. They try and they play with anything, which is what you want them to do. And I always use the analogy of the first Toy Story movie that when Andy puts on his hat and pretends all these different toys of different characters like that's how they play. And that's what you want them to do, not the brand loyalists and try to sell them a brand because that doesn't that it does. It goes over the head and parents, you know, it may make it easier for parents to buy things, but it forces those brands to work harder that the products that they come up with are really, you know, worthwhile. We were looking at all those different brands that had been created year over year. I'm like every single one of these things has some military element in it. OK, so why are we letting these brands step on our turf? So I said, let's let's come up with a plan to create a segment because I had Sky Patrol and I had Tiger Force to follow. So I don't take any credit for inventing the segment idea. I just took it and blew it up. And what we ended up doing was it gave us things to talk about all year long so we could have something new almost every quarter of the year. And that helped us drive sales. It helped us get more space and it helped us thwart, you know, all these other, you know, factions that were out there, which we always looked at as it was taking, you know, was taking our brand. And it worked for two years. It worked. But what we found out after the second year was when you start to believe each of these segments can live on its own. Right. Then you start getting into planning for the fourth quarter and you want each one of your segments to have the big Christmas gift. But there's not more kids and there's not more kids buying GI Joe. So we created, you know, four big items for Christmas when there's only ever been one for GI Joe and we didn't grow sales. All we did was divide sales and that got really expensive to do the commercials and run the media for four big items in the fourth quarter rather than one. And so none of them really stood out. None of them really drove a ton of volume. It was clear that we weren't going to get a TV show. We weren't going to get a movie. And the powers that be decided that, you know, Kenner was quote unquote, the experts at action figures and that they should be given GI Joe. And they knew it was going to be a big emotional thing, which is why they didn't do it, you know, right away when they had that first round of reorgs. That's when GI Joe went to Cincinnati and I was left with the team that did Transformers. We worked on the mask, you know, beast wars, we worked on a couple of speculative things that didn't come to play. And, you know, that took us the better part of the year to turn all that stuff around. And then they moved that all up to Cincinnati that year after that. [00:26:43] Speaker 1: That's amazing. And like you bring up a good point, like you're dividing the audience for kids. Cause like, if I'm looking back at say 1992, do I want that GI Joe headquarters or do I want the talk so loud? They're both big boxes. Yeah. Right. So I, I think I see what you're saying now. And that's why 1993 had all these huge segments and then a dip in sales, which we'll get into a little bit later. [00:27:03] Vinnie Deleva: We had, I mean, the, the 12 inch scale, um, really got us over the hump of a hundred million dollars in the first time in a few years. Look, I, I talked to everybody and as you know, there are people that have different, um, areas or errors of GI Joe that they are, uh, passionate about. Yeah. And the, all the other sections did not passionate about. Yes. So I, I talked to a lot of people about, I liked GI Joe when it was classic and more realistic. Why'd you do all those bright colors and all these other kinds of things. And I said, okay, well, first of all, you think a bazooka guy wearing a football Jersey is realistic. Cause that's not realistic. No. Secondly, that line was dying. Yeah. Okay. It w it was going away. If we had left it as is and, and become, you know, you know, um, purists ourselves, we would not have GI Joe in the nineties. You know, we would call it a day. So using those bright colors was a way to at least be different and follow trends. Follow trends because there are, there are color and brand trends that, you know, go in there. But one of the things that we didn't do fast enough was to really understand the shift in action figure play because GI Joe was never an action figure line. It's a vehicle line. Yeah. When you look at the financials, the majority of the sales comes from the vehicles, not the figures. And remember the figures were a dollar 99. Yeah. You had to sell so many of them, you know, to even, they were 10, they were less than 10% of the sales. Yep. You know? And meanwhile, you have Batman who had the unheard of price for an action figure of 599. We're at $1.99. We're at $1.99, $5.99. And, and, and he's cleaning up. And we're just scratching our head. Like what the heck, what, what, what, what has happened? And it took us a while to realize that the vehicles needed to have features in them that we weren't allowed to do because Steven Hassenfeld had this thing about shooting projectiles. So it wasn't until he passed away and Alan became CEO that that rule was lifted and we cranked it to get features built into those toys. But I just think we, we just missed the trend. We focused still a lot on vehicles and not enough on how figures were really becoming the driving force because of all the content rather than, you know, the vehicles. And so that, that's a big difference in GI Joe, um, that, you know, when you look at the, the Star Wars line, Star Wars has, you know, some decent vehicles too. But if you count up the number of vehicles that they had in GI Joe had GI Joe will always beat them on the number of vehicles. Cause that was what our line was. So I'm not trying to dodge the, dodge the, the criticism. Cause look, if you don't like bright colors, that's cool. You know, but there are some that that's what GI Joe is to them. I grew up with them. [00:30:25] Speaker 1: So, you know, I get it. Yeah. The one thing that really surprised me was learning recently that when Sergeant Savage was conceived, it was conceived early enough that it was actually going to be in parallel with some of the stuff that got canceled with GI Joe, like ninja commandos. Right. So a lot of people kind of look at Sergeant Savage, like it replaced the three and three quarter inch line. But if you'd kept going with battle core Rangers and animals, the three and three quarter inch line would have run in parallel with this four and a half inch line, wouldn't it? [00:30:54] Vinnie Deleva: Well, the plan was that Joe would be going to four and a half inches. Oh, I see. So it would jump over there to be competitive because everything else was, was taller and bigger than we were and certainly higher price, which means it drove more revenue. And here we are. We can't just turn a blind eye to say the heritage can only ever be three and three quarter inch because GI Joe didn't start that way. It started at 12 inches, changing up the game is really important to do. Otherwise you get really stale. And the three and three quarter inch line was a mainstay because of how popular it was and how different those three and three quarter inch figures were to other figures in the marketplace. They had tremendous posability. [00:31:39] Speaker 1: Right. Okay. I, I guess, is that why the, the animals were a bit taller and why the ex soldiers were planned to be a bit larger? Yes. Did you have a favorite among these segments? [00:31:48] Vinnie Deleva: Well, I will tell you that only because it was really kind of my, my claim to fame, if you will, is you don't have hall of fame up here. Hall of fame was nobody in management ever really understood what the hell we were trying to do with that. It was again, something new, something different. And what I felt was that it was a way to bring dads into playing with their kids, which had not been done. And I don't want to say it's the first nostalgia play there was, but it was done specifically to appeal to dads. So when we developed that, it was always meant to be 12 inch versions of the three and three quarter inch characters, which is why the first Duke looks the way that he does. That was a target exclusive and the unwritten rule that Alan Hassanfold had with his division presidents was, look, I just need to see the main line of what you're driving. I don't need to see the exclusives. Okay. That's what you said. And, and Larry Bernstein, who was our president, didn't tell him we were doing it. And I didn't know that Larry didn't tell him we were doing it. So when we went into production, I had two cases sent to me to give to the executive team, because I was really proud of it, you know, because it was something that I thought was the right thing to do. And by that time we'd already known by the time I got my samples, we had known that this thing sold out in three hours and it started to get around. And then I just added gasoline on this smoldering fire because Alan hated it. Okay. He didn't like, he didn't like the whole edge line. He didn't like that Duke because he didn't think that doing 12 inch, we should be doing the three and three quarter inch characters. He grew up on it, lived in Hong Kong to work on the clothes. Okay. Of the original GI Joe. And so he always saw it as a rebirth of that original sort of every man approach. Not. Yeah. Characters of it. Right. So that blew up and I got, I got chewed out for it. And then I got accolades for it. And so did Greg Bernstein. And eventually we ended up doing both because what, what happened was after we, we, we redid Duke's face. Okay. To please Alan. Yeah. We did all the other characters based on 92, right? For 92. Right. Okay. So after we did that, we did all the other characters based on the three and three quarter inch characters. But when the GI Joe team was moved up to Cincinnati, they continued it based on the every man approach. And Alan had, you know, a hand in that. Yeah. [00:34:50] Speaker 1: So, uh, we did talk a little bit about the sales and everything, and I believe you've seen a similar graph to this before. [00:34:57] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. [00:34:58] Speaker 1: And of course, you know, for the audience there, the, the GI Joe sales numbers are in red and the sales numbers in blue, or that's the total sum of the boys toys industry. Right. And it wasn't until the other day that I tallied up that the numbers in red up until 1993 hits $1.3 billion, which kind of shows the success of GI Joe during its run. And we can kind of see there, like you said, it was over a hundred million dollars for a number of years. Right. You get to 1990 and 1991, it's struggling. And then now you've got the hall of fame line that now after the target release, you've got four figures, I believe in 1992 and boom, there's your hundred million. Right. So this is kind of a fascinating thing to kind of see the trend of GI Joe. Mm-hmm . The one thing that I found kind of interesting, um, because, and thanks again to 3D Joe's for rebuilding the slide and Joe declassified for unearthing the information was because this would have been done. And then 1994, the line would have ended. There's no 1994 total on this sale slide, but, um, I was able to, thanks to my friend, Chris Murray, find at least a partial number that was, if you can believe it was a David Letterman cover of Esquire magazine. Yeah. From December of 1994, where there's an article that's written at the time of the convention. Yeah. That talks about like, so, so the information in the article would have been current as of August of 1994 that year when the line ended. Right. And the lady who wrote the article mentions that sales were at about $26 million up to that point. Um, when did she, when did she write the article? She probably would have written it in, in August because she was at the convention and she was reporting on the convention. Yeah. So that leads me to, and you know, I mean, I'm not, I mean, if I can test your memory. Great. But, um, you correct me if I'm wrong. That leads me to think that the information is as of July because August numbers aren't final. So if you've got 26 million, that leads me to understand why the, why the line had to end. [00:36:48] Vinnie Deleva: Well, by the end of that year. Okay. We had done about 60 million, 60, 65 million. Okay. Okay. Which was basically back down to where it had been when we tried to resurrect it the first time. GI Joe was always looked at as a cash cow for Hasbro for two reasons. One is it had no royalty attached to it to pay anybody else. Yeah. Okay. And that the growth of revenue, you know, was far outpaced the cost of developing the TV show. [00:37:26] Speaker 1: Hmm. [00:37:27] Vinnie Deleva: Okay. I see. As the cost of doing the TV shows went up, it would, it would require Hasbro to invest more in GI Joe, which means the overall margin would get affected. Hmm. And they were not willing to do that because it would affect how the company was perceived. If all of a sudden the cash cow wasn't throwing off the same amount of profit, nevermind the dollars, but the profit margin. [00:37:55] Speaker 1: Hmm. [00:37:56] Vinnie Deleva: Okay. And all of GI Joe vehicles up until 95, you know, were all made in Rhode Island because Hasbro owned its own factories. Hmm. And a shift needed to happen where that stuff was going to need to be made in China because that's where all the competition was being, all those products were being made with better looking products in lots more features at the same price points that we were doing them at. Okay. And so there were a number of sort of self-administered rules that were put on that brand, you know, by the management team at Hasbro for, you know, for very good reasons, but inevitably it added to the slowness of GI Joe reacting to the marketplace. Okay. [00:38:47] Speaker 1: That's very interesting to hear all of that. [00:38:50] Vinnie Deleva: That's this comparison. First of all, in there is incorrect because you're, you're, you're comparing a full year. Yeah. Right. To a half a year when the toy industry does 90% of its business in the fourth quarter. Bam. That's what I was about to say. [00:39:07] Speaker 1: That's why it says partial sales there. And why I underlined it and why I mentioned it was July because I was like, I know it's an incomplete number. Yeah. And people always tell me that Christmas is the big boost. Yeah. [00:39:18] Vinnie Deleva: And 30, that was the 30th anniversary. We pulled out all the stops and the product was working. The 30th anniversary product didn't come out till the second half of the year. And that was extremely well received. In fact, we had the convention on the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier in Toys R Us was there and set it up in a year later. They wanted to look at their numbers and couldn't figure out why their numbers were off until they realized that the year before the Intrepid was the largest store sales in the entire company during that month. [00:40:00] Speaker ?: Hmm. [00:40:01] Vinnie Deleva: That's kind of fascinating. One day or two days. I think we did it. Two days. We're selling product off the Intrepid 30th anniversary product. It was the largest day for Toys R Us in their history of the company in of like, it was the biggest quote unquote store that year for them. [00:40:20] Speaker 1: That's very, see, that's why we're here. We learn these kinds of things. And when you say about 60 ish million for 1994, I guess that includes the hall of fame line as well. Yes. [00:40:30] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:40:30] Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. That's why I know I was never a fan of this incomplete number. And that's why I was like, okay, I know it's not lower. Whoever wrote this, she knew it was incorrect. Correct. Correct. And that's why I kind of had to look back. I'm like, is it the December issue? So it leads people to think it's December information. I'm like, wait a minute. Yeah. That's why you see me at the bottom of the slide. They're backtracking August to September was when it was probably written because the information is from the Intrepid and they wouldn't have the full August. They would probably have July and not accounting for the Christmas spike. So my friends warned me. They're like, if you talk to Vinny about this, he's going to have a very different take on what's written here. So we already chatted a little bit about this, but do you remember taking that photo of the young Vinny back in the nineties? Yeah. [00:41:11] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. All those DM binders. [00:41:13] Speaker 1: Oh God. Now this, this is a fantastic magazine. This is a must have issue in my eyes. And that's where the article about your baby, the Duke is there. Yeah. [00:41:24] Vinnie Deleva: I think I have, I think I have that, that issue someplace. It's amazing. [00:41:28] Speaker 1: And so this is what we were talking about before we jumped online and how things journalistically kind of got paraphrased a little bit. Cause you mentioned it was 20,000 and then another 20,000, which is where they probably got the 40,000 on the screen. [00:41:43] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. Well, originally when we did the deal for targeted and did projections, we thought, okay, we're going to launch with 20,000. That'll take us until October. And then we'll have another 20,000 shipped then. And so the deal was that they would take 40,000 for the year when it sold out so quickly. They needed to pick a number to order. You know, you have to pick a number. So they picked another 20,000, but that's not how many rain checks there were. We never got a final count of the number of rain checks. [00:42:14] Speaker 1: Okay. [00:42:15] Vinnie Deleva: They just picked another 20,000 thinking, okay, well that should take us, you know, to at least when we can get some more, but, but it wasn't, it wasn't enough. And by the, that time, the second group hit, we were already making the third batch of it for, you know, the holiday season. And that's when they, they added another 80,000 altogether to that third wave. And then that sold out too. I see. [00:42:39] Speaker 1: So that's how you got 20 and then 20, which makes 40. And that's the oversimplification here. And then that remaining number that gets to 120,000 is another 80,000. Exactly. And I guess that's, I guess that just comes down to the paraphrasing back in 1994, which is why it was written to 60. Yeah. Either way, it's a big number, right? [00:42:55] Vinnie Deleva: It's an enormous number for a $30 toy that had no TV advertising. A lot of vision on Target's part to be able to really get behind something like this. [00:43:06] Speaker 1: It's become kind of what you're known for. And a friend of mine, when he knew I was going to interview you, he goes, Ken, I know you don't have one of those Target Dukes. I will, I will gift you one because by the end of that interview, you will be such a big fan of it. You will want one. So he's going to give you one. [00:43:21] Vinnie Deleva: It was such a great project to, to work on. And, and what made me feel good about it was that the design guys who had created this and just were never able to get management to buy off of it, finally got to execute what they had always envisioned, you know, and I didn't even get it done. All that happened was I kept pushing our president to do it. And he shot it down every time until we had that meeting with Target the next day after a line review and they brought it up. Yes. You know, and Larry's a sales guy, you know, by, by, you know, uh, by training. And when they started talking about doing a big thing, he wasn't going to turn down that opportunity and we had agreed to do two figures. But then as Joe sales continued to decline, he's like, I'm just, this is a distraction. And he was afraid that it would just fail. And you know, that would be the end of it. Um, so I appreciate how he had to look at that thing, but I did an end run on him and got Target to meet him in the lobby. And he called me and he never yelled at me. He just said, did you call down here? And I said, yeah. He goes, what, what are you doing, Vinny? I said, cause Larry, you're wrong. I said, I know this is going to work. And he's like, oh, for God, can we just do one? Can we just do one? And I said, all right, we'll, we'll do, we'll do Duke. Okay. He goes, all right. He goes, I can't believe I'm asking your permission. Larry, you, you, you wanted sales to increase. I'm telling you, this is the way to do it. So, um, you know, and I was so sure of myself and I, I really believed in the design team in what they came up with. You know, it was not the, it was not the recreation of the Joe I played with, but it was a new version and, you know, it had really good camel fabric on it. And, you know, by this time in Hasbro's history, they were a huge player. They weren't a huge player back in the sixties. They weren't. No. And so by this time, you know, we're talking about the nineties, like they knew what the hell they were doing. And they had the best vendors on this product. And, you know, the stitching was excellent and it, you know, everything about it was better. The only thing that we sacrificed was the body because we didn't have the time, you know, to tool it. So we use the body and the legs, and then we tooled up new arms and a new head and got those going. And we were able to execute it on time. That was from a, from a maxi toy. What was it called? Maxi's boyfriend. And he just happened to be the right scale. And so we used that. I can't remember who, who figured that out, but they brought that to the table. We met on this every, you know, every week they cranked through it, you know, sculpted up new arms. We get those designed engineer tooled. And, you know, and we, and I think the other piece of this, honestly, Ken, it's about timing. This was, this was the father day thing to get that year. And it was on father's day that it was. So you got it out in June or whenever father's day would have been that. Yeah. Okay. And that was the goal to get, to get it out there for that. I, I don't know how much worse it might've done if it was a different timeframe, but father's day was the right time. Cause we did this for dads, right? We made a toy for dads before there was anything called a kid. Cause you won an award for that too. Yeah. And so did Greg Bernstein. That award we got was a resurrection of that ward that had not been used since like the seventies. That was the Merrill Hasenfeld award, right? [00:47:13] Speaker 1: Yeah. It was named after the dad of, uh, Allen and Stephen. Yes. Yes. Okay. That's cool. Right. Because they're so used to pulling pranks on you and telling you that that Hasbro Duke that that target Duke wasn't going to sell. [00:47:28] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. [00:47:29] Speaker 1: And they said it was glued to the shelves and everything. And you found out, oh my God, they sold 20,000 and they ordered more. Um, do you remember this black Tuesday prank that was pulled on you that? [00:47:39] Vinnie Deleva: Yes. This was not funny when it happened because what happened after this was I would get to work early, right? So I would be there really early before anybody got there. And one day I'm, I'm in my cubicle and Al Varecchia, who was, you know, the COO at the time, he comes walking by my, my cubicle. And I'm, I was on the phone with somebody and talking in the model shop because they got there early too. And he comes by my office and then he sees that I'm there and he comes and does a double take. And then he flips me the bird with both hands. Okay. What? Yeah. Really? Al Varecchia did this. Yeah. You know, trying to be funny. Okay. Trying to be funny. So then a couple of months before that, right around the time of this, I had gotten a phone call again, early in the morning. Al Varecchia and I'm, and I thought it was somebody from the model shop pulling a prank. You know, cause Al would never call me about anything. And so he wanted me to come down to his office and I said, Mike, that's, that's not funny. I said, and I got stuff to do. And, and he goes, you don't believe this is Al Varecchia? I said, no, I don't. So I hung up. Okay. So he calls me again. He goes, here's my extension. He goes, call me back. So I call him back and it gets to his secretary. And I'm like, oh crap. I said, tell, tell Al I'll be right there. So I run down to his office and I'm in the office. And there is, um, one of my counterparts from, from the girls toys side, um, uh, Valerie juries. And we, we, the two of us look at each other, like, why in the hell, why the hell are we here? And what did we do? Cause I was called to his office a couple of times. Not all of them were, were pleasant. And so he, um, he wanted us to be basically ambassadors of calm for the organization, because there were lots of rumors about how the reorg was going to affect in how people were doing. And how people were going to, um, you know, lose their jobs or their division was going to change or their team was going to change or whatever. And it had become rampant and they weren't ready to do the reorg because, uh, Bruce Stein quit. He was supposed to be the lead person in all of this. And he quit and they had to scramble to figure out who were they going to get. So they ended up, uh, bringing, they gave it to Dan Owen, who was based in Rhode Island and had been president of, of, uh, play school. And he became the president. It took him a while, you know, and then, you know, then he had his opinion about things, right? So it took longer than it should have, but it was because of that hiccup that it did. So he was just trying to get us to just calm the natives. Hmm. [00:50:44] Speaker 1: I see. And that's why this prank was not funny because you already had some issues with, you know, hanging up on the boss as it was. Yeah. [00:50:53] Vinnie Deleva: And yeah, it was not funny. Yeah. [00:50:55] Speaker 1: Should I apologize for bringing this up? I just, I saw this. No, no. And I thought, here's another prank. [00:50:59] Vinnie Deleva: I kind of forgot about it until you, until you put it up here. We look at this, this statement here about 105 people will let go. This was, you know, very emotional for a lot of people. I don't think they had ever had a layoff like that, but that was also because of just combining, you know, Kenner Parker Tonko with Hasbro in all those divisions. There's duplication of roles. And usually those are the ones that are vetted out first. And in fairness, in all of these kinds of reorgs, the first thing you want to do is eliminate any open positions so that you're not eliminating people. But inevitably you have to, like, you have to figure out whether that's enough, you know, to get to the profit level that you're trying to get to, you know, bottom dollar. And life is about the bottom dollar. As much as people want to say, oh, it's about this and this and this, you can't get paid unless it's about the bottom dollar. [00:52:00] Speaker 1: Well, I mean, speaking of the kind of like the end of the line here, you kind of get to 1994. Obviously, you made the cut. You got the stay after Black Tuesday, that August 16th, 1994 dreaded day where a lot of people left. Were you relieved to be moving off the brand or were you? No. No, you were. Okay, you were sad. [00:52:17] Vinnie Deleva: No, I was. Well, it wasn't sad. I just wasn't done. What we had planned for 95 was to get back to our core. Right. But take a more modern military approach and not take any gimmicky approach. So those bright colors were going to be gone. Right. [00:52:34] Speaker 1: So that's why Battle Core Rangers was going to be a bit more. [00:52:36] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. More realistic. And, you know, we were still planning on doing segments, but, you know, we wanted everything to be really, truly military. [00:52:45] Speaker 1: So I'm into the part of the discussion now where I test your memory a little bit because there's a few things that we're really, really curious about and sort of like the research circles and everything. So hopefully we've got some memory of some of this stuff, but I know you've been asked about this recalled or discontinued 1992 roadblock before. Yeah. We've heard a couple of. Well, first of all, we we've called it the recall roadblock. Do you recall the circumstances? Was it actually like recalled and like, hey, retailer, send us back your stuff or were they just told to dump the stuff or was it discontinued and replaced? [00:53:22] Vinnie Deleva: The problem with with this was that it would break if you overwhelmed it. Right. And that makes a problem. Right. And so we, we did not want that on the market. So we, we pulled it all from, you know, our inventory and, and destroyed it. And then we came up with another one so that we could replace that character because it was a popular character. Right. [00:53:51] Speaker 1: But what about the ones that had already shipped to retailers? What would they have had to do with? We eventually had to pull those too. The article I found on 3djoes.com mentioned, you know, it says here from collectibles. Toys and values magazine that 80,000 got shipped. And it doesn't feel like there's 80,000 on the market because they're kind of hard to come by. So it feels to me like whatever was shipped. Part of that had to be like, hey, retailer, ship that back. We got to replace this. So, okay. Yeah. [00:54:16] Speaker ?: Okay. [00:54:16] Speaker 1: Cool. Yeah. And I've heard two stories. I've heard that, you know, you mentioned before that over round and broken. You've also mentioned that the, the mechanism might be a little unstable. [00:54:23] Vinnie Deleva: Like it might just the mechanism, the design of it was that the mechanism would be in the housing and wouldn't move. Right. But the spring was really powerful. And so that tended to loosen it up and then it would break. So that was the problem. You could just say that the spring was basically over spec. When you got it to work, it worked really well. But at the same time, it was, we would have had to really design a much more like, you know, almost like brick housing on that thing to, to get it contained. It would have been too expensive to put in a basic figure. [00:55:00] Speaker 1: Do you get any reports of it just sort of like launching on its own as well, or? No, no. [00:55:05] Vinnie Deleva: Okay. It was more just winding and breaking. Yeah. [00:55:08] Speaker 1: Two versions about back in 1993. [00:55:10] Vinnie Deleva: Yep. [00:55:11] Speaker 1: And you'll see that there's a photo there of you with Dave Kunitz, Greg, Dan Klingensmith and Kirk Groen at the DFW panel. And I remember listening to this one very, very closely because you guys brought up some of the canceled eco warriors. Yeah. And for the longest time, yojo.com had just sort of assumed that that sort of like yellow hard hat tie dye pants. That's gotta be the canceled eco warriors one. It looks crazy. That was kind of the assumption. Yeah. And we had always done research and realized, wait a minute, all the pre-production material seems to match that tan and green one. And then you guys confirmed that at that panel, you guys were talking about. [00:55:48] Vinnie Deleva: Mm-hmm . [00:55:49] Speaker 1: Do you remember the circumstances from when you changed from the green and tan to that sort of like pie dye pants and the yellow hard hat? [00:55:56] Vinnie Deleva: Do you remember? Kirk Groen had come up with this idea. I don't know if he came up with it on his own or was his team, but came up with this idea to thwart the constant costing pressure. We felt on figure costs going up to be able to get some type of camouflage effect without having to decorate it with paint. So if you adjust the mold and you feed in two different opposing colors, they don't blend necessarily. They just kind of counteract to each other, which is why, you know, that's got a little bit of a green tint to it, but it's really yellow and blue. Right. And then he used that technique on other figures. [00:56:37] Speaker 1: I see. So to, I guess if I can kind of paraphrase or summarize that, because I'll be talking to my friends about this later is you have that tan and green one and that met all these sort of like costing pressures within budget. And you wanted to create something that looked more expensive without being more expensive. And that's how you ended up with the tie dye pants. [00:56:54] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. [00:56:55] Speaker 1: So that's, so that's cause I always wondered like if it's several decades ago, how did you remember which one came first? But if you're remembering the costing pressure, then that. [00:57:02] Vinnie Deleva: Oh yeah, no, no, no. The, the one in the yellow hat came second. [00:57:05] Speaker 1: I see. [00:57:06] Vinnie Deleva: Okay. Fair enough. The one in the, the one in the tan pants is kind of boring. [00:57:10] Speaker 1: Yeah. Fair enough. And you ended up using that sort of like swirled plastic and other figures like the mega marines. Right. Do you recall if there was a connection between that tie dye pants and mega marines where you're just like, oh, we discovered something new. We're going to use it for mega marines. [00:57:22] Vinnie Deleva: It wasn't planned for mega marines because mega marines had numbers on their armor. And this one doesn't, this was an existing set of tools that we had and we were using it for something else. Okay. It could have been just another basic figure. We're going to reuse. That's all. [00:57:38] Speaker 1: Fair enough. Because we know that we noticed the, the tie dye pants got carried over to the other. So we're just like, oh, that's. [00:57:43] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. I mean, I think it was a novel solution to cost. I mean, really when I was there, the single figures, it was the most Herculean effort to get it above $2. But we finally got, we finally got retailers to go to $2.09 as the retail. And that took like a year to convince everybody. [00:58:03] Speaker 1: Just to give you an idea of the obsessive research we had trying to figure out which one came first. Like we were like, oh, the two up paint master is of that other color. The toy fair catalog matches that. It even says grizzly out back on the back. And I thought this grizzly mean tan and green, boring forest color. And we were literally like that, but that just goes to show how we were putting everything together. But now that you've told me the story about how you were trying to create the perception of added cost without adding other costs by swirling two bits of clap plastic together and doing extra colors without extra paint hits. Yeah, that makes so much more sense now. [00:58:39] Vinnie Deleva: The other thing to note, and this is indicative of what happened, you know, in those final couple of years is. Because we were creating these segments, we were creating them with six figures per assortment. Okay, well, that created a lot more figures to do hundreds of more products every year. And we're flying. You know, we weren't getting more people to do this work. We were all doing it. And so there were mistakes that were made. So if you look at that shot of the packaging down there in the bottom. So you know what the illustration is of the original coloring. That mismatch happens when we show figures in a line review and somebody makes a comment. Oh, I don't really like that color. It looks boring. Why don't you make it something else? Well, the packaging has already been released to the vendor. [00:59:36] Speaker 1: Yes. [00:59:37] Vinnie Deleva: We can change the product. We can't change the packaging in time. Yes. Yes. So we let it go. [00:59:44] Speaker 1: So you get a running change. Yeah. There are a couple instances of that. Snowstorm, who I'm going to bring up next, is that way. Yeah. There's a couple of those. So we were trying to figure out like which one was the canceled eco warriors and which one was the second version. So the earlier one is obviously canceled eco warriors because that segment was canceled. Right. That's kind of what we were going with. So we then kind of run into a similar thing because like just like Outback, the earlier version was going to be part of eco warriors and we kind of run into the same thing with snowstorm. Now, this one might really test your memory. Do you recall whether there was the orange highlights was first or the blue highlights was first? [01:00:23] Vinnie Deleva: I think the I think the blue one was first. [01:00:26] Speaker 1: You think so? [01:00:27] Speaker ?: Okay. [01:00:27] Speaker 1: Yeah. Fair enough. All right. Cool. [01:00:31] Speaker ?: Yeah. [01:00:31] Speaker 1: I was always a little unsure myself because the toy fair catalog at the top there shows the blue one and then the card back shows orange ish. So we were kind of like weren't really sure. [01:00:42] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. It's it's a machine. This whole process is a machine. And if you muck around with it, it doesn't work quite the way you want it to. And so mistakes are made. Okay. And, you know, in variations are created when they're not they're not intended to be that way. So right. Right. [01:01:02] Speaker 1: Okay. We even found paperwork that said he was considered for an astronaut at one point. And we're like, yeah, probably. [01:01:08] Vinnie Deleva: It probably was because we were looking at, at space as a segment. You definitely could have fit that except it's snowstorming. You don't put a winter guy in space. We'd have to call him something else. [01:01:20] Speaker 1: That's why I thought someone had told me once at one point that the name payload was considered Yeah, because it would have been space. Yeah. Mm hmm. Another one of our favorite loves here that moldable bio armor. [01:01:30] Vinnie Deleva: Oh, yes. [01:01:31] Speaker 1: Yes. So this question for you. I've kind of heard like two different stories. There's one that you've often mentioned that you were not using Play Doh because there's always a story that, oh, you acquired Tonka. Mm hmm. So it made sense to use Play Doh. But then I'd also heard you say in an interview that, but Play Doh was made in Rhode Island and the moldable bio armor. Yeah. Was made in China. So you couldn't have used the actual Play Doh. Right. Right. [01:01:56] Vinnie Deleva: So. [01:01:57] Speaker 1: Say what? [01:01:58] Vinnie Deleva: We did though. You did though. Because. Because Play Doh was already making Play Doh in China. OK. It just hadn't migrated to be all of that volume. Whenever you have a big line like Play Doh and you say, hey, it's cheaper to do it in this country. OK. Right. OK. It'll take you two years to get that transition done because it doesn't happen at the snap of fingers. So you try it. You start with, you know, one market. You build it up. You build up capacity and then you can start to migrate other things. So we obviously couldn't pack out figures in Rhode Island with anything because it would not pass OSHA safety standards on how figures were decorated or even the heat sealing equipment on it. So it had to be done in China. Luckily, the only reason we did this was because they were already making Play Doh in China. And we just we just used that dough. Now, the funny thing is, the people who were running the Play Doh brand were all kind of up in arms because they thought we were going to call it Play Doh. And they said, you can't call it Play Doh. And we said, there's no way we're going to call it Play Doh. We don't want to be calling it Play Doh. [01:03:17] Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah. That was my thought was that the reason why you were able to do the moldable bio armor, though, I'm sort of assuming was because by the time you acquired Tonka, you now have the proprietary formula to make Play Doh regardless of what you call it. [01:03:29] Vinnie Deleva: Yes, because Play Doh at that time was under the Kenner brand, but it was Kenner Parker Tonka. And so it was made in Springfield at the Milton Bradley plant at that time, you know, initially in and then they moved it, you know, to several other places, you know, and it's a global company. So you can't really make it all in one country and then ship it. Sometimes it makes better sense to just make it on site. [01:03:54] Speaker 1: Do you have any memory of the Hasbro employee store? [01:03:58] Vinnie Deleva: Yeah. So when I was there, we had the store that was at one of the nearby plants. And I went there a couple of times to get things. And usually you'd find, you know, all kinds of different things there. A lot of them would be figures that we had done for particular promos that the promo was over. We had extra figures. [01:04:22] Speaker 1: And so they would sell them there. Fair enough. We found some stuff that said not for resale or colors of things that we hadn't seen before. Okay. So. [01:04:31] Vinnie Deleva: Some of that stuff is also stamped because it came with a vehicle and you don't want to sell the figure by itself, which is why there's no UPC code on any of those cards or anything like that. [01:04:45] Speaker 1: You know, that makes sense because the first three were the ones that the people always say they found were clutch, Grand Slam and Hawk. And they were all vehicle drivers. Yeah. Vinny. First off, you've answered a lot of really great questions here. Really helped out me and my friends who sit there and obsess over this stuff and message each other at two in the morning. Um, we think about and bottle over the stuff that you helped bring to markets. Daily. [01:05:09] Vinnie Deleva: I'm so glad I solved some of those questions for you, but there, there are answers to all of those questions. [01:05:16] Speaker 1: Perfect. Because I saved the hardest one for last. Do you need to, do you need to wipe the sweat off your brow? I'm good, Ken. I'm good. Okay. So we've been trying to solve this thing called total combat Hawk for years now. And this shows the 1995 pre toy fair catalog. And you can see underlined, it says total combat Hawk and our common friend here, Dan Klingensmith. Right. He has this photo of a final engineering pilot version of backblast with this bunker that was eventually released for Sergeant Savage. But it was just kind of like a promotion for something that was called total combat Hawk that obviously was never released. And we were trying to figure out what it actually is. And we think we've got it, but we need to talk to somebody who was boots on the ground at the time. Well, why don't you tell me what you think it is? Um, yep. I will lead to this. And Carson has these. Sculpt sheets. And, you know, we see that the sculpt sheet shows talking battle commanders, General Hawk, but with a different project number that doesn't match the other talking battle commanders. And there's this figure source sheet that came with it, that Patrick Stewart has put some colors on there. So what we think it is, is, and Patrick went and took the colors. [01:06:36] Speaker ?: Like he's okay. [01:06:36] Speaker 1: We got the pantones from sci-fi from slipstream from mainframe from battle force 2000. I believe that's Maverick. And they kind of put it together to get this general Hawk right over here. So we actually think that it's this and somebody made a custom for me. We think it's that gray and green general Hawk. And then we found this memo that was made within written within a week of that figure source sheet that refers to this DVC headquarters Hawk. And we're wondering if the headquarters quote unquote is the total combat bunker. [01:07:09] Vinnie Deleva: I'm going to tell you what I think this is. Sure. Sure. We worked on this concept of developing a, a relief pattern on the bottom of the boot for the figures, right? On one boot that would get placed into a micro cassette reader and would fast forward or fast rewind that tape to a corresponding segment, which would be that character talking. [01:07:44] Speaker ?: Okay. [01:07:45] Vinnie Deleva: Okay. So you didn't have to put backpacks on them. You just had this one area. And if you put their figure on this pad and read it, it would fast forward. And then that figure would talk. And we had that an item like that as going to be that, that device. But when we tested that whole concept with kids, after we had a working prototype, they had no interest in it. Okay. They, what they had interest in was the missile launcher that we put on top of the thing because Kunitz insisted that it have to have a missile launcher on it. It was the only thing they played with playing with the figure in a passive way to hear it talk was just, just wasn't fast enough. It wasn't engaging enough. So we didn't do it. And the inventor that brought it in was a big time inventor and he was not happy, but we, we showed him the footage of, of the test and you couldn't, you couldn't refute it. But when we killed that thing, we did want to keep the idea of having like this bunker looking thing with a missile launcher on it. And so we've created this other item and we just called the total combat Hawk so that we'd have like a little, little mini playset that came with the figure. That's why it's at 599. [01:09:12] Speaker 1: Okay. I see. [01:09:14] Vinnie Deleva: It's the salvage of another concept is what this really is. [01:09:20] Speaker 1: So total combat Hawk was a salvage of another, of that talking concept. [01:09:26] Vinnie Deleva: I see. It affected every GI Joe figure. You would have been able to get every single figure to be able to talk. And then we had GI Joe figures that would come with little micro cassettes. So you could expand the adventures from it. We had the whole thing planned out. Okay. And we were just about to start tooling on all the feet. Okay. And then we, we finished with the testing and it wasn't good. And that's part of the call is, you know, when you start a project, you plan on what it's going to be and how it's going to work at the end, but it's development. And so it develops over time. And sometimes it doesn't go the way you want it. Right. And you have to decide whether you continue with it or you call it a day. Right. Okay. So you're saying that that bunker was the salvage of the. [01:10:16] Speaker 1: Yeah. [01:10:17] Vinnie Deleva: The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the picture there is not the one that had the micro cassette recorder in it, but the idea of the, of having a bunker with a missile launcher on it was, and that's why we created that. I see. [01:10:31] Speaker 1: So the concept before this photo. Yes. It was it. Okay. I see. I see. All right. Then. Okay. [01:10:41] Speaker ?: I see. [01:10:41] Speaker 1: I see. Okay. So I think our mystery is solved that. Um, general Hawk was going to look like this. Yeah. So we have solved total combat Hawk. Yeah. [01:10:48] Vinnie Deleva: So we have solved total combat Hawk. [01:10:49] Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. [01:10:51] Vinnie Deleva: So we have solved total combat Hawk. Okay. So we have solved total combat Hawk. Yeah. Okay. Okay. [01:10:57] Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. So I think our mystery is solved that. Um, general Hawk was going to look like this. Yeah. So we have solved total combat Hawk. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And that whole thing about the salvage from a previous ID. That's like a bonus story. So yeah, you're going to make a lot of researchers very happy by basically confirming and putting a checkbox beside that mystery solved with that. I get a big kick out of all this. [01:11:28] Vinnie Deleva: I get a big kick out of all this because you guys are very interested in the mistakes that are made as well as the stuff that comes out. Well, we've got how long? [01:11:40] Speaker 1: And I haven't even mentioned that Pimp Daddy Destro. Oh my God. Oh my God. Please. Lord. No, we're, we're going to park that one. We're going to park that one. So thank you. I'm going to start calling this general Hawk, which that's just the digital render of the figure with the Sergeant Savage bunker by, by Patrick Stewart. I have a custom that was gifted to me. I'm going to start calling that total combat Hawk. And I'm going to tell Patrick and Chris Murray and Carson and all the Ojo moderators and Dan Klingensmith that we've solved it. [01:12:11] Vinnie Deleva: Good. Dan will yell at me for not telling him, but he's never really asked me that question. So. You have made my year. You are, you are a great host. So thank you for having me. [01:12:25] Speaker 1: Thank you for being here. Um, I really want to do this for a long time. And the fact that you're here now talking, answering questions and doing it with a passion just makes me know that I'm in the right hobby. You should continue. [01:12:37] Vinnie Deleva: I just want to thank everybody for listening. And thank you again, Ken, for calling me and inviting me to come in. And I'm happy to talk anytime. [01:12:47] Speaker 1: Thanks for watching. And if you enjoyed this video, I'm going to put the history of GI Joe in the 1990s for you to click on right over here, or to pick your own toy history topic from an existing playlist. You can click on that playlist right over here. Otherwise, I'll see y'all next time. Yojo!