G.I. Joe commercial 1960's ( Hasbro )

I've been loooking out for toys that reflected some of the values (and paranoia)in the US during the Cold War. Being a girl, and having mostly girls who were relatives around my age, I didn't see many of these. But my cousin Jeff had some and I remember playing with him and his sisters in the backyard, although inevitably his sisters and I would drift toward the jumprope or inside to watch TV.








I've asked some of my Russian interviewees about their favorite toys during their Cold War childhoods. It surprised me to hear from a couple of them that Americans weren't the default "enemy" in playground play. I remember hearing boys (mostly) talk about "the Rooskies", although often their role-play adversaries were pretend Viet Cong. Russian kids in the 60s still had images in their head of the German Wehrmacht when they played with toy soldiers....at least my the people I've been speaking to. This was despite the fact that none of them were old enough to have remembered or seen any bellicose Germans...but of course the USSR suffered greatly under Operation Barbarosa, and parents and grandparents who had survived that era were still around to talk about it. Americans had not seen fullscale war within its borders over 100 years before GI Joe, and Soviets and Viet Cong ended up being the easiest target. And Indians, if we were playing cowboys.