GI Joe Creator Revisits Its Birth

“Old soldiers never die. Your mom just threw them away.”

That advertising phrase was printed across the bottom of a poster that displayed the array of GI Joes trotted out by Rhode Island’s Hasbro toys over the late 1960s and 1970s.

Sitting a few feet from that poster in the Barrington Senior Center on Thursday evening was the man who created the GI Joe action figure in 1964 – Don Levine, a Korean War veteran.

“I came back and felt that I had a duty to tell people about the real American hero,” Levine said. “That became GI Joe.”

Levine said just about the first decision he made was that “I wanted a moveable soldier. What’s the use of a soldier unless it could be moveable to ride in Jeeps and planes and boats and scuba diving.”

Levine said he found the model for GI Joe in an art supply store: the wooden dummy with multiple joints used by artists and sculptors as a foundation for their works. With the array of boxed GI Joes Levine brought with him – “just a fraction of my collection” – was that wooden dummy.

“I talked Merrill Hassenfeld into doing it,” Levine said of the founder of Hasbro. “He had never done anything like this before.”

The rest, as they say, is history. GI Joe may be the most famous action figure or moveable doll ever created. It has made oodles of money for Hasbro and Levine himself, who wrote two books with a co-author about GI Joe. One book, a coffee-table volume, sold about 500,000 copies, he said.

Levine was introduced by Kent Phillips, president of the Barrington Preservation Society. It sponsored Levine's visit to Barrington as part of the current military exhibit in the society’s museum within a couple of dozen steps of the Senior Center in the lower level of the Barrington library.

“He was in charge of the creation, development and marketing of GI Joe,” said Phillips. “He became an icon in the toy industry in that time period.”

Levine said: GI Jo was “the first toy ever to be promoted on a TV commercial.”

The commercial was played during his presentation. You can see it for yourself in the YouTube video above.