6 Holiday Toy Crazes and Why They Captivated Kids (and Parents)<br />This was a particularly delicate problem for Hasbro, the makers of G. I.<br />Joe, which was carefully branded “America’s Movable Fighting Man.”<br />In 1988, The Times’s editorial board warned about the effects of G. I.<br />Joe and He-Man saturation in young minds.<br />So why should we feel great about a message that says a woman can go to the White House if she looks like Barbie?”<br />The toy soldier has been at the mercy of changes in the adult world, increasing in strength and complexity during national militarization,<br />but stumbling when war becomes too real or unpopular.<br />It would not want a doll with a teen-age body — a bust and such shapeliness.’”<br />Barbie’s cultural staying power for half a century proved that people would indeed buy the doll, though not without controversies along the way.<br />A Christmas Eve dispatch from 1911 in observed:<br />The Christmas toy market is an illuminating commentary on modern life<br />and the conditions of the moment and reflects the attitude of the adult population rather more than it expresses the ideas at work in the childish minds.<br />In 1993, a group of guerrilla artists calling themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization went so far as to swap the voice boxes of G. I.<br />Joes and Barbies and place them back on store shelves.
