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ZAPP CON 2022 w/ Emily Bader of from the Hasbro G.I. Joe Team
858 Plays2 years ago
FALL IN PUKES! We recorded our first ever live episode of the pod at Zapp Con and Hasbro's Emily Bader was kind enough to join us. Hear about the latest and greatest coming from the G.I. Joe (and Dungeons and Dragons) toy lines in this special LIVE edition of Adventures in Collecting.
Save $5 off of your Magic Spoon order - visit magicspoon.com/aic and use code AIC at checkout!
This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/aic to get 10% off your first month.
Follow Emily on Instagram @morphinomenally_emily and keep up with the latest from Hasbro on hasbropulse.com
Follow us @aic_podcast on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
Intro and other voices by Joe Azzari
https://www.instagram.com/voicesbyjoe/
Theme Music is "Game Boy Horror" by the Zombie Dandies
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Transcript
Introduction and Magic Spoon Cereal
00:00:02
Speaker
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Speaker
spice up your peanut butter cereal by slicing up some fresh banana in it. That's what I did. Go to magicspoon.com slash AIC to grab a variety pack and try it today. And be sure to use our promo code AIC at checkout to save $5 off your order. And Magic Spoon is so confident in their product, it's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked.
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Speaker
Remember, get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com slash AIC, and use the code AIC to save $5. Thank you, Magic Spoon, for sponsoring this episode. Are you ready, kids? Get your parents' permission, check your mailbox, and grab your shopping cart.
Podcast Introduction: Adventures in Collecting
00:01:41
Speaker
It's time for the Adventures in Collecting podcast.
00:01:45
Speaker
I'm Eric. And I'm Dave. Welcome to Adventures in Collecting. Where we talk toy news, culture, and halls. Along with our journeys as collectors. Hello everybody and welcome back to Adventures in Collecting. Hi.
00:02:12
Speaker
Dave, we're back.
Three-Year Anniversary and ZapCon Live Show
00:02:13
Speaker
And yes, this is our first live show. And it's right after our three-year anniversary. Yeah, everybody who doesn't listen actually heard how long I do The High for in real life. Yes, yes, in real life person. Before Erica edits it. So we are live here at ZapCon. Thanks so much to the folks at Zap Comics for inviting us to do this panel. Yeah.
00:02:41
Speaker
It's been a two year wait, but it is well worth it. Yes, and this should have been on your birthday. So happy belated birthday two years ago. It's my 39th birthday all over again, but outside this time.
Guest Introduction: Emily Bader from Hasbro
00:02:54
Speaker
So returning to the show, outside of the confines of the virtual media roundtable, is our friend, your friend, and marketer for both the GI Joe and Dungeons and Dragons teams at Hasbro. Give it up for Emily Bader.
00:03:12
Speaker
That was a very authoritative point, too. It was like, you're a friend, so somebody's. Well, it's true. Emily, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
00:03:22
Speaker
So as is usually the case when we are lucky enough to have somebody from one of these major toy brands, we are going to open it up to questions at the end here. So that way you guys can ask Emily some, you're burning questions about the GI Joe brand. So if you've looked at the Instagram story, no, that's not this time. We're live. We have people that are going to ask questions. That's awesome.
00:03:47
Speaker
Jumping right in, congrats again on an awesome Hiss Tank campaign. Thank you. You guys absolutely crushed it. Yeah, definitely give it up for the Hiss Tank. Now that everything has wrapped, when will backers get their chance to vote on the Hiss Tactician colorway?
00:04:04
Speaker
soon. So after a HasLab campaign closes, usually it's about a, what do we do, 45 days for funding, something along those lines.
GI Joe Hiss Tank Campaign and Product Development
00:04:15
Speaker
It's always a variation. His tank got a couple of extra days because nobody wanted to work on a Saturday, so we all decided to extend it to the Monday instead of closing it on Friday. Seems like it worked out okay for us.
00:04:25
Speaker
So then you have after, oh, no, I touched the microphone. Okay. We're live, guys. So after you have the 45-day campaign, you have the 30-day cancellation window for anybody that's like, oh, I have, I made a mistake. I can't pay my rent. It's a hard choice. Do I not have a home or do I have a, or, you know, not have a his tank?
00:04:49
Speaker
it's a difficult decision to make. So we wait, we wait for the end of the 30-day period and then it was really important to us that we didn't open up that voting window early because we wanted everybody who backed to be able to vote on the colorway because we know that that's one of the really exciting parts of the campaign that you guys actually get to pick what color figure you're going to be getting, that Ron Rudett is going to be doing the artwork for, who by the way we met with him last week. He is
00:05:15
Speaker
So sweet and he's just like I'm just so excited that people want to that are excited about like my artwork and the figure and that you know so many years after he did those color studies they're actually coming into play in a way that they never did originally which is awesome. I think that's one of the really fun parts about.
00:05:33
Speaker
having a brand like G.I. Joe with so much history is that we really can kind of go into the archives and say, okay, what kind of cool stuff do we have that never saw the light of day that we can use now? Which is fabulous. I'm sorry, I got very off topic there, but you know me. Not at all. No, I'm definitely here for, like, Ron Rudatz resurgence in the toy world. It's like a second Renaissance for him. He rolled it. He was so sweet.
00:05:58
Speaker
He rolled into the Hasbro parking lot in a convertible, like top-down, nice and sunny out, and he was like, this is my sunshine car. I was like... If you're not following Ron Rudette on social, by the way, definitely do that. Most of the pictures are about what he eats for breakfast, but awesome follow, great artist. Of course, he's did a ton of work for G.I. Joe and the Hasbro WWF's, you know, among many other toys.
00:06:25
Speaker
And he will tell you that I believe he did the designs for 125 of the original GI Joe figures, which is wild. Sometimes he can't remember exactly which ones were his, but if you show him the drawing and it has his signature on it, he'll be like, oh yeah, I guess I did that one.
00:06:42
Speaker
So we have seen some fun collaborations with Transformers, which is over there. So our Megatron his tank is right here. And then the second one was our stalker who comes with an Bumblebee Ostrich, is that what it was? Yes. So they have the three and three quarter inch GI Joes with them. What are the chances that we see collaborations like that for classified?
00:07:11
Speaker
I would love to do collaborations like that for classified. It's a little bit easier with three and three quarter inch figures because of the scale that they are. In order to do it at a six inch scale, they would need to be like, yay. I mean, you guys saw how big the his tank is at six inch scale, right? The original one was like this big. And so it's really trying to pick
00:07:32
Speaker
for the vehicles that we're looking at potentially scaling up or like when we did the Cobra coil and we did like the RAM cycle and the newly announced trouble bubble that we're doing, it's picking the things that will scale up appropriately. So like somebody the other day was like, someone you're gonna do a USS flag in classified scale. And they're like, well, we did some rough math on that. It would be about 20 feet long and I'm five feet tall and I could stand in it.
00:07:59
Speaker
All right. So challenge accepted. This is the perfect room for that flag. Yeah. So, you know, you could sell it for like twenty thousand dollars. It could be a man cave. We'd have a great time. But it's kind of picking what the right balance is between that.
Toy Size and Collector Considerations
00:08:15
Speaker
We did hear from some people.
00:08:17
Speaker
from about the his tank that they're like this is about as big of a troop builder thing as I'd have room for on my shelf and so we're kind of using that as a little bit of a blueprint to say okay bigger than the his tank smaller than the his tank to kind of figure out how it could work with people's collections keeping in mind that we know that all of you have these amazing toy collections and that you know this isn't going to be the only thing that you have to find room for on your shelf and
00:08:41
Speaker
We were like, well, if we did like a six-inch scale pterodrome, people could just like use their dining room table as the shelf for that, right? Or just like, somebody was like, can they put it on the floor? I'm like, you're really going to put what would end up being like a $800 toy on your floor. And they're like, yeah, why not? Like, do you have toddlers at home? Clearly not, because that would not happen in my house. At least with Maddie, the eldest, she'd be fine. It's the little one I got to worry about.
00:09:08
Speaker
But I mean even imagine like getting drunk and tripping over that in the middle of the night like oh I can't imagine just tripping over. Yeah, just like how I operate Dave doesn't even need to get drunk drunk to trip over the pterodrome. It's just gonna happen
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just going to bump into it. That's how I work. But I mean, the collaboration stuff with GI Joe and the crossover is so ingrained in the DNA of it. It's just we're waiting.
PulseCon Exclusives and New Releases
00:09:33
Speaker
Sarge? Yeah, we're looking at Sarge and Slaughter in front of us right now. By the way, awesome windowless packaging on it, getting to see this for the first time. And his little micro Sarge that he comes with.
00:09:47
Speaker
We were calling it, so we've gotten to meet Sarge a couple of times since we've been working on the figure, and he was holding it the other day, and we were like, oh, it's Sarge, little Sarge, and littlest Sarge, and he didn't not like that, so I'm gonna keep saying it.
00:10:03
Speaker
the littlest Sarge. I think that might be the littlest Sarge. It's so cute and what I would like to say is with the packaging on littlest Sarge it's like you know an inch big and you can actually take littlest Sarge out of that packaging and then put him back in later so that it's not like oh no do I have to choose if I'm gonna rip the blister on this thing no no we gave you we gave you multiple options for that friend.
00:10:26
Speaker
And for those of you that are fortunate enough to be here in person, definitely after the panel, you can come down to the table, take a look. This stuff will be moving back to our table, so you can get a closer look at Sarge. And while we're talking about the cool things that we have on the table, Emily, why don't you tell us a little bit about Serpentor? Yes. So we were super excited. So we announced Serpentor as our PulseCon exclusive item for GI Joe. So PulseCon, which will be happening at the last weekend of September,
00:10:55
Speaker
30 days half September. Great. So September 30th and October 1st will be when PulseCon is happening. And so Sir Pentor will be the GI Joe. Jesus, I just said all of this. His box is very beautiful. So this is a, the box matches the Mindbender that we did for San Diego Comic Con. And so it is the first time that Sir Pentor is making an appearance in Classified. He comes with his Air Chariot and a handful of accessories.
00:11:20
Speaker
Two different snake cowl head pieces so that you can go a little more modern or more of that kind of retro throwback Comes with a snake that can keep him company or that he can throw at people dealers choice Oh, and then a cute factor is that the air chariot's mouth actually opens and it has little fangs that will you can pop down so it's
00:11:41
Speaker
The development team worked incredibly hard on this, and so we're really, really excited that people are excited to have it be in their collection. And we continue to have the best animal figures that are available. Yeah. Shouts to a friend of the pod, Khalil from Caster's Corner, who's in attendance. Hi, buddy. Yeah, he's going to open a zoo with all of the G.I. Joe animals.
00:12:07
Speaker
We just keep, when we're doing development line planning, we're like, so we know that all of you are really excited about the articulated animals that we're doing. And so we just kind of keep throwing out the weirdest animals that we can do. So at one point I was like, could we do a giant stingray and we have Cobra Eels riding the stingrays? Could we do, what else would be fun? I don't know, like a panda bear or something, a unicorn maybe?
00:12:35
Speaker
But you just, you know, there's really no limits to the weirdness. Hey, you got Tiger Force. How about a tiger? We could do a tiger. There was that, the, um, the Drist figure that came out last year, two years ago, for Dungeons and Dragons, that came with Gwenovar, which was a gorgeous, if you need a panther for your collection, that Drist figure is still available on Hasbro Pulse, and is a, that's a top-notch tiger sculpt, or panther sculpt. Oh, big cats. Big cats, low as cats. It's fine.
00:13:02
Speaker
So you mentioned Dungeons & Dragons. You are also on Dungeons & Dragons team. I sure am. So far we've only seen product tied to the upcoming film. Are there plans to include items from elsewhere in the D&D world?
00:13:16
Speaker
Yes, so there will be a full line of products for Dungeons and Dragons to support the movie release and they will include elements that are both movie specific and draw from lore. So we really wanted to appeal to kind of a wide range of Dungeons and Dragons fans. So you have the people who may be new to the Dungeons and Dragons universe that are going to be seeing the movie that are like
00:13:38
Speaker
Oh, I saw that gelatinous cube in the trailer. Okay, now here it is in toy form. This is great. Or you may have those fans that have been playing for decades and are like, oh, I encountered this gelatinous cube in the first campaign that I ever ran, and gosh, I was stuck in it for like eight turns, and I would really like to commemorate that. Maybe I could commemorate that with a selfie series figure of me stuck in the cube forever. Actually, funny story, on the first day of San Diego Comic Con,
00:14:08
Speaker
I forgot when I was packing one of our Dungeons and Dragons figures that was supposed to be in the gelatinous cube. And so my selfie series figure actually was stuck in the gelatinous cube when I was doing all of the media interviews for D&D. People would be like, what is that? I'm like, oh, that's me. And then my DM heard what I was saying, and they were like, oh, you want to be in the cube? We can make that happen.
00:14:30
Speaker
I was just going to say, I know you play. Have you wound up in the Cube yet? I have not because we've all been really busy, so we've only played one session since that happened, but they have promised that our D&D brand writer named Sam is my DM, and they have promised that I will definitely end up in a Cube. Everything comes back to the gelatinous Cube. It really does. I just feel like it always does.
00:14:54
Speaker
So before we open it up to audience Q&A, we mentioned Hasbro PulseCon. Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect from the GI Joe team at the event?
00:15:05
Speaker
Well, so you've kind of figured out at this point that we have a new kind of standard for what we're doing when we do events. And so perhaps without commenting to, well, Sir Pentor is going to show up, right? Because he'll go up for order. And then perhaps we will have some other pre-orders that will be announced. Perhaps we will have some digital renders. Perhaps we will do a couple of name-only reveals. Perhaps we'll have some special guests. Perhaps we'll do, you know, something
00:15:31
Speaker
You know, what I can promise you is we are not announcing another HasLab at PulseCon this year. I need to take a break from announcing HasLabs for a little while. Flag stands, stand down. Oh, yeah. There will be no sixth-inch-scale classified flag announced at PulseCon for you to have to mortgage your house against. This is both disappointing and good at the same time. I think it's a split reaction.
00:16:00
Speaker
And now, a word from our sponsors. This segment is brought to you by our friends at Chubsy Wubsy Toys.
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00:18:10
Speaker
And now back to the show So so with that if if anyone's time if anyone has any questions we have a little bit of like a microphone conundrum here yes, so if you have a question feel free to come down and And ask the question and one of us will repeat it and Emily will do her best to answer it and
00:18:32
Speaker
Or I'll tell you that I can't, and then I'll let you pick a different question. Yeah, or that. So who's up first? Dario's eating. Dario's eating, but he wants it. Khalil. So from an engineering perspective, what has been kind of the hardest item to figure out so far? I think...
00:18:56
Speaker
We've had some amazing engineers on our team. So Chris, who was our engineer for quite a long time, totally ditched us when he moved with his girlfriend to Florida. So rude of him. And our new engineer, Rachida, is phenomenal. But it's kind of the more unusual the project is, the harder it is to figure out the engineering for. And so what you end up with is like,
00:19:21
Speaker
the air chariot as something that is, you know, totally new that we have not done before that has never been tested in six-inch scale. Took a little while to figure out exactly how to make it work. The higher complexity items, so like the his tank and the sky striker, the sky striker, oh my gosh, all of the parts that went into that and it not only was
00:19:41
Speaker
How do we make the coolest plane that we possibly can? But how do we make the coolest plane while also like doing an homage to the toy that came out 40 years ago and making sure that it was like premium and cool and had all this extra stuff? Sky Stryker was a hard one. And then I think the His Tank, it's been so much fun to get to work with
00:20:02
Speaker
our Spark Labs kind of has lab team.
Engineering and Development Challenges
00:20:05
Speaker
And so we get like a whole different group of new humans that are coming in to help us problem solve things. And so figuring out, you know, how exactly will the tread work on this? How exactly what will be the weapons rack in the back look like? Which weapons are we including with the figures? How do we make that work so that the consumer experience is as best as it possibly can be? So I'm gonna vote vehicles are usually the hardest to figure out.
00:20:34
Speaker
Great question. Great question. Who's up next? Yes, Sir Pentor is being pre-ordered at PulseCon.
00:20:53
Speaker
So one thing I just wanted to point out too, Emily, you mentioned that I think maybe not everyone's aware of, but kind of a new direction at Hasbro is that these HasLab projects are being developed by a core team. It's not necessarily the, you know, the G.I. Joe team or the Star Wars team or the Marvel Legends team that's developing these. They're actually going to a HasLab team now.
00:21:14
Speaker
And yes, it gets a little bit complicated depending on what team it is that's kind of working on it. But essentially, we have what we call our Spark Labs team, which is kind of like special projects, but also sometimes entire toy lines. It gets a little murky.
00:21:29
Speaker
These are now going to be people that have the experience kind of working across all of the HasLab projects to say, okay, we know, so with experience has taught us kind of these big projects. It turns out take a lot of our time in a way that maybe makes us
00:21:46
Speaker
not focus as much as our other products that aren't has labs and so being able to kind of take some of that off of our plate so the brand team essentially becomes consultants on these products so we meet every week we talk about what our options are for things for the future we talk about you know okay for the his tank
00:22:03
Speaker
kind of the process was what are what are the things that are the most important to us we kind of ranked them and we're like okay what of these is feasible to do what do we think is something that fans would be excited about and so it's a lot of kind of back and forth between the teams but in a really fun way because we get to I am like a huge fan of
00:22:26
Speaker
There's no dumb ideas. Throw your ideas out. It doesn't matter if you work in QA and you have a marketing idea. It doesn't matter if you work in product branding and you have a design idea. I want to hear them all because I think that we are so much stronger together. And even if maybe your original idea wasn't something that we could use, that could spark a conversation that could kind of snowball into something amazing that we land on where we're like, oh my god, we can't not use this. This is so good.
00:22:54
Speaker
but it also fosters a very collaborative environment, which I think is really nice and it makes everybody feel like,
00:23:04
Speaker
they're all kind of part of the team, which is wonderful. Do you want to feel like you're part of the team? You don't want to feel like you're not part of the team. But again, I'm phenomenal at tangents. But here we are. So yes. We're here for them. SparkLab team. And then our great friend Mark from HasLab, who has been, who helped us on the his tank. And many other people from the HasLab team. He thinks it's really funny that now there's the urban legend of Mark from HasLab. Do we have any other questions?
00:23:38
Speaker
Question? Somebody had their hands up. You're up again. Yeah, so to restate, basically the gist of the question, I apologize for not doing the entire thing, but within kind of the waves of figures, there has been, you know, different kind of accessory counts, different kind of weight counts with that, and kind of how do we figure out kind of how that is balanced? Is that fair?
Packaging Innovations and Sustainability
00:24:05
Speaker
What it comes down to for us mostly, and Lenny is very focused on this from like a consumer happiness perspective, is when people look at boxes, we want it to look like there is, we want them to look kind of equal when they're on shelf. And so usually the figures that have the bigger figures with the more stuff that's on them usually tend to come with less accessories because they take up more room in the box.
00:24:31
Speaker
So what then you see is the smaller figures that have less secondaries or maybe the female figures that are smaller sculpts that have less plastic and less weight against them will come with more accessories that could be bigger accessories that could be heavier accessories. But essentially our goal is when you're holding two classified boxes in your hands.
00:24:51
Speaker
we want them to feel roughly the same. So we want you to feel like you're getting your money's worth regardless of what figure you're getting and that it's a fairly even value proposition across the line. Alright guys, well thank you so much for your questions. That's gonna wrap it up for the Q&A portion of it. Oh wait, we have one more. Darius got one more, sorry.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yes, so essentially, as I'm sure you're well aware, the GI Joe team encountered some extreme supply chain issues over the last year. And so the original intention was for GI Joe to also be plastic free starting in September of this year. Because of those issues, essentially product was pushed about six months on shelf. So what you'll see is that our next mainline wave
00:25:47
Speaker
that will be on shelf in April of 2023. So the next one that's being announced, you've seen renders of it, it's the CoverGirl Marauders BBQ Falcon Outback. I'm missing one.
00:26:08
Speaker
Crimson bat. Nailed it. So that wave, which is going to be our 4123 wave on shelf, is going to be our first plastic-free mainline wave. So yes, so this is the direction that all of the classified boxes are heading. One of the things that's nice about GI Joe is we have a history of doing plastic-free boxes because that's essentially what the products were in the 80s. So if you look at like those vehicle boxes,
00:26:36
Speaker
you know, they were plastic free, they were closed box. And so we're kind of excited to get to bring that mentality to classified and kind of see what that means. And then, you know, with all things, there will kind of be an evolution of what that means and for the different price points, kind of how that gets represented. But yes, so we will be going plastic free like Legends of Black Series are doing.
00:26:59
Speaker
And I was going to try to open it real quick to show you guys, but there's a really cool cardboard footlocker in here. Oh, it's open on the bottom. Oh, it's open on the bottom. OK. I got tricky. So what's cool is the accessories. I was playing with this before. I should have remembered. But you could see that the figure number is going to be on there. And then on the front of the footlocker, you could see the character name. And then your accessories are inside. And then we are doing so.
00:27:28
Speaker
So all of the figures will be retained like so with printing on the back, which is nice. So a nice unboxing experience. Then with those kind of weapons caches, they do have, so the figure number, the figure name, and then it is the color of the box depends on what their faction is. And then we are doing printing on the tissue paper. So your accessories will either come in tissue bundles or some of the accessories that we want to make sure stay really flat will be packed out and cardboard.
00:27:56
Speaker
So like Sarge's baton, we want to make sure it stays flat and packed. So we're trying to give you a kind of a new unboxing experience, so we're not just like throwing everything in the box. But then those weapons caches, you can either use them for just
00:28:12
Speaker
things you can use them for sorting you can use them in your displays and I think for most of them they are the mainline ones are the correct size where you can actually put the figure in them as well so like if you wanted to use them for storage in theory everything could live in there.
00:28:29
Speaker
The figure definitely fits in there too. I could just picture already just stacking these up in a display with the name and the... I like how they had the little key code. And what a nice brag that would be to basically have a pyramid structure of those sitting on shelves to be like, yeah, I bought all these. What's up? The pocket.
00:28:52
Speaker
and then there's the printing on the back of them as well that ties to the faction. So this is the print that is on, so for the open boxes, that's the print that's on the back panel for when you're looking at the figures.
00:29:05
Speaker
And the ties are even paper. They're not plastic. So they're little paper ties. So with that, that's going to wrap up the Q&A section. So as a returning guest, you know that we like to ask our final question. Dave does his thing. So we have an altered final question for you. So Dave, would you like to fulfill your role as this shows James Lipton and ask our altered final question?
00:29:35
Speaker
Why yes, Eric, I would. So a special altered final question for our returning guest.
Emily's Personal Toy Stories
00:29:43
Speaker
What is the one toy you've always wanted, but were never able to get?
00:29:51
Speaker
So it's gonna be a long story. I mean, it's, you know, not as long of a story, but I will have a follow-up that is a follow-up note from my last question the first time I was on the show. So when I was a wee youth growing up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, my neighbors were two and four years older than I were, which meant that they were really, really cool. So imagine like little Emily, approximately two or three years old, ringlet, curl hair, lots of freckles, super adorable.
00:30:21
Speaker
And our neighbors had a ride in Barbie Jeep. And I thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world. And so they would leave their driveway and go through our cul-de-sac and come up my driveway and come to my front door and ring the doorbell and say, can Emily come out and play? And then I would get to get in the Barbie Jeep and we'd go back to their house.
00:30:42
Speaker
All I wanted as a child was a Barbie Jeep. And for some reason, my dad said no. And it's also important for backstory to know that my dad did not say no to me a lot as a child. And when you ask him now, hey, why didn't you let me have a ride in Barbie Jeep when I was little? He doesn't remember why. So I think it's just character forming, essentially.
00:31:02
Speaker
But so, as a 90s child, I really would have liked to have that right in Barbie Jeep. Now, I figured out that as an adult, there are several things that I can do to rectify that situation. One, I go buy a Barbie Jeep, but adult humans can't fit in those, so I would just look at it. I could put my 11-pound dog in it, basically.
00:31:24
Speaker
So I was thinking, okay, what could I do to fix this situation? So it has occurred to me that if I pick a significant milestone in my life, say, I don't know, when I turn 40 or make director at Hasbro, which will obviously be a thing sometime in the future, what I'll be able to do is
00:31:41
Speaker
I had a toy Barbie Jeep for my Barbies. I'm sure PR is like, thank you Emily for talking about Barbies on a Hasbro thing. So it was like the 1994 Barbie Sunrider and it was pink and it had flowers on the side of it.
00:31:56
Speaker
and I still have mine from when I was little. But it has occurred to me that as an adult, I have disposable income as like an in theory thing, and that I could go buy a vintage Jeep, take it to an auto body shop, take my toy Jeep with it and say, can you make this onto this for a human? And then I could drive it as an adult. So that's my plan for how to fix that. So what do you guys think? Should Emily get her Jeep? Come on, give it up.
00:32:25
Speaker
Exactly. So basically I'd be doing the same thing but cooler. And the toy that I grew up with doesn't actually say Barbie on it either. So in theory I could drive it to work at Hasbro and it would be fine. There we go. That's the idea. Yep. I love that. So make sure to stay tuned for years in the future when that happens. And I hope that that was a good answer. That was the perfect answer.
00:32:51
Speaker
So what I will say, as a follow-up to our last time that we met, I told a story about my creepy bride doll that lives on my shelf that I brought home from Italy. And... Oh no. Oh no. You didn't bring that. You didn't. Oh no. The creepy bride doll is here. It's little... Oh no. She's tucked in a linen napkin from Crate and Barrel to keep her safe. That's what you get for housewarming presents when, you know, your mom goes to Crate and Barrel.
00:33:22
Speaker
Here's her head. Oh geez. It was everything I hoped for. Just a head. I feel like that is the creepy bride belt. Here's her one remaining leg. Yes. I love that she's in a blender bottle. To be fair, this is a Ziploc snap and lock storage container, but yes.
00:33:50
Speaker
and here's her creepy little torso. Oh, amazing. Well, everybody, give it up for the bride doll. Yes. Oh, no.
00:34:03
Speaker
Everyone leave while you still can. Before this curse fully washes over everyone, Emily, and before we end this panel, remind everyone, where can they find out more about the GI Joe brand on the internets? Where can they find you?
Where to Find More Information Online
00:34:24
Speaker
The creepy bride doll lives in my living room so I would really appreciate it if you didn't come and find more information about her. So we are on official social channels as GI Joe that has grow pulse for more information about all of our amazing products. I am on social. I am more phenomenally Emily. I think on everything I only use Instagram really though.
00:34:46
Speaker
Which is fine, because I don't have personal social channels, so I just post about work. But that's how you find out more about us. And so on behalf of the entire GI Joe Toy team, we are so thankful that all of you are interested enough in our products to want to chat with us. And thanks for having me on the show again. Guys, give it up for Emily. Give it up for Emily, everybody.
00:35:07
Speaker
And thanks again to the folks at Zap Comics for inviting us to ZapCon. This was two years in the making and we're so happy to do our first live show with you guys. And thank you everybody for watching. Yeah, we're watching. We can actually say that this time. Thank you for watching. And listening and sticking through our technical difficulties that you will know nothing about on this episode.
00:35:25
Speaker
Well now they will. Yeah, now they will. Good job. Make sure you come back to the table over there to get a closer look at the GI Joe figures. But also watch the rest of the panels. I was going to say the Twisted Toy Fair Theater reunion is coming up next, so you don't want to miss that. Guys, thank you again. Thank you everybody.
00:35:48
Speaker
Thank you, dear listener, for hanging out with us today. Subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen, and then tell your friends to do it. Thanks also to Joe Azari, the golden voice behind our intro. Our music is Game Boy Horror by the Zombie Dandies. Find more about them both on our show notes.
00:36:05
Speaker
Follow us on social media at AIC underscore podcast on Instagram and Twitter. Stop by and say hi. Show us your toy hauls and share your toy stories. Maybe we'll talk about it in a future episode.
00:36:29
Speaker
This has been a non-productive media presentation, executive producer Frank Kablaui. This program and many others like it on the non-productive network is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license. Please share it, but ask before trying to change it or sell it. For more information visit non-productive.com.