Star Wars occasionally bears the brunt of snooty criticism that says it's nothing more than a glorified toy commercial. Like that's a bad thing. Like creating memorable playthings to expand and engage a child's imagination is something shameful.

Well, purely toy-driven universes like G.I.Joe and Transformers don't have much of a defense against the toy commercial criticism, but they deserve more praise than they usually get. Hasbro really pioneered the idea of turning toys into characters in a larger story, and it's really remarkable how that all came about.

Not surprisingly, Star Wars plays a role. The phenomenal success Kenner had with their 3.75" action figures prompted Hasbro to bring back G.I.Joe in a smaller scale, but the real breakthrough idea was to abandon the idea of "Joe" as a singular character for boys to put through action scenarios, and instead create a whole cast of characters. After all, kids were reenacting and expanding Star Wars adventures with their assortment of figures, including second tier non-hero characters like "Snaggletooth" or "R5-D4." Star Wars proved that this play pattern was viable. So while Hasbro did what they did best -- created toys -- they recruited Marvel Comics for their expertise of crafting characters and stories.

A word about the world of early '80s toy advertising. The FCC had strict rules governing the depiction of toys in television commercials. While a certain amount of dramatized content was allowed, the commercial needed to show the toys as toys. You couldn't have 30 seconds of animation for a toy. And you most certainly could not have a 22-minute show based on a toy at the time. But Hasbro was itching to showcase the newly created Joe storyline in a splashy way, and wanted to craft a 30-second wall-to-wall animated commercial. But how to get around the rules....

It was genius, really. The FCC had no rules about the content of a commercial for a comic book, simply because there never ever was a television commercial for a comic book before. Hasbro commissioned Marvel to create a comic book showcasing their G.I. Joe characters, with Larry Hama writing, and put Sunbow Animation studios to work creating a 30-second animated spot for G.I.Joe #1.

It was a brilliant marketing solution to bypass a government restriction, and resulted in the smash-hit comic release. For the first time, there was a nationally broadcast television commercial for a comic book. Much of the animation created for the commercial was repurposed and edited into toy commercials, with the government-approved amount of toy footage intercut into the action.

What deserves mention is that, given the business reasons for the comic's genesis, Larry Hama deserves credit for crafting as good a comic as he did. It was a toy tie-in comic that no one at Marvel wanted to do, and yet it ran for a staggering 150 issues. Those characters became icons, and the G.I.Joe comic continues publishing today, building on the universe that Hama built.

What does this have to do with Transformers? Because the same creative care was applied by the same parties in the launch of that series. This time, it was Bob Budiansky crafting the Transformer characters and origins. Also different was that the FCC loosened their regulations, and entire half-hour television shows could be created based on toy properties.

He-Man was actually the first out of the gate in 1983, with Transformers following the next year. Sunbow handled the animated series, and Marvel launched what was supposed to be a 4-issue limited series that instead turned into an 80-issue run. It was the stories of the animated series and comics series -- sometimes spotty, sometimes goofball, and yes, sometimes great -- that made these series really stick out in the memories of guys my age.

Glorified toy commercials? That's hardly scratching the surface.

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