I collected Marvel’s G.I. Joe comics for the longest time, and I don’t recall seeing ads for the toys in them.
I didn’t either. And I much preferred the comic book to the cartoon and I still haven’t gotten over the death of Kwinn the Eskimo. 
RIP, Kwin, you were an occasional antagonist but you were a good guy.
You can thank Larry Hama for those magnificent story lines that went far beyond the cartoons and commercials. He pretty much created much of the “G.I. Jpe” universe.
Sorry yeah, I meant the comics themselves would be the ads same as the show.
Joe Camel
He did. In the episode covering GI Joe of the documentary series The Toys That Made US, Hama refers to the cartoon as “morally bankrupt” in large because there were no consequences to violence.
I occasionally read comics as a kid. Not often. They were never a big part of my life.
So, when did those ads for “X-ray specs!” and “Throw Your Voice!” and Charles Atlas chicanery go away? Did anything replace them? Were the manufacturers asked to stop these ads, which I presume were misleading? (Though sorely tempted, I figured they were BS and spent my meagre allowance elsewhere…)
We have a whole thread about those.
I can’t tell for sure from the pic, but my only guess is the bread is whole grain???
If you can find a copy, “Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads” is very interesting, it shows the ads next to what was sent if you ordered. They played extremely loose with the facts, but technically gave you what was advertised. That “real seven foot tall glow in the dark Frankenstein’s monster” was a poster with tiny glow in dark stickers to put on the eyes, for example. Disappointing for the kid who ordered it, but they probably got about what he paid for.
An early Mad magazine parody of those ads:
“LIVE CROCODILE! SURPRISE YOUR FRIENDS! AND ENEMIES!”
Back then, yes, but nowadays the shows aren’t so bad if you watch them in the absence of any commercials. This is easy enough to do if you get them on DVD or from a streaming service. I know kids who are happily watching various incarnations of He-Man these days but, since they don’t watch cable or broadcast TV, are blissfully unaware that there was (and still is) an entire toy line built around the series.
The real egregious examples are kids’ shows that have the advertising baked into the show. I think Mac and Me was probably the worst example. I remember it being little more than a 90-minute advertisement for Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, complete with an appearance by Ronald McDonald himself.
Shows like GI Joe, He-Man, and the Transformers were explicitly created to sell toys. i.e.
They were the advertisements. To an extent this still happens today, in 2013, the series Young Justice (DC property) had plenty of viewers, but it was cancelled because they weren’t selling enough toys related to the show.
I know that. What I was saying was that the physical toys themselves aren’t part of the show; they were commercials that ran separately. If you watch the shows without the original commercials, then it’s not so obvious that the cartoon was produced to sell toys. Some of the shows even have redeeming artistic qualities that make them worth watching. For instance, while the original He-Man is notorious for its shameless reuse of stock footage, its background artwork and the especially its underscore are actually fantastic:
There was a comic strip that resonated with me… Gahan Wilson ran a strip called “NUTS” (in, IIRC, early National Lampoons). One dealt with a little kid’s excitement as he sent away for a “Real U-Boat: The Wolf!”
Weeks later, a box arrives… “Gee, it seems a lot littler than I expected…” and as he’s giving up trying to glue tiny pieces together, a full size U-Boat glides past him: “So long, kid!”
“So long, Wolf U-Boat.”
(I had a huge disappointment the other day. So that’s what I said…)
I’m reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes propeller-beanie storyline.
Mine was a T-Rex that turned out to be a two-foot high balloon the shape of a bowling pin with cardboard feet that you could stick the tied-off part through so it would stand upright.
It did have a dinosaur printed on it, though.
Thanks! I just ordered a copy from an eBay seller.
Sometimes the thing advertised is actually pretty good. From the back of a Cheerios box I sent away for a “real flying model” of the then-new 747 jet. It was a two or three piece plastic model, about 10 inches long, nicely molded and easy to put together. It came with a long string (about 15 feet long) which you attached to the 747 and spun it in a circle. It actually flew! It was really an advertisement for PanAm and Boeing, but it was kinda neat.
Yep, I had one of those; I’m pretty sure the ad I read for it described it as a “statue” 
, which I thought might be a cardboard stand-up. Nah!