The moment was intense. I broke the seal on the dossier with my decoder at my side, began to decipher the secret message in front of me. My mission was of utmost importance because if I wasn’t successful, I would jeopardize our national security. Sitting at my desk, I worked quickly. A dot and a dash was an “A”. Three dots was an “S”. A dot, two dashes, and another dot was a “P.” It was coming together easily and the further I got, the quicker the solution came. When I finished, I put the decoded message in the mail and waited for my reward.

Four to six weks later, I got it–a patch and a certificate.

While it wasn’t as crushing to my childhood innocence as Ralphie Parker decoding and Ovaltine commercial, the anticlimax of toy-related mai-ins and ocntests could be very real when i was a kid. Sure, many of my friends and I have glorious tales of saving up proofs of purchase for a special mail-away figure, but I also remember toy inserts or ads inc omic books that promised something really cool if you filled out an entry form.

Now, most of these were for contests or random merchandise, but Hasbro did the children of America a solid with their G.I. Joe toys back in the mid-1980s. I wasn’t there for the Sgt. Slaughter or William “The Refrigerator” Perry figures (although my friend had both), but in the summer of 1987, I did spot an ad in the back of a comic book for a G.I. Joe figure based on myself.

I spent much of 1987 not only reading G.I. Joe comics, but also being fixated on the military. My friends and I all owned some variation of camouflage that we convinced our parents to purchase from Thunder Ride, the army surplus store that was in the same strip mall as Carvel. We’d wear the camo pants to school when we weren’t wearing them while playing “army” in one another’ backyards or in the park, fake shooting one another with Entertech guns or pretending to throw grenades after pulling the pins with our teeth (something I think in real life would really hurt). Along the way, we created personalities and characters. I don’t remember if they were fully fleshed out, and that character’s function changed based on what looked cool at the moment, but they were there. So creating a profile of the character was not out of the question.

When we saw the ad in the back of our G.I. Joe comics, we grabbed a few times, got on our bokes, and headed to the library where we made photocopies of the ad, which we filled out. I know nothing about what I wrote, only that my character’s name was Maneater (a subconscious reference to Hall and Oates?).

Four to six weeks later, I got the figure, a helmeted “Steel Brigade” guy with a light pistol for a weapon as well as a “Steel Brigade” patch for my jacket.* It was .. well, not a total disappointment, but not the coolest thing, either. I liked that I had a file card, but the figure itself looked generic. The head was huge, the colors were drab, and he wound up in second-tier status when I played with my figures–usually manning a computer in the tactical battle platform. I guess I shouldn’t have expected much from a mass-produced toy like. They weren’t exactly going to let me design my own guy or make me look like Snake-eyes.

Still, they got my money and time, and I think I might have been the only one among my friends hwo followed through and actually sent in the form, just like I had with another G.I. Joe mail-away, a game called “Live the Adventure”.

Running through 1986 and 1987, Live the Adventure was two puzzle solving games that came with the vehicles in the G.I. Joe toy line. For each of them, you were given a scenario where you had to help the joes defeat Cobra and that meant decoding a secret message, the deciding which team members would be best for the mission. If you got a certificate and a patch (again with the patches) and were entered into a drawing. In 1986, you could win the U.S.S. Flagg; in 1987, you got a toy prize pack.

The message was not hard to decipher–it was written in Morse code. I’d learned about Morse code earlier in the year by doing an “inventors” report on Samuel F.B. Morse, and just as my friends eagerly looked at military rank insignia in The World Book Encyclopedia, I also looked up the legend of various dots and dashes to know how to communicate if I ever found myself using a telegraph. It will come as a shock to nobody that I have never had to send a telegraph in my life.

The certificates were essentially participate trophies, as anyone who entered got one, and while most of my friends completed the first Live the Adventure challenge, I remember being the only one who completed the second (although it’s all relative–I knew 10 people at most). I don’t know what happened to the certificates, patches, or action figure. It’s likely that they were thrown away or donated at one point or another, just like most of my childhood ephemera. But I am not going to lie; I was proud of that accomplishment and those certificates sat face-forward on my shelf for at least a year, propped up by my soccer participation trophies until I took them down and replaced them with books and eventually a CD/cassette stereo.

*What was with patches in the 1980s? I kept getting them in fan club mailers and as incentives or prizes in cereal boxes or as mail-aways.