A visit to Adventure Team headquarters

I mostly missed out on the GI Joe Adventure Team as a kid. It came along too late, when I was supposedly outgrowing my painthead military Joes. But I was very aware of the line, and it had a great deal of appeal to me.

Perhaps it was just that I spent so much of my life on and around military bases. That stuff was just kind of every-day for me. But the spies, explorers, and adventurers were something different and exciting, and I loved reading the old Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, with all their futuristic vehicles and gadgets (how mundane those magazines seem today, though it's gotten better in the last couple years).

But one aspect that seemed especially interesting to me was the Adventure Team Headquarters. Yes, yes, there's the vinyl, plastic, and cardboard pop-up set that was sold, but that only suggested to me what the real ATHQ might be like. I figured it had to be one-part command post, one part club-house, and one part museum. When I got back into the hobby, I immediately started collecting props to create my "ultimate headquarters." Believe it or not, I'm still not there, but every once in a while I did all my stuff out and see how come I can come. This is one of my efforts from a year or so back. Worth blowing up, as there's tons of interesting detail.













There's literally every kind of prop you can imagine in here. Knick-knacks, props from smaller-scale action figures, museum shop items, aquarium decorations, doll-house furniture, advertising items, craft-store bits, you name it. Only a few things here were actually intended as 1/6th props: the Power Team folding chair and "movie-screen" map, the Ever-Sparkle white-board and training tower used as part of the back wall, the "Mummy's Tomb" mummies, a couple GI Joe map tubes and portable computers, a few odd tables, and so on. But most of this stuff has been "repurposed" for Joe use.