>>8504943most people today now aren't old enough to have gotten into the GI Joe line in the 80s.
There was a much bigger crowd in the 00s and 10s who focused on the 1:18 Joes, but they dispersed in the past 5 or 8 years when the line was on a decline from lack of support.
You have to remember that a lot of people that did reviews had their own websites to do review from in the 00s and into the early 10s, and a lot of those disappeared as youtube became a viable source of income and required next to nothing to create income creating content vs maintaining a website.
And because of the line starting to slow down, there really was no transition of old fans going onto youtube.
I remember in the 90s and 00s, there was a ton of content for me to check out, from just fansites creating massive dioramas and/or reviewers talkinga bout their favorite figures and reporting news on upcoming figures + articles about production/prototypes/interviews. Today it's a complete dearth of dedication even from old collectors who are still active but never bothered to reupload shit.
So basically, from your perspective it's like finding out about the Beatles in grade school, thinking you discovered some underground band, because none of your classmates care about shit from the 60s and 70s. Your parents don't find music important like they used to and you aren't interested in what your uncles and other adults do.
In reality, both GI Joe and the Beatles were fucking huge. GI Joe was outselling shit like XMen in the 80s, and outlasted other popular franchises like Transformers because of a far larger fanbase, for the cartoons, comics, and toys.
And just to note, the success of the GI Joe 25th Anniversary line for Hasbro in 2007/2008 (and it was originally only supposed to be a limited mini-line, until Target asked for even more products) is what led to them moving the main Marvel line to 1:18 scale.
