Out of scale?

Just a question....
It's probably just my O.C.D. kicking in, but I just wanted to ask if the absurdly out of scale dog tags that came with G.I. Joe ever bothered anyone?
I am always on the lookout for stuff that's 1/6 scale to use in photo setups, and I have modern 1/6 scale figures that have perfectly in-scale dog tags, but Joe's would be the equivalent of wearing a very large bread board chained round your neck!

I had two GI Joes as a kid in the 60's and 70's and while the first must have come with the breadboard dog tag and the second with the Adventure Team medallion, I'm sure I took these off right away and have no recollection of my Joes ever wearing them, probably because they looked ridiculous.

I never understood the large dog tags either mate. I think the 50th line have more in scale dog tags?

Mam early 90s had large dog tags I think. I have the large mam dog tags on most of my carded set sets that are on figures because I like seeing them being warn on my mam figure.

The company that makes the 1/3 scale Smart Dolls sells 1/3 scale dog tags... for about forty bucks apiece! So I put GI Joe dog tags on my Smart Dolls:


Even on the 1/3 scale dolls... I mean action figures (note the Joe-style coveralls)... the Joe tags are a bit oversize. But since they're saving me forty bucks a pop, they're close enough.

When I was a kid, I thought the tags were ridiculously large, but they came with the figures, so the figures all kept their tags; at least until the chains broke and the tags got lost.

These days, I usually remove the dog tags from Joe figures for photo-story projects, but I return the tags to the figures afterwards. The "giant" dog tags are just a GI Joe thing!

I think there were probably two or three reasons why the GI Joe / Action man dog tags were as large as they were.

1. They were going to be placed on standard beaded chains that were commercially available and so making them to scale would have been silly since the chains would not have been anyway.
2. They were intended to have the GI Joe / Action Man Logo’s on them as a further advertising and marketing tool.
3. They were going to go into the hands of children, and small, properly scaled ones would have been likely lost right away anyway. Better to have the large enough to carry a legible logo and perhaps not be lost.

This being said, I’m sure I took the ones that came with my Joes off right away and lost them right away as I don’t remember ever having them on.

I’ve got a to scale one .. I will post a pic later..

Just about all my "modern" figures that represent military personnel have proper in scale dog tags....as in tiny really and the chain is in scale too. It's only the vintage Joes and some of the earlier MAMs that have those gigantic tags. They get removed and thrown in a little box.

I think they were intended to be worn as a zipper pull or key chain. I think Hasbro thought they were a cool 'bonus'. As a kid they were the first thing you took off.