Thread: I'm trying to write a fiction book in English. Just for fun :)

Thanks guys. Corrected.

I would add (to Medved, as more cultural background for Peter) that during the 1970s, Hollywood's anti-Sovietism cooled down slightly -- partly because of public anti-war sentiment after Vietnam, and perhaps also because of the optimism created by the SALT talks. Notorious examples such as Red Dawn were a 1980s phenomenon. And when Star Wars revived the sci-fi genre in 1977, the bad guys were blatantly modeled on the Third Reich, not the USSR.

A little more stuff that might be of interest to the author:

In the mid-1960s (when Peter was about 15) "GI Joe" dolls action figures became some of the top-selling toys for boys. (They were the same scale as Barbie -- ~30cm tall -- and just like Barbie, they could be dressed in different clothes.)



Virtually all the uniforms and weapons for GI Joe were based on American designs of the WW2 era. "Generic enemy" uniforms (based on WW2 German uniforms, but without swastikas!) could be bought separately -- so that boys who owned two or more GI Joe dolls could "переодеть" one of them into an enemy for the "American hero" to fight with -- but Soviet, North Korean, Chinese, and/or Vietnamese soldiers/uniforms/weapons were never officially sold.

Of course, little American boys most likely PRETENDED that the "generic enemy" soldiers were Soviet, Chinese, and/or Vietcong, but the toys weren't labeled as such by Hasbro, the company that produced GI Joe. And all the dolls were, at first, white men with various colors of hair -- an African-American GI Joe was added a bit later, but there were never dolls with "Oriental" eyes.

Hasbro stopped selling the original ~30cm GI Joe dolls by the mid-'70s, but they had a (hugely successful!) reincarnation in the mid-'80s, as ~10cm "action figures" -- Hasbro's answer to the Star Wars figures produced by the Kenner company. This time, countless enemy figures were sold for GI Joe to fight -- but they weren't Soviets or Red Chinese or Arabs, they were "generic" high-tech terrorists of no identifiable national loyalty, similar to SPECTRE from the James Bond movies. None of this was part of Peter's childhood, of course, but it would have been part of his consciousness as an American man from the Baby Boomer generation.

And, incidentally, the phrase "GI Joe" (meaning "typical US soldier") had possibly existed as obscure military slang since WW2, and was definitely in widespread use among the US military in the Korean war, but it did not become a "household word" for American civilians until the dolls were introduced in the late 1960s. So, if Peter were to say "I'm not GI Joe," it would have been as meaningless to Ann as "UFO" or "Star Wars."

Sorry this was so long... but I hope that it might give Medved some insight into Peter's psychology, while also helping him to avoid anachronisms in Ann's English usage.