Blog time.

I’ve been using lyrics as blog titles for a while now, but I wanted to write about Masters of the Universe today and there are no words to the cartoon’s theme song beyond repeating “He-Man!” in different octaves, so I took a snippet from the intro instead.

In the days of my youth, I flitted from toy line to toy line but really there were three lines that emerged as predominant forces: Star Wars, G.I.Joe and Masters of the Universe. The action figures from Masters of the Universe were colourful with fun designs, they had great play features that set them apart from many other toy lines and best of all, they had terribly punny names. The master of disguise was named Man-E Faces. The bee guy was named Buzz Off. The guy with the cybernetically elongated neck was named Mekaneck. You get the picture.

In those days, we lived in an apartment that had a large alley that served as something of a backyard for the kids on the block. On this block, there was a girl named Fannie who was also very big on Masters of the Universe. When we would play together, we would pool all our figures and then take turns drafting our favorites for our respective teams, regardless of their canonical faction. Surprisingly, while both of us had sizeable collections, there was very little overlap, so this gave us an opportunity to play with characters we couldn’t play with on our own. As I remember it, the draft was the fun part as then we’d then go to opposite sides of the porch and play out our own separate adventures, which I guess means that we didn’t really play TOGETHER all that much, but we still had fun.

I never got Castle Greyskull or Snake Mountain (Fannie had both). I got the Fright Zone, which was Hordak’s lair. It wasn’t the most elaborate playset. It was a mountain-side with a prison, a tree that could grab figures and a hole from which emerged this giant lizard creature (a rubber hand puppet). It was the most sturdy of the playsets though (Greyskull’s walls were quite thin). While doing some research for the mash-ups, I discovered that there was an Eternia playset which was enormous. It must have come out after I got out of the line because I had no recollection of it whatsoever. Amazing.

For some reason I only got the villain vehicles (they were probably more affordable). The Land Shark and the Roton were great. I would have liked to have several Sky Sleds as those were the vehicles most often used in the cartoon, but they were only sold as a part of the Battle Ram (which you never saw in the cartoon).

Because I like Top Ten lists, here are my 10 Favorite Masters of the Universe action figures:

10 – Roboto
9 – Battle Armor Skeletor
8 – Mer-Man*
7 – Mekaneck
6 – Beast Man
5 – Trap-Jaw*
4 – Man-E Faces (My first figure from the line!)
3 – Webstor
2 – Kobra Khan
1 – Sy-Klone

* Figures I never had, but Fannie did. She almost always drafted Trap-Jaw first, so I didn’t get to play with him very much, but I always picked Mer-Man which she thought was weird.

This trip down memory lane is brought to you by the flashback line of mash-ups that will be beginning on the site this Friday. Be sure to come by for the next 22 weeks to see how much better the mash-ups look this time around.

That’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

Blog Time.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to keep up my pace of two flashbacks in a weekend for the third time in a row. I had plans for Saturday and there was a LOT of wrestling to watch over the weekend. Somehow in the middle of it all, I got the work done. It helps that I’m really enjoying drawing these Masters of the Universe flashbacks. They’ll start going up next week.

One of the conversations I got into when I was out on Saturday was about passion vs. talent and whether one should give up on something when it’s obvious they’re no good at it and aren’t really getting any better. My opinion is that one should never have to give up on something they’re passionate or that brings them joy, but one still needs to be realistic. I don’t think it’s healthy to cling to the hope that you can make a living at something that you’re not very good at, no matter how much you love doing it. Of course, how good you are at something artistic can be pretty subjective, and it’s possible to hit a niche audience with work that the general public would consider subpar. Still, it can be tough to make a living as a musician or an artist. That’s why I’ve always kept what I’m doing on this site as a hobby and not pushed to pursue it as a career. I continue to see improvement and I’m still enjoying the process so that’s enough to keep on keeping on. If someday I can connect in some small positive way with an audience, small or otherwise, outside my immediate sphere of acquaintances, that’ll just make it all that much better.

I finally got to try Machi Koro on game night last week. The long and short of it is I liked it. The goal of the game is to be the first to build the six landmarks in your city. Each turn you roll one or two dice which will determine which buildings generate income during your turn. You can then either expand your city with a building or landmark with the income you’ve generated or save up to build something bigger on a future turn. The buildings come in four flavours. Blue buildings will generate money for you when their number is rolled, regardless of whose turn it is. Green buildings will generate money for you when you roll their number on your turn only. Red buildings will cause other players to pay you money if they roll the red building’s number on their turn. Finally, purple buildings will cause other players to pay you money if you roll the purple building’s number on your turn. The landmarks are designed to offset some of the luck involved in rolling the dice. Overall it’s a nice, light design and I very much enjoyed the game, even though I lost all three times we played. But if you don’t like games with a high luck factor, I’d say avoid this one. You can help yourself by diversifying your buildings so that you’ll make money on any die roll, but it’ll happen that your maximum payouts will be on a number that you just never seem to roll and inevitably you’ll keep rolling that number that matches another player’s red building and keep having to pay them money. It can be frustrating but funny at the same time. Of note, I bought the “Deluxe” Edition that came with the first two expansions. If playing with just the base game, I would still recommend using the setup from the expansions which will make things less predictable. I think it’d also help to offset the problem that the base game’s setup favors keeping to a one-die strategy which makes some buildings kind of useless.

That’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday.