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.