Masters of the Universe

Who is this sandy blond stranger on my shelf, his shiny horizon of a chest glistening in the warm phosphorescence of my room, his arms, two mountain ranges of marbled beef, tensed and clenched so that he looks like he is at all times brandishing an invisible boulder with which to smash those who oppose his might? What urge brought him thither on such sinewy (yet, honestly, slightly out-of-scale) legs? What is his mission, his purpose? Where did he buy that furry loincloth? This He-Man intrigues me. I, a rising giant, now grab my coffee (a boiling cauldron to my little friend) and with my free hand grasp the tiny yet godlike hero to get a closer look.

The first thing that I notice about him is that he has a pleasant solidity and heft to him mainly due to the fact that his arms and legs are solid molded plastic. Yes, sadly there are no joints in these manly pythons. Sorry, kids, but even though he has the strength of Superman, and a sword that can cleave the moon in twain, he can only move his arms up and down at the shoulders. Is this a downside? Perhaps, but the upshot is that the arms had holes on the insides of the shoulders that snap onto protruding pegs on the torso, which meant that A: you could safely take off and put back on their arms, and B: you could interchange arms between different figures, so that He-Man could have one arm that is a robot arm with a gun on the end, and the other arm that has a giant crab claw for a hand, an awesome play option that I am not so sure that the good people at Mattel planned on.

This interchageability didn’t matter so much, however, since a lot of the toy line reused parts from earlier figures. A lot of the figures had Skeletor’s weird arms and their small fish fins on the top and bottom of the forearm, and nearly everyone sported the same fur bikini bottom. Sometimes, whole figures would be repurposed into new characters; Moss Man was nothing but a green, flocked, pine-scented Beast Man, and Stinkor was Mer-Man painted like a skunk and cast with patchouli oil in the plastic mix to make him stink.

Is this rehashing of figures a drawback? Perhaps, but I always saw it as a strength. I always liked the fact that a lot of the figures sported very similar details. Ironically, this cheap repurposing of figure parts made the line more cohesive. Every character in the line, even the really bizarre ones like Snout Spout and Clawful, had similarities with other figures in the set, linking them as part of a whole, and even if the design was totally original, as with the Leech figure and his lizard body and suction-cup hands and mouth, it still did not stray far from the super-studly-and-buff design aesthetic of He-Man himself.

Indeed, they all looked to live in a world where anabolic steroids were found naturally in the drinking water. However, that commonality made it okay somehow, as if these were the rules here in good old Eternia and that’s just how it is. We, all of us, man and monster, are ripped like you wouldn’t believe. Even Roboto, the, um, robot with the clear chest with the moving gears in it, was bringing serious firepower to the gun show, and how does that make any sense? Why would a robot need muscular arms? Furthermore, why would a bee man need them, either, or a man with a robotic elephant mask on his head? How did Skeletor, whose face had no flesh on it, manage to develop such a beeftastic physique over the rest of his body? Magical Pilates?

But hey, who cares, man. Don’t get hung up on the details. They’re Masters of the Universe, after all, and we can’t have our Masters of the Universe running around with sunken chests and arms like Don Knotts, now, can we?

Copyright 2013 Brian Stacy Sweat