Masters of the Universe

Is it about the figures? Maybe. Is it the comics? Probably not. Is it about the cartoon? Somewhat. What MOTU is really about for me now is the nostalgia factor. I think that He-man was the first cartoon I can remember watching where I had a toy that was based on it. I do remember watching Tranzor Z earlier, but I never had any of the toys.

I remember as a kid having several of these toys, and my brother had a few himself. I don't know what actually happened to my MOTU figures, and will probably never know, but I do remember playing with these as a kid, and even having Castle Grayskull. That was awesome. For some reason, my parents only bought me good guys and my brother and friends had all the bad guys. I can even remember being really jealous of my friend Doug's MOTU collection, but hey I was a kid, what do you expect. I think it's kinda the suck that I never had any of the bad guys to fight against, cause the bad guys were where it's at.

Which brings me up to one of my theories. Villains are always more fun than the good guys. I don't know why this is, but I heard an interview from a Marvel writer once discussing the problems with villains. His main point was for every hero, there needed to be a slew of villains or the plots would get boring. Would Batman have been Batman if the Joker was the only villain? What about the Penguin, the Riddler, the Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, the Phantasm, Ra's al Gul, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Clayface, Manbat and a host of others. His point was that behind every successful hero, there stood a ton of supporting villains. I think I read something like at one time Marvel had copyrighted something like 20,000 characters, but that less than 500 of them were superheroes. I think the number was around 96% of copyrighted characters were villains. So if there were so many of them, to be memorable, they had to be great, not good. That's why villains like Bizzaro, the Joker, Sinestro, Venom, Metallo, Magneto and Kingpin just to name a few were so cool, they had to be.

So in MOTU, there were a lot of toys, and there were a lot of good villains in with it. Trap-Jaw, Faker, Beastman, and later some of the She-Ra villains were very cool. There were so many of them that some of them really had to stand out. Some of them just were so good, and no where near as pathetic as some of the heroes.

Just recently there has been a new line of figures released, obviously to tie into the nostalgia market, and some of the additions like Adora and the Green Goddess are really nice. I enjoyed these as a kid, and have a collection of them still now as an adult, so I guess I fill my nerd quotient for the day right there. However, there is one huge marketing faux pas from the original characters that I would like to sum up in the next question. Why was there never a Faker Battlecat?