Bicep-rippling battlers with moral message

There’s an almost infinite number of reasons why we should hate He-Man And His Assorted Toy-Flogging Swashbuckling Masters Of The Cartoon Universe. For a start, he’d have been wedgied into the middle of next week if he’d turned up at our school disco with that pudding-bowl haircut, “Power Of Grayskull” or no. Plus, he hung around with such a bunch of cockmunchers (floating conjuring incompetent Orko, sappy love interest capture-monkey Teela and moustachioed P.E. teacher Man-At-Arms – real name Duncan) that he was in serious danger of looking a dweeb by association.

However, we’ll quite happily go on record as saying that Mattel’s He-Man toy range was fucking excellent, simply because we’ve never seen a company throw itself quite so wholeheartedly into merchandising a toy in our tiny lives. Seriously, there was no stone left unturned¹. The range comprised the biggest and barmiest selection of figures, accessories and playsets the Eighties ever saw, each constructed to the same, chunky, child-hand-sized scale (at five and a quarter inches of pleasingly tactile plastic, they were completely incompatible with the likes of Action Man and Star Wars figures).

Masters Of The Universe was arguably also the first cross-gender toy range. Despite all the macho posturing, there were plenty of slender-thighed lady figures for sis to kick ass with and – in 1984 – an entire range of She-Ra toys. Blessed with long, brushable hair and a selection of fashions, She-Ra fought with “honour” rather than “power” as heiress to the throne of Etheria. (She was, naturally, He-Man’s twin sister.)

Mattel was so single-minded in its determination to revolutionise the action figure oeuvre that not even the puny TV series could stop it². Around 1986 the toy giant gave up its dependence on the cartoon and started inventing its own range of villains, The Evil Horde. The He-Man figure alone was re-issued in at least six different versions (the original, then Battle-Armor [sic], Thunder Punch, Flying Fists, Laser Power and Clark-Kent-style alter ego, Prince Adam). In addition to the toys there were also He-Man comics, Viewmaster reels, walkie-talkies, videos, party horns, beakers, bedspreads, jigsaws and puzzles. And much, much, much, much more. Mattel was rumoured to have raked in billions and the impact on Western pop culture was permanent.

Lest we forget, He-Man also begat Thundercats and Transformers and, we’d be happy to claim, WWF. However, the abiding irony is that, on a cartoon which featured violence at its very core (there were more battle-axes this side of a Les Dawson monologue), He-Man had the gall to turn up at the end of each episode and deliver a lecture, the moral extraction of which can be summed up as “don’t be a cunt”.