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by Lore Sjöberg
He-Man
An incredibly muscular blond guy in a breechcloth and
a page boy. On this planet he'd be stripping for tips
in North Beach, but on Eternia he fights deformed animal guys
and delivers homilies on the value of cooperation. Location,
location, location. My real difficulty with He-Man is that
his secret identity -- "Prince Adam," which is a porn name
if I ever heard one -- was nothing more than
a change of outfit and a whiny voice.
He didn't even bother with the Clark Kent eyeglass move, for
God's sake. C-
Skeletor
I can only imagine the incredible amounts of money Mattel must
have saved by not allowing the action figure designers to
spend more than thirty-five seconds coming up with character
names. Skeletor was a by-the-book evil overlord, from his raspy
voice to his megalomania to his incompetent flunkies. While
the ram's head staff was a nice Satanic touch, he really didn't
add anything to the genre. C-
Man-At-Arms
One of the neighborhood kids -- when I was young and actually playing
with action figures, as opposed to just having them -- was convinced
that the name "Man-At-Arms" was composed of the first name "Man-At"
and the last name "Arms." As if he was the child of Hank and
Brenda Arms, an art-loving couple who tried to name their son
after Manet but missed by a vowel. Still, considering that the
character's real first name was "Duncan," my friend's delusion was
a marked improvement. B
Mer-Man
The moral schema of Eternia was pretty straightforward: "Incredibly
Ugly = Evil, Merely Grotesque = Good." Mer-Man, in spite of the
handsome-sea-lord invoking name, was squarely on the malformed
misanthrope side of things. He was a fish guy and a lackey of
Skeletor's. He may have had some sort of fish powers, I don't know,
but his main tasks were to do Skeletor's dirty work, and to run like
a startled chinchilla when confronted by He-Man, thereby preserving
the cartoon's oddly non-violent facade. D
Orko
Don't talk to me about Orko. I don't want to hear it. The
very existence of Orko in cartoon-land has serious impact
on my will to live. When did they pass the Constitutional Amendment
requiring squeaky-voiced buffoon sidekicks in kids' cartoons?
The only things between Orko and Scrappy-Doo level badness
are his lack of a moronic battle cry, and the fact that the
He-Man show would have sucked even without him. D-
Stinkor
You have to admire the design chutzpah that went into
creating this molded plastic marriage of action-packed fun and unpleasant
odor. When you make something like this, you're hoping that
kids will be so enamored of the very awfulness
of it that they will overcome a parent's natural reluctance to
spend seven bucks on something where the main selling point
is "smells bad." Apparently the gamble paid off, though, because
it seemed like half the kids on my block had one of these guys. B
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