It seems like every geek franchise has at least one mysterious, badass-looking character who gains a cult following despite having done hardly anything or had any characterization at all (at least at first). Star Wars’s Boba Fett is the classic example, though the franchise also produced Darth Maul, who had even less screen time. In the world of G.I. Joe there was originally Snake Eyes, but now he has more history than you can shake a stick at; fortunately, the likes of Mercenary Wraith and Agent Helix have filled that void. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics has gotten so much mileage out of this sort of character it’s become something of a joke (it began with Wolverine in the 1980s, followed by Cable in the ’90s and then a plethora of characters since).

But when it comes to toy lines, the reason an obscure character becomes so popular is often because they have so little background. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar and a professor at the University of Southern California, has made a living examining the social trends of what we’d call geeks. In his essay “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?”, during a discussion of fan filmmaking, he notes

Fans, for example, note that the Boba Fett action figure, far more than the character’s small role in the trilogy, helped to make this character a favorite among digital filmmakers. The fans, as children, had fleshed out Boba Fett’s intentionally murky character, giving him (or her) a personality, motives, goals, and conflicts, which helped to inspire the plots of a number of the amateur movies.

In Masters of the Universe, the role of the mysterious-yet-badass character is filled by Scareglow. A late addition to MOTU as it lay dying in 1987, few fans ever owned him, having moved on to Transformers or G.I. Joe or some other fad by then. He was produced in smaller quantities than earlier MOTU figures, and so between that and the utter lack of characterization beyond a single minicomic appearance, Scareglow became somewhat legendary among MOTU fan circles.

There seems to be a contingent of fans out there who hold it against such characters that they’re popular, considering them to be cheap fanboy sops undeserving of the attention. To those fans I say: lighten up–and maybe think about using your damned imagination, for a change.

But I digress. In what was arguably a crime against fanity, Scareglow never received an updated figure in the 2002 MOTU line–hell, he never even got a “staction.” And so the Masters of the Universe Classics Scareglow arrives amidst much anticipation. (more…)

The 2002 revamp of Masters of the Universe was ambitious in scope, encompassing the toys, a new cartoon, a McDonalds tie-in and even a videogame. Mattel was fervently hoping to recapture the bottled lightning they’d found in the early 1980s.

Unfortunately, the toys weren’t as successful as Mattel’s immense hopes, and after two years it was shut down (though it lived on for quite a while via NECA’s “stactions”).

The theories for the 2002 line’s demise have been hashed out ad infinitum, so I won’t go over them again here. Suffice to say Zodak represents the second 2002 character to appear in MOTUC. As a variant of the already slow-selling (comparatively speaking) Zodac, it’s not surprising that he took two weeks to sell out; I’m very curious to see how the Goddess does in December. (more…)

Whew! After all that chaos and uncertainty, Teela is finally here.

I’ll forgo the tempting-but-predictable “sausage fest” jokes about the current state of Masters of the Universe Classics and simply say that Teela, the line’s first female figure, is a welcome addition.

The story of Teela’s creation for the original 1980s MOTU line, and how that conception was later woven into the various continuities, is pretty damned complicated. The original sketch of the character we know as Teela was called simply a “female warrior.” Since it was known even in those earliest stages that MOTU would re-use a lot of parts between figures, there was also a sketch of a character called the Sorceress, who would use the same basic body as the female warrior but have a snake-themed helmet and staff.

From here the story gets murky, but somehow the design labeled “Sorceress” got labeled “Teela” on the toys themselves, but the early mini-comics mixed up Teela and the Sorceress all the time (sometimes referred to as the Goddess, or even the Warrior-Goddess). In one mini-comic she was actually colored green.

The cartoon series put an end to it all, with the figure’s design (sans snake armor and staff) being called Teela, captain of the king’s guard, and the Sorceress having a completely different design. But the “Green Goddess” idea continues on, and we’re even getting a translucent repaint of the character (with a new-tooled staff) in December. (more…)