He-Man: The Evil Horde Figures
 
It's been awhile since our last Masters of the Universe article, and I wanted to do something on the villains. We've seen quite enough of Skeletor and his crew for one lifetime, so I've decided it's high time to reintroduce y'all to some of the Horde toys that made a splash into the world of He-Man toys back in '87. And what was the Horde? Well, see, it went something like this: He-Man's show had enough baddies for the good guys to beat up with Skeletor and company, but She-Ra, a new show with new heroes, had none to speak of. So, instead of lumping Hordak's Evil Horde onto Eternia, they were given to the Princess of Power cartoon, with a dual purpose: now She-Ra had a reason to look sexily forlorn, and boys wouldn't feel ashamed watching the show because it had some decidedly masculine baddies shooting everything in sight.
While Hordak ranks as one of my favorite action figures ever, today we're only going to focus on his minions - all of them evil, all of them ugly, all of them stupid. These three are the first in a line of Horde villain figures, which aside from being pretty good looking toys, (almost handsome!) broke the mold on the usual MOTU fare by some of them having their own shapes and sizes as opposed to being more repainted Beast Mans with different rubber heads popped on. Before these figures, you'd swear that every hero and villain in Eternia utilized the exact same workout regime and diet plan. Plus, as was the case with every new He-Man figure, their biggest selling point was the rush kids would get when they smelled that fresh plastic after opening the package. It was like drugs for us. Every time I landed a new He-Man toy, I wasn't sure what to do first - play with it, or put the figure in a little paper bag, sit in a dark closet, and smell the shit out of it till I was high. I love toys that give you options.
 
Leech was the Horde's suction master, because every evil conglomerate needs one of those. Think about it: say She-Ra and her buddies moved into a larger headquarters made entirely of laminated plastic. Who better than Leech for the job? You've gotta give Hordak credit for thinking about the future while selecting his moron slaveboys. I mean sure, Leech is pretty useless right now, but eventually, a lot of Hordak's enemies could live in plastic buildings and then he'd come in mighty handy. Until that time, he's always good for changing the bulbs in the high flourescents in the Fright Zone - Hordak hates having to bring in the ladders.
Leech's figure had a face with an air-suction cup that let him stick to windows, walls, or even your cheek. If memory serves, Leech gave me my first hickey. His hands had suction cups too, so this guy could pretty much suck things with every limb on his body. I guess that's a pretty lame claim to fame when you really consider things...
Skeletor: Okay fellas, Hordak and I were talking, and it seems like we've got one villain too many between the both of us. One of you guys has gotta go. Tell me what your most powerful aspect is - if you impress me, I won't feed you to my evil congregation of evil pet tigers.
Mer-Man: I can breathe underwater - He-Man will drown in the chase!
Spikor: My body is covered in spikes - He-Man's punches will hurt his fist lots!
Two-Bad: I have two heads - if He-Man punches one, I can still throw insults from the other!
Stinkor: I smell terrible! - He-Man will be too busy holding his nose to call on Greyskull's mysterious powers!
Leech: I uhh...stick to things. Um..He-Man will be too stuck to me...to, you know, do things that require...forefront unstickiness. I'm sticky.
Poor Leech. At least his face looked like a bullhorn. He's a great figure to use if you ever need someone to talk a toy down from a suicide jump off Snake Mountain.
  
Mantenna was, according to the package, Horde's evil spy with pop-out eyes. See, his eyes extended out on weird stalks, so he could see over short barricades. Hence, a spy. On the cartoon, he was also able to shoot out vicious psychic beams that came complete with a wooshy wooshy sound, but that's another story. Definitely one of the more unique He-Man figures, Mantenna is reminiscent of the ending scene from The Fly, where ol' Brindle ends up part human, part fly, part machine, part plastic tubing. Mantenna shares in this variety of flavors - nobody's really sure what he is. He's got those weird eyes, four legs, human-esque arms, insect features, and a head that looks like a giant piece of packaged sour ball candy. I guess Hordak hired him in case his kid ever needed a case study for his biology finals.
The figure had a little lever on it's back that let you push his eyestalks up and down. It was one of the few He-Man figure features that worked 100% of the time, as opposed to the first three times, or no times at all. Mantenna was also made from a much harder plastic than most of the figures, meaning that if you used him as a surrogate ninja star weapon, chucking him by the foot, he'd hurt your friends a lot more than usual. That's gotta be worth 5.99.
Inexplicably, Mantenna and all the figures featured here today come with crossbow weapons. There must have been a huge sale on crossbows when they were doing the wartime stockpile. Or maybe they all felt Hawkeye was a way undervalued West Coast Avenger and wanted to pay a little homage. Maybe crossbows were just considered chic by ugly monsters back in those days. Maybe they all admired Chewbacca. It doesn't really matter much because the crossbows shot lasers much like any cartoon gun would. They just looked dumber.
He also preferred goat's milk to cow's milk. Don't ask me how I know that, I don't for sure - but it's written all over his face.
 
Finally, Grizzlor, the brawn of the Horde. Grizz was Hordak's personal version of Beast Man - they were both furry, they were both idiots, and they both wore amateur wrestling boots. Only Grizz had a much better toy, because his fur was real, not just some bumpy plastic chestplate that was supposed to look like it. If memory serves, he was my very first fuzzy action figure, the first in a long and esteemed line of toys that were gloriously hairy and easily destroyed. We the children have this innate and uncontrollable desire to ruin anything we owned that was made of fur, felt, hair, cloth, you name it - if it wasn't washable, we had to pour something bad on it. It was like this universal masochistic entity that came over ever kid who ever lived. With me, it was by way of the He-Man Slime Pit tub o'slime. I had my pick of no less than six dozen action figures to pour slime on, and I pick the one that'd get totally destroyed in the process. Poor Grizzlor. By the time the game was through, his body was like the pubic hair on someone who got too excited with their clothes still on.
So I, quite literally, gave him a haircut. The end result was a sort of Drill Sergeant Grizzlor. He had the buzzcut thing going, and the cliche bloodshot eyes that just screamed for him to order Fisto to do lots of push-ups.
All of the figures featured came with the infamous mini-comics - a staple addition in every package of a MOTU figure. These mini-comics usually explained the origins of the figure you bought using the most inane storyline humanly possible to dream up, and dialog that makes Hamlet seem like an easy read by comparison. Check it out...
My favorite part is Buzz Off's private thoughts in the second panel. I just think it's funny that a guy in a bee suit would have such well thought out insights running through his bee head even when a sasquatch is being shot with rifles three feet to the right of him. It reads like a really bad SNL skit. Also, I wonder what prior business Grizzlor has with Teela. From the looks of things, she still owes him 50 bucks on that bet she lost...she was wrong, He-Man couldn't get through a battle without inadvertently falling victim to the atomic wedgie. Pay up, Wilma.
Because the figures had this brilliant and sadistic 'Horde' bat logo on the package, you always felt like you'd accomplished something special when you purchased one. Tri-Kiops never had any special logos on his package. It really made Hordak's group seem like some elite force, when in reality they were just as useless as every other villain in the He-Man universe. They just had crossbows. Lots of 'em. And tonight we pay tribute to those bowcastin' Horde fools - without them, we would've had to admit that we watched She-Ra because we had a big crush on Frosta. And let's face it, our reputations had enough trouble remaining stable after that whole fiasco with collecting Pound Puppies. Remember The Horde!
- Matt
matt@x-entertainment.com
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