- by Owen Morton
Around about this time last year I wrote a series of articles discussing the most stupid He-Man figures and characters I could think of. We witnessed the delights of Mantenna, the very very hard figure with the bulging eyes, for example, and in other articles I took the piss out of such inspired ideas as Moss-Man (I still find it hard to believe that even Skeletor could be defeated by a man disguised as a piece of moss) and the entirely useless disguises offered by Man-E-Faces. But recently I acquired a large box of He-Man figures from eBay, and as a consequence, I can discuss the various useful features of figures which I never owned, and – indeed – never even knew existed. Until now.
Sy-Klone is the first of these. He is, I am told by He-Man.org, a warrior for the forces of good, and is bright yellow and blue. If you spin a little wheel on his waist, his arms fly out and his torso spins round at an alarming speed. This is evidently supposed to be his secret weapon. His name seems to imply that doing this summons up a cyclone, but we’ve seen He-Man do that sixteen times an episode, so we’re really not impressed. (This is actually the problem faced by all of He-Man’s friends. There’s not anything a single one of them can do that He-Man can’t do himself a hundred times better. I bet he could even make himself look more like moss than Moss-Man does, if he wanted to. And the fact that he never does says something about the effectiveness of Moss-Man’s cunning ploy.)
Anyway, Sy-Klone is disturbingly hard to use. I find it a real effort to spin the afore-mentioned wheel on his waist, and frankly it’s not an enticing enough reward to make me even try. But if it’s that hard for a twenty year old, surely it would have been much harder for a five year old. I’m so glad I didn’t have Sy-Klone when I was little. I bet he’d have made me cry.
But let’s move on. The real purpose of this article isn’t to discuss Sy-Klone. I just put Sy-Klone in here so I wouldn’t have to try to drag out a full article about him, because he’s so uninteresting that I probably wouldn’t have been able to. Today we are actually going to talk about one of the Evil Horde. Possibly the most evil member of the Evil Horde. I’m surprised he was included in a toy range for children, that’s how evil he is. He gives me shivers down my spine every time I look at him.
The Evil Horde, as we all know, was a band of nitwits led by Hordak in his ever-failing attempts to suppress the rebellion on the planet Etheria, led by He-Man’s sister, She-Ra. No self-respecting boy would ever have collected the She-Ra toys (they actually had hair! They were like Barbies!), but the Evil Horde were a different story altogether. It was quite easy to ignore the She-Ra aspect of the situation, and just pretend that Hordak and co. were another faction of evil that He-Man had to deal with. (It’s interesting to note that in the new series of He-Man figures coming out now, Skeletor’s men are referred to as the Evil Horde. I hope this doesn’t mean they’re not going to redo the original Evil Horde. The redesigned figures are rather cool, actually, and I wouldn’t mind having a new Leech, among others.)
Anyway, the Evil Horde consisted of Hordak, Leech, Mantenna, Grizzlor, the Horde Trooper, Modulok (some of which have been previously discussed) and … Dragstor!
No, I didn’t think you’d have heard of him either. This is because I’m relatively certain Dragstor would have never appeared on either She-Ra or He-Man, on account of being really rather rubbish. Dragstor appeared in my box of He-Man figures as a complete random. I’d never seen or heard of him before. I was only able to tell he was actually a He-Man figure because he has the Evil Horde logo on his front. A slight bit of research on He-Man.org later, and I discovered his true identity!
Having identified it as Dragstor, however, doesn’t really make me warm to the thing any more. I’m now going to describe it. (If I could be bothered, I’d take a photo of it and put it up, but I really can’t.) Dragstor looks like some kind of deep sea diver, being clad in a dark blue diving suit and a helmet, and big red boots, with some orange gloves on. He has breathing pipes heading into his face, and – as previously mentioned – the Evil Horde logo on the front of his suit. What is intriguing about this interesting fellow, however, is the fact that he has a small wheel jutting out of his front.
I initially thought he was going to be like one of those cars you pull back and let go, and it shoots forward. Sadly, it’s not that good. On examining it, there seemed to be no obvious way to activate the wheel. My friend Anton looked it over (Anton’s good at fixing things, even He-Man figures, and moreover, he can make Sy-Klone work!) and decreed that there was once something that slotted into his back (Dragstor’s back, not Anton’s) which would have made the wheel work. Obviously this priceless accessory had not been included.
On the other hand, what good would it have done even if I had got the accessory in question? If I put that another way, what good would it have done Hordak to have an evil servant whose special ability was to dress up like a diver and go zooming along with his face on the floor? What possible victory was he hoping to achieve? It’s the same with most of the He-Man characters. What good is Tung Lashor’s tongue, which flicks in and out of his mouth? Yes, it looks cool, but really, the only benefit it’s ever going to have is taking out the eye of some poor unsuspecting child who’s playing with it. In ‘real’ life, He-Man would never let Tung Lashor close enough to him to let something like that happen. He’d just summon up a cyclone or disguise himself as a piece of moss or something, and Tung Lashor would have been well and truly trounced. Similarly, if He-Man saw Dragstor zooming towards him, lying flat on the ground, not even looking where he was going, He-Man would probably just kick him in the head – or, if he was feeling imaginative, drop a tree on him or something.
Isn’t He-Man great? I wish he’d come to Earth and set the world to rights.