- by Owen Morton
Well, we haven’t had any articles for a couple of days now, and in my drive to make May 2003 one of the most productive months website-wise I’ve ever had, I thought it was high time for another one. The obvious thing for me to do when I can’t think of a particularly original thing to write about is to resort to He-Man, and this is of course what I will now do. To be more precise, I’m going to write another in this extremely popular series of articles about the most stupid characters to appear in He-Man – this time focussing on some of He-Man’s own useless friends.
Orko:
Yes, okay, I know Orko’s one of the main characters and appears in pretty much every episode, but to be quite honest, you’ve got to admit that he never does anything remotely useful. If you think very hard, you may be able to come up with an occasion when Orko saves the day, but these times will be strictly limited to the times when Orko’s caused the problem in the first place – therefore, if Orko wasn’t buggering about, there wouldn’t have been a problem and the day wouldn’t have needed to be saved. For the most part, I remember Orko was completely pointless (I still remember that bit in A Trip to Morainia where he and He-Man split up to explore separate tunnels, only to meet up again mere seconds later – and just what was the point of that?) and, just to make it even better, he was deeply annoying as well. Did anybody else – even when they were of the more usual age to watch He-Man – get fed up with his continually failing magic tricks, especially the ones involving eggs and Man-at-Arms?
His figure was pretty damn stupid too. There was, firstly, the problem of scale. Anyone who’s ever seen the cartoon will know that Orko was rather small, at least compared to the other characters. Yet the figure decided that he’d be better if he came in a size which made him several times fatter than the other inhabitants of Eternia. Orko was probably one of the only characters not to have one of those impossibly small waists I’m always on about. The problem with this was of course that when you were re-enacting a scene where He-Man talks to Orko, Orko would loom several times bigger than He-Man, and all the dramatic tension of the scene would be lost.
Another problem with the Orko figure was the removable hat. Everybody knows that Orko never ever takes his hat off – and the figure obviously sought to explain why, coming up with the answer that he looks bloody stupid if he doesn’t have the hat on. I seem to remember that on the cartoon Orko does not have two blue horns poking through holes in his hat, but he does on his figure, and I presume this modification is so that the hat stays on his head, since these horns were the only thing keeping the hat on. The problem was, as soon as you pulled the hat off, Orko would be revealed in what was evidently his true nature – a very strange creature with a jet black head with two completely random blue horns. As opposed to the perfectly natural creature with a jet black head who wears a bright orange hat.
The figure also came equipped with yet another stupid characteristic, however. One of the accessories that came with Orko was a long thin purple piece of plastic which – on closer investigation – you would find you could slot into a hole on Orko’s side. (I suspect these holes weren’t there on the cartoon, but, you know, give them creative licence.) If you pushed this stick all the way into the hole so that it came out of the hole on the other side, then sharply pulled it out again, Orko would spin round and round in a manic fashion, on wheels which were on his base. Wheels. Now, I know I did just mention you should give people creative licence, but really, adding wheels to a character who is supposed to fly anyway is just stupid. And moreover, I can’t see any point to making him spin round and round. It’s not like Orko did that sort of thing regularly on the cartoon, now, is it?
And having established beyond any kind of doubt that Orko was totally useless to He-Man, especially if he’d had the abilities given to his figure, we’ll now move on to …
Cringer/Battle-Cat:
Yes, I know that, like Orko, he’s a rather important character, but again, I think it can be shown quite easily that he’s absolutely useless. As Cringer, he’s a whinging coward, whereas as Battle-Cat, he’s an overmuscled maniac cat which doesn’t actually do anything. Let’s face it: when has Cringer ever done anything useful? The most he ever seems to do is get scared at something – and it doesn’t even have to be anything to do with Skeletor or another baddy – and then run away. He also complains bitterly about having to turn into Battle-Cat, which is surprising, because you’d think he’d welcome the chance to become less scared. Perhaps he just gets scared by the bright flashing lights.
Battle-Cat, on the other hand, is also useless, but for different reasons. Because I’ve just recently watched Search For A Son, I can discuss Battle-Cat with regard to that episode. The most immediately obvious example of this creature’s stupidity is the scene when the entrance to Count Marzo’s hideout is discovered. Orko, to be fair to him, is the one who finds it, but it’s through a very contrived method, and I don’t think it counts as doing something useful (especially since it would probably have been a better idea to leave the King, Queen and Philip in Marzo’s clutches for ever anyway). Anyway, it’s found because Orko realises a wall is an illusion – and because of this, Battle-Cat immediately leaps to the conclusion that the cacti surrounding the wall are also illusions, and is about to just walk through them – without even testing them to make sure – when He-Man says something intelligent like, “Easy, cat” (or possibly, “Let me give you a hand!”, if he’s still fond of that phrase which he came up with about fifteen times in Diamond Ray of Disappearance) and proves that the thorns are, in fact, real. This little scene does suggest to me that Battle-Cat is rather deficient in the brain department.
I would also like to complain that Battle-Cat doesn’t seem to have a character – as much as I may dislike it, Cringer does have one – and doesn’t really do very much, always being upstaged by He-Man. He’s occasionally got involved in a fight – like with Panthor in Diamond Ray of Disappearance – or been vaguely useful, like when he growled at those dragons in Search For A Son and inexplicably frightened them away, but this doesn’t seem to happen very often, and – to be totally honest – it’s not very exciting when it does.
Okay, I’m bored of talking about Cringer and Battle-Cat now, so let’s move swiftly on to the piece de resistance …
Ram-Man;
Ram-Man is a very stupid concept. I believe the basic premise was that he was a man with springs in his legs, who could use his head as a ram. This being the case, on pretty much every appearance on the cartoon he made, he was featured leaping at something and nutting it as hard as he could with his head, in an attempt to make it fall over. I would imagine he was largely unsuccessful whenever he did this, because it would be infringing on He-Man’s own territory of knocking down walls with his bare hands – I mean, if Ram-Man were able to knock down walls, how could He-Man get his entertainment of “making his own exits”, as I believe he put it so eloquently in Search For A Son?
The creators of He-Man were obviously concerned that children would attempt to emulate Ram-Man (clearly feeling that he was the sort of role model children might adopt, though if they are now reading this website, I would like to assure them that I never, ever, ever, wished I was Ram-Man), so much so that they drilled it into the cartoon that doing what Ram-Man does is not a good idea. This was partly done by portraying Ram-Man as an absolute imbecile, though that doesn’t really differentiate him from the various other morons this programme featured. The much more subtle approach (and I mean that in the most sarcastic sense) was when, in one of the moral segments of an episode, Ram-Man appeared to inform viewers that, “Ramming things with your head is just dumb.” I’m not making this up. I haven’t actually seen the episode in question, to be fair, but I read that on the He-Man and She-Ra Episode Review Website (now sadly deceased), which – if I’m not very much mistaken – took its subject matter very seriously, and wouldn’t have made things like that up. (It is, of course, possible that the entire He-Man and She-Ra Episode Review Website was an elaborate exercise in taking the piss, but if so, it was done so subtly that it could easily be mistaken for a serious website, thus meaning that it failed in taking the piss, really.)
On the plus side, Ram-Man didn’t have an impossibly small waist. As far as I could tell, in fact, he didn’t have a waist at all, or a neck. As I recall, his arms were firmly attached to the sides of his body, and his legs could not be separated either, nor could his head move from side to side like all the others. All in all, he was a pretty immobile figure, other than the springs in his legs. I didn’t own the figure myself, but my friend Peter did, and to the best of my memory, I do seem to recall that using Ram-Man to ram into our respective sisters was one of those manoeuvres that did not make us popular with various authority figures (and that doesn’t mean figures of He-Man, it means our parents).
And I think I’ll end this article here.