- by Owen Morton
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! You may be aware that Heath the Rat’s Silly Page has recently been undergoing a drought of worthwhile reading material, or indeed any reading material at all. But don’t worry! Things are changing around here, as there are many exciting and entirely pointless articles in the pipeline, starting with tonight’s useful analysis of Skeletor’s methods of defeating the new villains on the block – the Snake Men!
The three interesting individuals pictured above are the feared Snake Men. I haven’t seen many of the new He-Man episodes involving the Snake Men, but from what I can gather, these persons are opposed to both He-Man and Skeletor, preferring to set themselves up as the rulers of Eternia. And you can see why, and how they hope to achieve it. They have some seriously deadly weaponry at their disposal. Kobra Khan, on the left, can spit water at you, which could drown you if you were very very unlucky. Rattlor, on the right, can extend his neck to a frankly useless length. He does this so rapidly that presumably the intention is to headbutt you as he does it, which could be unpleasant if not entirely lethal. King Hiss, the relatively normal looking fellow in the middle (normal, that is, for Eternia), actually houses the deadliest secret weapon of them all – his human exterior is actually on hinges, so he can flip it back at any time and display his true nature: three snakes. Big wow.
At any rate, ‘people’ like this are clearly a threat to Eternian security. Skeletor and his bunch of freaks from Snake Mountain, despite their general dimwittedness, can sometimes pose a threat to the wellbeing of the Eternian people, so just imagine what happens when King Hiss and his band of evil snake-based lifeforms come along with plans that have actually been considered for more than half a nanosecond before being put into action. That’s right … He-Man shows up!
Now, the individual above is not He-Man, as I’m sure most of you will agree. He-Man is a camp man with neon orange hair, not some Japanese-animated fellow who looks actually capable of having an intelligent thought. But since we’re working with the new figures here, I thought it would be a little silly to get the old He-Man out of the cupboard to star in it. (But don’t worry – Old He-Man will shortly be conducting his tour of Castle Grayskull: considering the fact that Old Skeletor managed to perform a tour of Snake Mountain relatively successfully, Old He-Man feels it would be an affront to his pride if Skeletor did something better than he did.)
Anyway, He-Man comes along with general intentions to sort everything out, distribute a few punches liberally in the direction of the Snake Men, and go home feeling jolly pleased with himself (though without telling any feeble jokes – the new He-Man is very serious, and is even – if I may say it – quite a long way up its arse). But something goes wrong, and it turns out the Snake Men are even more powerful than he thought. Consequently, he goes home and turns into a new exciting version of He-Man – Snake Armour He-Man!
Sadly, I do not possess a figure of Snake Armour He-Man, nor do I intend to, and so Snake Armour He-Man will not be featured in this little adventure. You will just have to pretend that my normal bog standard He-Man is Snake Armour He-Man. It doesn’t really matter, since there’s little difference between them anyway: Snake Armour He-Man is virtually identical except he has some weird metal thing on his shoulder and comes equipped with a net rather than the massively oversized axe that the original has. There’s simply no way I’m splashing out my hard-earned cash (thank you, Nottingham Science and Business Library) on Snake Armour He-Man, when I’ve already got a normal He-Man. (For that matter, I’m also not planning to invest in Mega Punch He-Man, Shield-Strike He-Man, Ice Armour He-Man, Jungle Attack He-Man, Smash-Blade He-Man, Mecha-Blade He-Man, Samurai He-Man or any of the other myriad He-Men.)
So, He-Man as pictured above is actually Snake Armour He-Man, all right? Now, let’s backtrack a little. He-Man hasn’t actually got involved yet. The first group that the Snake Men come into conflict with on their arrival is in fact Skeletor and his intrepid band of numbskulls. You see, as I understand it, the Snake Men live underneath Snake Mountain, which is of course where Skeletor lives. So …
“Halt! Who goes there?” inquires Skeletor, in his usual polite tones. King Hiss isn’t interested in the pleasantries that would usually take place at this point, knowing that it would only be a trade of meaningless insults, so instead he and his friends all attack Skeletor and whip his ass good.
(I might point out at this juncture that it’s not particularly easy to put action figures in positions which imply they’re beating other action figures up, and frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my life than waste my time trying to put them into such positions. So please excuse any further scenes which are as unrealistic as the one above shown.)
This is probably the point that He-Man shows up, since he seems to have an unbelievable ability to detect it the instant that someone does something that’s even slightly at variance with the laws of Eternia. He too is defeated by the Snake Men, but fortunately he and Skeletor manage to escape. I’m guessing that because they like it best when they’re fighting each other, not a load of idiotic snakes with delusions of grandeur, they probably strike out a truce until they can get rid of the Snake Men. They part company, each promising to go home and think about how best to work against this new foe. He-Man, being rather intelligent but sadly not very imaginative, comes up with the Snake Armour He-Man approach. Skeletor, possessing the same attributes in the inverse quantities, comes up with possibly his most ludicrous idea yet …
After equipping himself with this new and exciting outfit, he calls himself Snake Crush Skeletor and is clearly very proud of this particular brainchild, because he’s really gone all out with it. He-Man just put on a different suit of armour and picked up a net, but Skeletor has put on a different suit of armour and grew his arms to a length of about nine feet. And he didn’t stop there. He changed his hands into snake heads. You can just imagine the scene next time the new allies meet.
Skeletor explains the various benefits his new outfit bestows upon him, which are very few, being largely confined to being able to reach the TV remote from the other side of the room. He-Man points out that due to the extensive surgery performed on Skeletor’s hands, he couldn’t pick up the remote even if he could reach it. He then throws a major wobbly, demanding to know exactly how Skeletor thought he would be able to defeat the Snake Men by turning his arms into very passable imitations of snakes. Skeletor goes quiet for once in his miserable existence, before muttering the vague idea that perhaps he’ll be able to lull the Snake Men into a false sense of security by making them think they’re among friends. He-Man demolishes this idea by telling Skeletor that the Snake Men would be rightly suspicious of two snakes who are attached to someone’s body where that person’s arms should be, and stalks off in a hissy fit. Skeletor makes a poor joke about a King Hissy fit, and with that, the scene ends.
At this point, Skeletor gets very upset. How dare He-Man insult his invention like that? It’s the single greatest Snake Men Defeating Outfit ever designed. With this in mind, and his eternal confidence in his own intelligent plans, Skeletor goes out to find the Snake Men, despite the fact that with his new arms, he’s so overbalanced that he can’t even stand up straight. He experiments with various ways of dragging his new arms with him, since walking is fairly difficult with such oversized limbs.
He finds the Snake Men easily enough, but while his new ability stands him in good stead for a while, the end result is the same: Skeletor is well and truly trounced when King Hiss shoots him from behind while he’s holding on to Rattlor and Kobra Khan with his long arms. And this time, He-Man doesn’t bother coming to his rescue, judging that anyone stupid enough to swap his arms for snakes deserves all he gets.
I was frankly amazed when I saw Snake Crush Skeletor (or as he is generally known, Long Arms Skeletor) for sale. It truly has to be the stupidest special ability ever given to an action figure. It’s probably appropriate that it’s Skeletor who had this indignity foisted upon him: he was, after all, the stupidest villain there ever was. Perhaps the new He-Man series does have a sense of humour after all.