- by Owen Morton
Okay. I know it’s been an exceedingly long time since I wrote an article here, and to be quite honest I haven’t got much of an excuse this time. The last few weeks I have been too busy, but in the three weeks after the Secret Seven article, I had a lot of time to kill. Instead of writing for the website, though, I spent this time writing a computer game, which – when it’s finally finished – I will upload to the website so all and sundry can download it. That will be a long time in the future, though. In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience while I hardly write anything here.
But anyway. The topic of discussion I have chosen for today is that of Skeletor. Again. I know that to the independent observer, I probably appear to have an unhealthy obsession with He-Man in general and Skeletor in particular, but really, that’s not the case. Well, okay, it is. It’s a worrying thing that He-Man is probably the thing I think about the most. Very worrying. I am eagerly awaiting 22nd September, as that is the day on which the first instalment of the original He-Man series is being released on DVD. (It’s also the day on which I’m going to Italy, but you know, He-Man on DVD just outweighs that by about a million miles. If you can outweigh things by miles. Kilograms, probably. But a million kilograms probably equates to some other form of measurement. I don’t know how many grams are in a tonne, but if we were to say it was a million, then He-Man on DVD outweighs going to Italy by a thousand tonnes. But a million kilograms sounds better. A million miles sounds better still. I’m going to shut up now and proceed to the next paragraph.)
We’ve discussed Skeletor and his myriad stupid plans many times, and doubtless – once I acquire that DVD – will do so many times more. We’ve also talked about Skeletor’s many stupid friends, if such they can be termed, and again, probably will go on doing so until we run out of characters to insult. But today I have a different Skeletor-related topic to discuss. It’s perhaps one of the stupidest that the He-Man creators ever came up with, though that’s saying quite a lot, since He-Man was never renowned for its intelligence.
This amazing topic is a figure that was brought out towards the end of the height of He-Man’s popularity, when the creators were desperately bringing out figures with more exciting gimmicks to try and make children badger their parents for them. The later He-Man figures thus included individuals like King Hiss, who appeared to be a perfectly normal human until you pressed a button on his back and his torso would fly off at a quite alarming velocity, leaving behind something that was supposed to be a snake with arms, but in actuality resembled little so much as a wobbly plastic banana, still attached to the legs of the human King Hiss. As you may be able to detect, it wasn’t a very good idea. It was still less good than I have heretofore described, since the logical ending to any child’s acquisition of King Hiss would be to lose the human torso and be left with the really quite useless wobbly plastic bit which I have now decided was more like what you’d get if Frankfurter sausages grew in bunches. The later He-Man figures also included, however, an individual named Scare Glow, which is what we’re going to talk about today.
Scare Glow was a glow-in-the-dark figure, his glow-in-the-dark ability being his only gimmick, and since glow-in-the-dark is never cool (and more to the point, never works – I mean it, did anything you ever had when you were little that was supposed to glow in the dark actually do so?), he was quite stunningly unpopular. According to internet authorities, this unpopularity in his early days has now made him into a rather rare collector’s item, whereas the toys children actually enjoyed having, like He-Man and Skeletor, are two-a-penny. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? As I recall – for I did actually own one of these creatures – Scare Glow also came equipped with an exciting purple cloak, without which he looked quite astonishingly stupid (being as he was that stupid luminous colour, with a few random splashes of black across him, and wearing, of course, the traditional He-Man black underpants and boots) and which I quite promptly lost.
So far, so good. Well, if not good as such, not entirely bad. Well, actually, it probably was entirely bad. But anyway. Let’s pretend it was good. Actually, let’s not, because if we accept that it was a totally rubbish figure, the following explanation for its existence actually makes a bit more sense. Knowing that no one – not even the traditionally mentally challenged individuals who collected He-Man figures – would want this stupid example of bad-action-figure-ness, the creators thought they’d have to come up with a really good excuse for Scare Glow’s existence. My advice to them would have been to just forget it and abandon the stupid figure while it was still on the drawing board, and go back to such lucrative ventures as, er, King Hiss. Obviously, since this was 1989 or some time thereabouts and I was only six or seven years old, no one did ask my advice, which I expect they regret now, and so the helpful suggestions I could have offered were never used.
Instead of just abandoning Scare Glow like I’d have told them to, the creators came up with an exceedingly implausible reason for Scare Glow’s presence in the He-Man universe. And this is implausible even for He-Man, not just implausible for the sane. It was advertised that Scare Glow was … the ghost of Skeletor!
Right then. If I’m not very much mistaken, there are two possible angles we could put on this, neither of which actually serve to explain away Scare Glow. Firstly, we could argue that Skeletor is not in fact dead, because He-Man never actually manages to kill him (I nearly wrote “kiss him” then, which would also be true, if irrelevant, and indeed, the very thought is a little disturbing), for reasons which are rather unclear. Actually, let’s take a little digression now and inquire as to why He-Man never does kill Skeletor? It’s not like he never has the chance. Skeletor’s predilection for setting up elaborate plans which – when they inevitably fail – leave him high and dry and generally stranded in Castle Grayskull surrounded by He-Man and most usually a large selection of his moronic friends. In such circumstances, instead of doing the planet of Eternia a vast favour by wiping Skeletor off its surface, He-Man tended to let Skeletor get away. Maybe He-Man is really an undercover agent for Skeletor. Or … maybe not.
Anyway, the second angle we could take on Scare Glow is to agree that Skeletor, being an animated skeleton, is indeed dead. This would seem to make sense, but you’ve then got to ask the question why – if Skeletor is indeed an animated pile of bones – he would also have a ghost hovering about. The way I understand it, a ghost is someone’s spirit lingering after their death, yet I would say that Skeletor’s spirit is quite firmly encased within his skeleton. Therefore, Scare Glow wouldn’t be there. In fact, I’d like to suggest that the very concept of Scare Glow is just stupid. I’d also like to end this article here.
So I will.