- by Owen Morton
Okay, everyone! Remember that article I did last month about He-Man’s most useless allies? Well, here’s the great follow-up that I promised: a discussion about Skeletor’s most stupid henchmen! And boy oh boy, does Skeletor have a lot of stupid henchmen. In fact, I would posit that there’s only one of Skeletor’s friends who has so much as one brain cell, and that would be Evil-Lyn, who always came across as quite clever really. Well, maybe not ‘always’, but ‘usually’, anyway. Well, occasionally. Well, once. Maybe.
Tri-Klops:
We’ll start with one of the very first baddy characters to appear on He-Man. Tri-Klops was there right from the first episode, Diamond Ray of Disappearance, which I reviewed last September. I can’t remember whether he appeared frequently thereafter (I don’t actually possess very many episodes of He-Man on video, so can’t assess the regularity of character appearances), though he certainly wasn’t a character I remembered, so when my revived He-Man obsession began about three or four years ago, Tri-Klops was new to me (though I do recall having owned the action figure).
For those of us who don’t know, Tri-Klops was the character who had the same impressive muscular physique as everybody else (everybody else, that is, except the women and such odd individuals as Modulok, for example). He wore brown underpants, black boots, some weird form of green top (though, since this was detachable from the action figure, I promptly lost it) and had a green band round his head which covered his eyes. This green band was, however, more than it at first appeared, since it actually contained Tri-Klops’ eyes! Basically, the premise seemed to be that Tri-Klops had three eyes, pointing in three directions. He could spin his green band round so the chosen eye could face forwards as he desired.
I have trouble figuring out exactly what benefit this confers on him. Okay, maybe he can look in several directions at once, but if that’s the case, why does he need the band to spin round? Surely keeping the same eye in the same position would be less confusing for him. The only effect the rotating nature of the green band ever had, as far as I know, was when in ‘Diamond Ray of Disappearance’, Orko grabbed hold of it and spun it round, thus rendering Tri-Klops temporarily useless (I mean, temporarily more useless than he already was), which doesn’t seem to be an advantage to Tri-Klops, does it? Thus I think he was a badly designed character, though I suppose he’s relatively innocuous compared to some, for example …
Two Bad:
Yes, Two Bad was one of those inventions I would refer to as deeply, even irrevocably, stupid. It would, I think, have been very interesting to sit around in the offices of the He-Man Development Studio and help to invent strange characters to appear on the series. I’m sure that some form of illegal drugs must have been involved, because this sort of thing is just not would people in control of their own minds come up with as a matter of course.
Two Bad was, to be fair, a different kind of action figure; there was true variation from the standard mould from which most He-Man figures were made. This was largely because Two Bad came equipped with two heads, one of which was blue and the other was purple. Other than that, Two Bad had the same odd type legs which were terminally incapable of supporting his body, and had an even larger chest than most figures, since he had to have two heads sitting on top of it. You would think, therefore, that the most interesting thing about Two Bad’s figure would be that it had two heads – but it in fact gets better than this. Two Bad’s arms were where this figure got especially exciting. Perhaps in an attempt to make him look like he had his arms folded across his chest (though quite why this would be a desired position for him to be maintaining, I don’t know), Two Bad had arms which, to cut a long story short, rendered him incapable of punching anybody except himself. His arms were so designed that they bent inwards, towards his heads, but not outwards towards anyone who might be attacking him. And if that doesn’t make him useless, I really don’t know what does.
But that’s only the action figure. The character as he appeared on the TV series was cured of the problem of the interesting arms, in that his arms worked like everybody else’s (thus really begging the question of why the action figure’s arms were designed in the way that they were), but he had other substantial defects. As can be expected, one of these was split personality disorder. Two Bad’s heads did not get along with one another. I remember seeing Two Bad in only one episode, entitled ‘Visitors From Earth’, and he was constantly arguing with himself.
Another of those defects was that he was terminally stupid. In the afore-mentioned episode ‘Visitors From Earth’, he was assigned by Skeletor to guard an astronaut from Earth who’d been captured. He-Man and the other astronaut, coming to rescue the first astronaut, got past Two Bad with the use of an exceptionally simple trick. (It should be noted that the trick was the astronaut’s idea; He-Man would probably have been more comfortable with just knocking Two Bad out.) This trick, as I recall, involved throwing stones at one of Two Bad’s heads, thus making him accuse the other head of doing it, and this manoeuvre somehow – do not ask me how – ended with Two Bad getting buckets stuck over both of his heads. Anyone who can get himself into that sort of predicament – especially if he’s got two brains – must be really stupid.
Kobra Khan:
After my discussion of Two Bad, any character is probably a bit of a let-down, but Kobra Khan serves to provide a suitably inane character to go on to. Well, kind of. As with Two Bad, I don’t recall him appearing very often, but he was present in the seminal Disappearing Dragons, where he didn’t do much other than speak in a very silly hissing voice and trade insults with Webstor, who’ll probably feature in an article similar to this in the not too distant future. He also, for some reason, teamed up with a bunch of nutcases in white robes in a dastardly plot to kidnap dragons for use in blood sports.
The reason I decided he was worthy of inclusion in this article is because of the special ability his action figure came with. Originally, the action figures were pretty much all standard, with just different faces and different colours on what was essentially the same model of figure to distinguish between characters. However, as the line went on, I suspect the manufacturers realised they’d have to do something different occasionally, or people would stop buying the figures, so they came up with figures that varied substantially from the norm, such as Mantenna, Grizzlor and Leech (all of which, actually, were in the She-Ra cartoon rather than He-Man).
Kobra Khan fits into this category of figures with something very different about him. What is in fact different about Kobra Khan is that his head is designed to come off. (In most cases, the heads of He-Man figures could be encouraged to come off, though this was not part of the original design, and it was, as I recall, rather difficult to get the heads back on.) Kobra Khan was, however, not given a detachable head so that you could pretend he’d been decapitated in a particularly fierce battle – it was so you could fill the interior of his body with water. Once you’d done this, you could replace the head, and then – and this is the clever bit – if you pressed his head down still further, he would shoot a jet of water out of his mouth. Said jet of water would usually impact with something that you didn’t want to get wet – your mother, for example. Notwithstanding this particular flaw, which the manufacturers can’t really be faulted for, the real query I have is why the ability to shoot water out of his mouth might benefit Kobra Khan in a real life situation. Let’s just assume that Kobra Khan is involved in a pitched battle. He’s pretty useless at fist-fighting, but fortunately, he’s got his special ability: he can spit some water at He-Man. Is He-Man really going to care? Bearing in mind that He-Man doesn’t care when Skeletor whips up a sandstorm or something equally improbable, my guess is that he won’t give a toss if Kobra Khan gets him a little bit wet. (Yes, I know we’re supposed to pretend it’s snake venom or something nasty like that, but I deal in reality. If the action figure spurts water, then I’m going to take it as water. I suppose it would be possible to fill the inside of Kobra Khan with some form of snake venom, in which case, things would be different.)
Anyway, that’s enough for now. I still have a lot of He-Man characters I want to talk about – Faker Folker is springing to mind especially right now, and the afore-mentioned Mantenna, Leech and Grizzlor are also on my list – so I’m sure we’ll see the next in this series before too long!