The only non-toy He-Man related items I tried to collect as a kid were the puffy stickers offered inside specially marked boxes of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereal in 1984. As any blind box toy collector can tell you, collecting stickers like this was as exciting as it was frustrating. You will inevitably get multiples of anything you’re trying collect (I got several copies of Evil-Lyn, as I recall, but alas, no Skeletor). And of course, I could only cajole my mother into buying so many boxes of Rice Krispies.
The stickers came in waxy envelopes, with a coupon for 20 cents off of a variety of “Kellogg’s talking Krispies” cereals. Incidentally, the coupons are still good, as there is no expiration date. But 20 cents was a better deal in 1984 dollars.
I think was really sold me on these as a kid (aside from the He-Man characters) was the facts that the stickers were plastic and puffy. That gave them a sense of permanence that typical paper stickers lacked.
The artwork comes from a couple of different sources. The Teela sticker is directly based on Teela’s cross sell art, albeit with more vivid colors:
Evil-Lyn’s sticker is also based on her cross sell artwork, although they’ve modified the position of her left arm, and given her a blue version of Teela’s shield. Her coloring also seems influenced by Filmation’s version of the character:
Battle Armor He-Man, Battle Armor Skeletor, and Orko do not seem to be based at all off the cross sell artwork. Stylistically they somewhat recall Errol McCarthy’s extensive body of Masters of the Universe illustrations. I have not found any examples of his artwork that are compositionally identical to either He-Man or Skeletor as they appear here. However, Errol did a version of Orko that may have influenced the design of the puffy sticker:
Note that Orko’s hat is off model on the sticker – it’s colored yellow rather than orange. I suspect the reason for that was to save on the number of colors being printed per sticker. The same shade of yellow is used in Orko’s bursts of magic.
I miss the old days of collecting things from cereal boxes. If it had ‘He-Man’ or ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Knight Rider’ or ‘Ghostbusters’ or anything else that was a favourite of mine at the time (note: all three of those still are to this day!), I’m munch my way through as many boxes as I could to try and collect the whole set of whatever tie-in item they’d packed inside.
We didn’t have the puffy stickers here in the UK (at least I don’t think we did), BUT, Shreddies (made my Nabisco) did have a set of six MOTU stickers in 1985. As with these Rice Krispies stickers, the source of the artwork(s) used is quite interesting to deduct. I recall collecting at least four of the set, which adorned the door of my bedroom for many years (until they got quite tatty and the door was painted…!).
About 10 years ago now, I got the whole set, with multiples, on ebay. Interestingly, they were in strips of each character and not cut up, suggesting they had come straight from the factory.
Here is info (and a link to the short but great TV advertisement) on the above-mentioned set: http://cerealoffers.com/Cereal_Partners/Shreddies/1980s/1980-85/Masters_of_the_Universe_Action/masters_of_the_universe_action_sticker.html
Sort-of-sister-brand Shreddied What, also by Nabsico, also had an MOTU offer in 1984/5, of ‘battle disks’, complete with Filmation-style artwork on the boxes. I somehow missed these ones at the time; as I didn’t like Shreddied Wheat I guess the offer passed me by.
Rice Krispies also did fuzzy iron ons with the same art as the stickers with Roboto instead of Evil-Lyn.
https://www.mrbreakfast.com/cereal_ucp_slideshow.asp?id=315&picid=1886
I remember some stickers in Kellogg’s cereal boxes in W. Germany around 1984. Back in those days, I used to stick them on my bed. I’m glad I was able to find some of them on eBay.