Here is the 1985 Mattel Toys Dealer Catalog. Intended for retailers, Mattel’s dealer catalogs showcased all the latest and greatest releases, along with existing products within its various current (at the time) toy lines. New products are highlighted here with a “New 85” graphic. New releases included:
Thunder Punch He-Man
Dragon Blaster Skeletor
Moss Man
Sy-Klone
Roboto
Stinkor
Spikor
Two Bad
Battle Bones
Land Shark
Bashasaurus
Night Stalker
Spydor
Hordak
Leech
Grizzlor
Mantenna
Modulok
Fright Zone
Adventure Books
Interestingly, Night Stalker is not marked as “New For 85”, but he also doesn’t appear in the 1984 catalog. He seems to have been an in-between figure.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the Evil Horde figures are hand-painted casts. In the case of Modulok and Mantenna, there is a noticeable deviation from what would be the final color scheme.
Here is the 1983 Mattel Toys Dealer Catalog (or at least the portion relevant to the MOTU line). Intended for retailers, Mattel’s dealer catalogs showcased all the latest and greatest releases, along with existing merchandise. The catalog showcases all the 1982 items plus everything new for 1983. As we’ve seen in other catalogs, the “new” items tend to be hand-painted rather than final factory examples.
The new for 1983 lineup includes:
Ram Man
Man-E-Faces
Trap Jaw
Tri-Klops
Faker
Evil-Lyn
Panthor
Attak Trak
Point Dread and the Talon Fighter
Screeech
Zoar
Close up shots:
Attak Trak Hand-painted Evil-Lyn Panthor with a hand-painted, glossy saddle Panthor with Battle Cat and the 1982 vehicles Ram Man, Man-E-Faces and Faker Trap Jaw and a hand-painted Tri-Klps. Notice the lack of orange detail on the bracers Zoar. Notice the green detail on Teela’s armor. Screech Talon Fighter. Notice there is no heavy red spray paint in front of the cockpit, just as depicted in the cross sell art. Point Dread, Talon Fighter and story book with record. Point Dread appears to be hand-painted.
Note: I recently acquired my own copy of this catalog. I’ve updated this article with all-new, high resolution scans. Please allow a moment or two for the images to load, or try refreshing the page if some images are missing. Open images in a new page if you wish to zoom in and see fine details.
Here is the 1982 Mattel Toys dealer catalog (or at least the portion relevant to the MOTU line). Intended for retailers, the catalog debuted at Toy Fair, February 17, 1982. Mattel’s dealer catalogs showcased all the latest and greatest releases, along with existing merchandise. Because the Masters of the Universe line debuted in 1982, this catalog has the smallest amount of space devoted to the line (only three pages) compared to subsequent years. What’s valuable about this particular catalog is that all of the MOTU items are prototypes (albeit late-stage prototypes, with a few exceptions), rather than factory-produced examples. The sculpt on most of these items is the final sculpt, with the exception of Teela, Wind Raider, Zodac’s armor, Castle Grayskull’s jaw bridge (specifically the locking mechanism) and Man-At-Arms’ armor. There are earlier prototypes of figures like He-Man and Skeletor that don’t appear here – so these photos represent a snapshot of what had been finalized at a particular point in time, very close to the debut of the line in stores.
Note that Battle Cat has orange paint around his mouth and a striped tail, which appear to be applied by hand. A few pre-production examples with this paint scheme are known to exist, although the production version lacks those details. Most of these figures appear to be hand-painted. That is most apparent on Castle Grayskull, which has a much finer paint job than any of the production versions I’ve seen. This hand-painted version pops up in product photography several times.
The prototype Teela that appears in this catalog is my absolute favorite version of the character. The mass-produced toy didn’t have nearly as much depth. I’m also quite fond of the prototype Wind Raider that appears here, which has a number of key differences from the final toy. I discuss those in greater detail in the toy features that focus on those toys.
I’ve included shots of all three pages plus closeups of each individual item.
As a side note, the photo spread on the first two pages was used as a basis for the line art that went into the Castle Grayskull instruction booklet. That line art also showed up on the back of the first version of the Castle Grayskull box.
Here is the 1987 Mattel Toys Dealer Catalog. Intended for retailers, Mattel’s dealer catalogs showcased all the latest and greatest releases, along with existing products within its various current (at the time) toy lines. New releases included:
King Randor
Sorceress
Clamp Champ
Scare Glow
Blast Attak
Snake Face
Ninjor
Sssqueeze
Buzz Saw Hordak
Mosquitor
Blade
Saurod
Gwildor
Rotar
Twistoid
Beam-Blaster & Artilleray
Tower Tools
Cliff Climber
Scubattack
Megator (delayed until 1988)
Tytus (delayed until 1988)
Tyrantisaurus Rex
Bionatops
Turbodactyl
Announced but unreleased items included:
Cosmic Key
Gyrattacker
Eldor
He-Ro
Gigantisaur
Conventional wisdom about the 1987 lineup says that Mattel was putting out a lot of reused parts in the new figures (like Scare Glow, King Randor, Clamp Champ). But really parts reuse existed in every year of the line. Taken altogether, there was quite a lot of new tooling in 1987, and a lot of new ideas to expand the line in new directions. It’s a pity that the line fizzled out before these ideas could be fully explored.