Tag: Rudy Obrero

Artwork

Invented characters in Rudy Obero’s packaging artwork

Posted on by Adam McCombs

Written by Adam McCombs

Freelance illustrator Rudy Obrero left an indelible mark on the Masters of the Universe landscape. He was originally selected by Mattel designer Mark Taylor for his ability to produce artwork in the style of Frank Frazetta, a major early influence on the He-Man toyline. Rudy’s moody atmospheres have made him a fan favorite in a toyline that was blessed with many talented artists and designers.

Today I’d like to take a look at something we often don’t notice in this artwork – the background characters and vehicles that never existed as actual toys.

The artwork referenced in this post includes:

Battle Cat

The original Battle Cat artwork (the first piece painted by Rudy for the He-Man toyline) is pretty sparse. You have He-Man on Battle Cat, some rocks and Castle Grayskull in the background, and not much else.

However, if you look more closely at the Castle, you’ll notice a barbarian warrior manning the laser canon on the castle turret:

In the background, to the left of Battle Cat’s helmet, you can also see a couple of shadowy figures:

In the original charcoal drawing (a piece owned Eamon O’Donoghue, who graciously shared a picture of it), you can also see there were going to be a few more background characters in the illustration, but they were dropped in the final oil painting. Like many of Rudy’s background characters, they look like barbarian warriors straight from a Frank Frazetta painting.

Image source: Vaults of Grayskull

There are two warriors on the turret in this version.

Castle Grayskull

Rudy’s Castle Grayskull artwork has nearly a complete line-up of all the 1982 action figures, with the exception of Mer-Man. But there are also two shadowy figures in the background, behind Beast Man.

Rudy also includes a small fleet of flying Sky Sled-like vehicles. They are v-shaped and each appears to have a single pilot.

Battle Ram

Rudy’s Battle Ram illustration features a barbarian warrior with a Viking helmet, and the suggestion of at least a couple of figures on the turrets of Castle Grayskull.

It also features six of the V-shaped Sky Sled-like vehicles that appeared in the Castle Grayskull painting, each with its own pilot. Some of them are shown in side profile here. The basic design seems to be the front half of the Battle Ram without the griffin figure head, and extended, swept-back wings.

Wind Raider

Rudy Obrero’s Wind Raider illustration features about a dozen warriors at ground level, most in silhouette. One of them, however, is a blue-skinned warrior with red armor and helmet. Update: this may in fact be Stratos. Thanks to Øyvind M. for pointing this out!

The artwork also features three Wind Raiders, each with an unknown pilot, mounting an attack on He-Man, who mounted his own attack against Castle Grayskull.

He-Man and Wind Raider

The illustration for the He-Man/Wind Raider gift set shows the clearest example of an invented character. I used to think this was an off-model version of Zodac, but Rudy has said he hadn’t seen Zodac when he did the painting (indicating this was done before Castle Grayskull). Dubbed the “Warrior in Red” by fans, he is just that. His costume looks a bit like He-Man’s, but recolored. He seems to have some kind of red and gray helmet on, but it’s hard to make out any details.

Behind Skeletor, Beast Man, and the Warrior in Red is a small army of shadowy figures. Presumably they’re aligned with Skeletor.

Special thanks to Shawn, who gave me the idea for this post.

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10
Evil Warriors

Screeech: Barbarian bird (1983)

Posted on by Adam McCombs

Written by Adam McCombs

Name: Screeech
Faction: Evil Warriors
Approximate US release date: September 21, 1983

My first memory of Screeech (yes, his name is spelled with the extra “e”) is from kindergarten. There were a couple of days during the year where kids were invited to bring a favorite toy to school to show to the class. On one occasion I recall bringing in Mer-Man, who I was enamored with at the time (and still am). But another boy brought in Screeech. I owned Zoar, but I had never seen this purple and blue repaint.

It was pretty clear to me what he was – a repainted version of Zoar. Had I been a little older I might have recognized that both were repainted versions of the Big Jim Eagle:

Screeech makes all kinds of thematic sense in the Masters of the Universe scale of cosmic balance. For every Battle Cat there is a Panthor. For every He-Man there is a Faker. And for every Zoar there is a Screeech. In fact, the colors for both Screeech and Panthor were chosen by the same designer at Mattel – Martin Arriola.

Screeech was sold individually, in a gift set with Skeletor, in a gift set with Battle Armor Skeletor, and in a gift set with Trap Jaw. The packaging illustrations for the first two sets were painted by Rudy Obrero, who also did the artwork for Castle Grayskull, Battle Cat, and many others.

Screeech single figure packaging

Screeech single figure packaging artwork by Rudy Obrero

Screeech/Skeletor giftset packaging

Skeletor & Screeech gift set packaging artwork, by Rudy Obrero

The Battle Armor Skeletor/Screeech set was illustrated by an unknown artist – perhaps someone on staff at Mattel:

BA Skeletor Screech
Battle Armor Skeletor & Screeech gift set packaging art

The Trap Jaw/Screeech gift set was quite plain by comparison:

Image Source: Grayskullmuseum.com

Screeech is probably the most obscure character from the first few years of the MOTU toyline. He was rarely depicted in stories or television, and when he was shown, it was usually very much in the background.

A noteworthy exception to that is in the Golden Books story, The Sunbird Legacy. In the story, Evil-Lyn has the power to transform into Screeech. This ability gives the character some nice symmetry with Filmation’s version of the Sorceress.

In Sunbird, Screeech resembles a buzzard rather than an eagle or falcon. I’m not sure if that’s because the artist wasn’t given a visual reference for the character, or if there were plans early on for Screeech to have a unique buzzard appearance.

Screeech’s cross sell artwork is likely just a recolored version of the original Zoar line art. It was seldom used, however. It didn’t appear on the back of any boxes that I’ve been able to identify. The only full color version I’ve found is on the back of the Power of Point Dread comic book and record:

Packaging line art by Errol McCarthy

In the Filmation He-Man cartoon, Screeech is a mechanical bird sent on missions by Skeletor to drop bombs on the heroic warriors:

According to James Eatock, the name for Screeech in the original cartoon scripts was the Robot Raven. Perhaps this was actually a character invented by Filmation, but renamed Screeech at the last minute to tie things back to the Mattel toy.

Illustration by R.L. Allen
Image courtesy of Jukka Issakainen

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8
Heroic Vehicles

Attak Trak: Battle Machine (1983)

Posted on by Adam McCombs

Written by Adam McCombs

Name: Attak Trak
Faction: Heroic Warriors
Approximate US release date: July 15, 1983

The Attak Trak, released in 1983, is a vehicle with a unique action feature and an interesting design history.

I saw the Attak Trak in the wild only once as a kid. I remember being at another kid’s house. I believe my mother was friends with his mother, and while they were visiting I spent some time getting to know her son. The first thing he did was show me his He-Man collection, and I remember distinctly being introduced to three toys I had never seen before: Evil-Lyn, Faker and Attak Trak. Unfortunately he had worn out the vehicle’s batteries, and I didn’t get to see it in action.

The Attak Trak was designed by Mattel visual designer Ted Mayer, who also designed the Battle Ram, Wind Raider, Eternia Playset, and many other MOTU toys.

In my interview with Ted, he had this to say about the Attak Trak:

[The Attak Trak] started out as a mechanical toy submission that Mattel bought from an outside inventor. It was given to me to make in to a He-Man vehicle. I did about four different design directions, of which they picked one.

Ted didn’t specify who the outside inventor was, but I believe it was Marvin Glass and Associates. They filed a patent for a four wheel drive toy on August 10, 1981, and it was published on April 19, 1983:

Notice the mechanical feature is identical to the Attak Trak’s. The visual design, however, is a fairly generic-looking toy tank.

Ted Mayer stepped in to give the vehicle a Masters of the Universe feel. He submitted the following drawings, which featured an elongated fantasy beast head on the front,  and an option for a canopy on top:

Attak Trak without treads. Image courtesy of Ted Mayer.
Attak Trak with treads. Image courtesy of Ted Mayer.
Attak Trak with canopy. Image courtesy of Ted Mayer.

In my interview with Ted Mayer, he explained:

The canopy was dropped because it costed out quite high, so they looked at dropping as many extras as possible. By this time I was also doing all the control drawings, so when they went to the engineers, things were final.

Ted submitted the following control drawings for consideration. “For some reason marketing didn’t want the gargoyle type head,” he explained. So the second design was chosen for final production.

In a Tomart’s Action Figure Digest article on the origins of Masters of the Universe, another Ted Mayer concept drawing of the Attak Trak appears, along with a black or dark brown production sample that features sticker designs not used in the final version:

Final painted prototype in red and blue

The final toy was produced in a bright red and blue color scheme:

Monogram produced a model kit version of the Attak Trak. It featured the canopy that Ted Mayer had originally designed (or something very close to it), as well as other unique details. The model was not motorized, but it was in scale with the vintage figures:

Box Art by Larry Elmore

Image source: Dwayne Pinkney

Rudy Obrero provided the artwork for the Mattel Attak Trak packaging. He has stated in interviews that it’s the least favorite piece he did for the vintage line. In the interview I conducted with him in March of this year, Rudy had this to say about the process:

It’s the last piece I did for Mattel. I started to think the art direction came from a committee, seemed as though everyone in Mattel wanted in on package art because of its success as a toy line. These pieces were done in oil paint so changes were a pain to do.

Box art scanned by me, repaired by Retroist

Rudy mentioned that various people at Mattel were constantly asking him to make small revisions on the Attak Trak artwork. It appears that two versions of his art made it to the packaging. The version below has the splash of mud removed from the front of the treads. I imagined they had it removed because the vehicle would probably stop working if run through real mud. The version without mud seems a bit easier to find, so it’s probably a version that came out shortly after the initial release.

The artwork for the Estrela Toys Attak Trak was modified for unknown reasons. The Brazilian manufacturer and licensee did the same with their versions of Castle Grayskull, Battle Ram, and other toys:

There was also an orange version of the Attak Trak. This one was released in Europe – I don’t know if there were any orange versions released in the US market. This particular version has the muddy artwork:

Interestingly, the cross sell artwork for the Attak Trak was also orange, and the vehicle was colored orange or sometimes brown in early mini comics:

Artist Errol McCarthy produced several pieces of artwork featuring the Attak Trak:

Attak Trak line art used in advertising

Early on in the mini comics, the Attak Trak was represented as having a “mind of its own.” That was expanded upon in the Filmation cartoon series. The vehicle could undertake complex tasks on its own and had a voice and personality. The Attak Trak also underwent a radical redesign:

There was, however, a more toy accurate version called the Small Trak that made an appearance in the Evilseed episode:

Filmation model sheet by Fred Carillo. Image source: James Eatock/The Power and the Honor Foundation
Image source: He-Man and She-Ra, A Complete Guide to the Classic Animated Adventures, by James Eatock and Alex Hawkey
Source: Oasi delle Anime
Source: Oasi delle Anime

Also released in 1983 was the Big Jim Spy Series All-Terrain Vehicle. The body shape was completely different from the Attak Trak, but it used the same track-flipping concept, and even shared the exact same tread design:

Image Source: Big Jim Forum

Some of my favorite Attak Trak-related artwork comes from MOTU artist R.L Allen:

Illustration by R.L. Allen
Illustration by R.L.Allen

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32
Heroic Vehicles

Battle Ram prototype

Posted on by Adam McCombs

Written by Adam McCombs

In this post I’d like to take a closer look at the Battle Ram prototype. For a more exhaustive treatment of this vehicle, see the toy feature.

Designed by Ted Mayer and sculpted by Jim Openshaw, the Battle Ram prototype was in some ways more impressive than the final toy.

Here is the prototype Battle Ram, from various angles (also shown is the prototype helmeted He-Man figure):

Images 1, 4 and 5 are courtesy of Ted Mayer; images 2 and 3 were retrieved from He-Man.org.

The overall profile is very similar to the final toy, but when you look closely, there are many subtle differences. I’ll go over each photo of the prototype and compare it with a similar photo of the final toy, noting some of the differences in each:

Prototype angle 1
Toy angle 1
Prototype angle 2
Toy angle 2
Prototype angle 3
Toy angle 3
Prototype angle 4
Toy angle 4
Prototype angle 5
Toy angle 5

Notice in the fifth prototype image, the front half of the Battle Ram seems to have a greenish tint (in most images it looks grayish-blue). Perhaps the paint took on that tonality depending upon the lighting. That might explain the greenish coloration of Rudy Obrero’s illustration for the Battle Ram packaging. On the other hand, his color choice may have been determined by the lighting in his landscape.

Speaking of which, Rudy’s illustration is also based on the prototype Battle Ram, although it features the reptilian sticker on the front section from the final toy, as well as a modified missile:

As you can see, his illustration is quite faithful to the source material, although he did elongate the front half of the vehicle. He also gave it a jet engine nozzle at the rear, visible when in flight mode:

Alfredo Alcala’s Battle Ram cross sell art is also based on the prototype vehicle:

The prototype also shows up in the 1981 “Fast Male Action for Licensees” kit:

Licensing kit images courtesy of Michael Jay

It was also featured in issue 90 of Tomart’s Action Figure Digest:

The prototype was very likely based on this control drawing dated May 28, 1981, drawn by Ted Mayer. It matches up almost perfectly with the prototype Battle Ram.

“Catapult Vehicle” – image courtesy of Ted Mayer

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